Can we hopemore not less?

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/baltimore_city/bal-te.ci.shoot24apr24,1,7450738.story?ctrack=1&cset=true

Keyonna was one of my students last year. I won't get all flowery with my language but she was a student teachers enjoyed having in their classrooms each day. Last year, she was not involved in gangs. So far, I have gathered that she was not involved this year, either. Her older brother may have been, though. My point is that it would be quite surprising to all involved with the situation if it was discovered that Keyonna did anything to provoke her shooting 3 Fridays ago.

This shooting happened 2 blocks from Calverton. It happened 30 minutes after school let out. As Keyonna was getting shot, I was breaking up a fight involving two of my current students a different two blocks from Calverton, after I had purchased a slushee from a corner store. It was the first time I had broken up a fight off school grounds and I felt extremely uncomfortable doing so. At one point I felt as if one of my other students had to come to my defense when a non-Calverton adolescent approached me. Synthesizing the simultaneous events from that Friday would lead one to conclude that my decision to attempt to stop the fight was a dumb one. And, for the most part, I agree. I knowingly entered into a dangerous situation in which there were unknown variables. A textbook no-no, most handbooks would say it was.

Yet, there is something fundamental about me as a teacher and I believe about you as teachers that is not textbook: Our love for our students and our commitment to do anything for them whenever they need it. My instinct when I saw one of my students bleeding from the nose was to pull her free from danger and get her home to safety. I do not want to predict what I would have done had I been at the park near Keyonna, but I imagine my response would not have been entirely by the book. The teaching profession requires us or develops in us the compassion for others only demonstrated by handfuls of our world's citizens; it is the interwoven father, brother, best friend, teacher complex (please allow me to use the masculine demonstrative) that motivates me each day to promote achievements of all sorts from my students. But that same complex that makes me feel most helpful simultaneously leaves me feeling utterly hopeless about my profession and the future of my students as my two year Teach For America commitment comes to a close.

The gang activity and violence that has invaded my school (and Meaghan's and most likely others) this year has been crippling. One of my favorite students from last year is the one who sprung the "crisis mode" at Harlem Park. He was kicked out of Calverton earlier this year for choking a student with a bicycle chain. He scored Advanced on the MSA. His father and uncle were murdered on the same day by the others' rival gang's members, each gang believing the relation to the student responsible for the other relation to the student's death. When he transferred to Calverton after being kicked out of West Baltimore, he asked for all the work from the previous semester, just so he "could know what was going on in class." He was with Keyonna when she was shot and, as a result of that and other things, I am sure, was shot at the next day and now has people looking to kill him each day and all I have experienced and know to be true about gangs and my students tells me to stop hoping he will survive the summer.

What can we do to restore our hope? I found out "word of mouth" about Keyonna from another teacher. A short letter was sent home with students for parents. A third of these letters ended up on my classroom floor. The administration offered no help to students, no advice to teachers, in how to cope with the tragedy or advise future actions. School and local police did not give any workshops on prevention or recognition of gang violence. Counselors did not give counseling because their administrators are requiring them to work on cumulative records instead of with students and their problems. And so, again, dealing with the heart of the matter was, again, left to the teachers. It is the teachers who see the stars on their desks and break up the fights between a divided class of sixth graders. It is the teachers who are, again and again, invested in the (de)construction of their students' lives but who are, again and again, left with nothing but their hearts to both protect themselves and save their students.

If I still had the hope that one of my students would stop, midpunch, and realize that she knew of no legitimate reason as to why she was about to hit another of my students, would I still step in? If I still had the hope that the cruiser parked a block away would both notice and respond to break up the fight that at first involved two but has the potential to involved twenty, would I still step in? If I still had the hope that fights like these were just playground fights and would not escalate to something involving more than fists or including people more than schoolmates, would I still step in? Is it my hopelessness then, more than my heart, that motivated me to step in? That, I hope, should depress more than just me.