I’ve said it before. In public education there are more sad stories than happy endings. Still, after graduating this year, I have to admit that happy endings can outweigh all those bad things. Well, not really, but at least for one glorious day, you can get a glimpse of what the achievement looks like. Does it look like this:
Three of my seniors are going to UC Riverside. We went there on our youth trip and fell in love. They also saw how happy some former students of our school were as freshmen and sophomores in college. The three students receive almost full trips because they are very poor. I tell them that every year, this is like my catchphrase: the poorer you are, the more money they give you. The children in my school are poor, and it’s true, the universities give them a lot of money.
Another senior received a full trip to UC Santa Cruz. Three students go to my Alma Mater, UC Davis. Another has a full trip to a great Liberal Arts School in Minnesota. Oh, and all of the students I just mentioned are Latino, the underrepresented group at the university in terms of population. In other words, there aren’t many Native Americans on campus, but there aren’t many Native Americans either. There are not many Latinos in our universities, but in the United States there are a lot of Latinos. Our colleges are nowhere near representative of the actual population (of course, that’s also true with Native Americans).
Over a dozen students will attend our local Cal State campus, which is another win as far as I’m concerned. I wish they’d go away and get the hell out of here, but as long as they’re in a 4-year college, I’m not going to complain too much. For some of them, I am happy that they have graduated.
Then there is the harvest of community college attendees. Oh good. At least when they tell me this, the next thing out of their mouths is the name of the university they’re transferring to. Part of the reason they’re saying this is because they’re talking to me and they know how mad I get about choosing community college. They already have a 4 year college ready to rattle off so I don’t start bleeding to death. Although on the last day of school, I feel bad about getting mad about it, and I usually let it go. I just hate the fact that out of the twenty students who told me they would go to the local JC, only two of them will actually transfer, those are just the facts. That’s why I get so hot.
Either way, this year was special. Wednesday held special meaning for me because this was my first true crop of seniors. I started with many of them when I started teaching 4 years ago, and many of them I followed for two or even three years. I know his parents. Now I teach his brothers. And for some of them, I feel like one of the reasons they made it this far is because the soles of my Converse All-Stars are printed on their butts.
Of course, I don’t take credit for everything. The truth is, the guys who got into the good colleges with the full trips would probably go there anyway, whether I went college crazy every day or not. Disappointing as it may sound, it’s the kids going to the local Cal State or JC that I could have helped the most. I really feel like some of my biggest victories might have been getting some kids on stage, or even thinking about going to community college. As disappointed as I am, I have to remember that some of these kids (many more than you think) are the first in their families to graduate from high school. I have a lot of kids whose parents dropped out of school in the third or fourth grade, both parents. crazy, right? So the fact that they finished high school and are even going to try something else with academics seems pretty good in that regard.
Graduation is an amazing day, and this year it was exponentially so. Seeing these kids after four years of struggling with them shows me the end product. I think too many times during the year we focus too much on the small picture. We have a bad day, or the kids have it, and we think it’s the end of the world. I can’t even remember how many times I looked at some of these kids’ grades, and their work, their missed assignments, and thought they were done. “They’ll never make it now,” he was telling himself. But here we are, after four years, and despite all the bad days, despite all the struggles, they’re walking onstage, going to college and looking more grown up than I could have imagined four years ago.
So this is for the older ones. They worked their way to the top, despite all the things that worked against them in their education. Even though some of them had to take Algebra twice because we didn’t provide a teacher the first time, and they had a different subject every day of the year. Despite the fact that a third of them live below the poverty line. Despite everything, they succeeded. Here here.
I guess now is the time to buy a new pair of Converse and get back to work in a couple of months.