“Man, some students are trying to set me up,” Javon said. “That’s why I hate this school.”
“What do you think the other teachers are going to say when I show them the student statements?”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“They’re going to kick you out.”
“Oh well.”
I placed a piece of lined paper on the desk with a pen. “If you won’t own up to it, take responsibility, you’ll be out of here. You think your mom’s gonna be happy about that?”
He slouched into the seat.
“Think it over.” I opened the door, and before I could close it behind me, Javon said, “What I got to write?”
In addition to the confession, Javon wrote a letter of apology to Ms. Mana and served as her helper after school to make amends. To keep our eye on Javon, we gave him two new advisors, myself and one of the co-directors, a double-team approach. We met with him and his mother every Friday morning to continually check in about his progress. His mom would show up on her way to work, dressed in a hospital uniform. For a short period, Javon moved in with his father, and he’d be the one to attend the Friday meetings. The extra attention paid off. Javon raised his grades and quit his reckless behavior, but he remained the class clown, at least in my class.
Though I’d agreed to transfer him into my Humanities class, a course combining English and history, I’d wanted to block the move, worried that Javon would drive me nuts. I was already struggling. I couldn’t get my students to focus. They’d chat like it was the lunchroom.
I could’ve sought guidance from seasoned teachers, but I had too much pride for that. I wasn’t a rookie, so I didn’t have that excuse. Twenty-seven, fourth year of teaching, and I still hadn’t grown into an authority figure. I sure didn’t dress like one. I’d wear baggy corduroys and cargo pants, oversized plaid shirts designed by hip-hop clothing brands. I’d rock Tims to my classroom. This was my version of dressing up.
At the first school I taught at, Urban Academy in New York City, my attire was even more casual: jeans and a T-shirt, the school even more alternative than June Jordan. Students chilled on couches in the hallway. I’d wear a baseball hat, not on my head—I’d take it off when I entered the building—but I’d snap the strap of the hat around a belt loop in my jeans, the hat hanging against my thigh, the same way it had back when I was a teenager, when teachers had forced me to take it off.
I didn’t feel that removed from my June Jordan students. Not only because I was still in my twenties, or grew up in ’Frisco like them, but because our lives overlapped. I taught students related to old homies. Some of the connections I would learn about later, but some I knew then. One advisee’s family had lived in the same public housing project that I had grown up in. Her older brother had schooled me in a pickup game. And more recently, during a spring break from teaching, I’d hung with her brother in Miami, along with several other dudes from my old projects.
Another student had a cousin, Keino, who’d been killed. He and I hadn’t been tight—he was still in middle school when I was in high school—but we’d kicked it a number of times, at the basketball gym and in the mornings at the bus stop in front of his school. Though he was from a different turf, most of the dudes I was running with back then claimed that same set. Keino and his middle school crew were the younger version of us. We’d all refer to each other as “cousin.”
The student, a thirteen-year-old girl, would come into my room to talk about Keino. She recounted the gory details of his death. He’d been in a van, shots to the face, an AK-47, close range—closed casket. I’d heard the story before, from someone who was in that van, but hearing it again from my student, someone I was entrusted to nurture, made me feel responsible for Keino’s death. Not his murder but for the weight of it, at least on my student.
Whatever feelings I had didn’t change anything. My student dropped out of school, and I never heard from her again.
laminator
Javon would run around my room, gossiping, dancing, pulling pranks on other students, slapping a kid on the nape of his neck and darting off. I’d grab him by his Powerpuff Girls backpack and drag him back to his seat. Throwing Javon down into his chair, I felt fatherly.
One of the co-directors, Shane, observed my class for an evaluation. Together, we’d partnered to advise Javon. She was one of the original founders of the school, a white woman with freckles in her early thirties. Shane was that rare blend, a visionary who had no ego about doing the dirty work. She’d roll up her sleeves right alongside us. It was her who gave me the nickname: “Laminator.”
After Shane observed my class, we met in her office. “The students like you,” she said, “but they’re not respecting you.” Students had been talking over me, out of their seat, side conversations galore. I had to reinvent my teacher persona, become firmer, serious, a different kind of man. I wasn’t sure I knew how.
We came up with a plan for Javon in my classroom. I stuck him in the corner. With fewer distractions, he got his work done. His last major assignment for me was a research paper on the Black Panthers. I’d lent him a stack of my Panther books: Seize the Time, A Taste of Power, Revolutionary Suicide. It wasn’t a stellar paper, but it was solid, and he was proud
