The teacher I’d replaced had left a vine plant in my classroom. It hadn’t been watered over the summer, its vines yellowed, its soil dry. I put the plant on the top shelf of a lateral file cabinet and hid it behind a stack of books. One day, the gym teacher took a look at the plant and assured me it could be revived. “Plants are resilient,” he said, “like humans.” In a couple of weeks, the vine plant started growing again, its vines stretching along the cabinet.
I’m not sure I’d use the word resilient to describe my year at Robeson Rivera. That sounds self-flattering. The only thing I know is that I endured. I’d have nightmares about students, kicking my then-girlfriend in my sleep. I lost my usual appetite and fifteen pounds, not a good look for someone already thin like me.
I was in over my head. I’d done my student teaching at Urban Academy, a small alternative school in New York City where students of color graduated at high rates and went on to universities. Kids could leave their backpacks in the hallway unattended without fear of theft. Each class period was filled with heated discussions, the students engaging each other thoughtfully and with respect. The only classroom management I needed was writing down who raised their hand. I taught a class on hip-hop. I brought in guest speakers, Fable of the legendary Rock Steady Crew. He declared hip-hop was dead. The original culture had been bastardized. My teenage students thought he was acting like an old fogey, too stubborn to change with the times.
In my class on gentrification, we took field trips around the city. We met with an owner of the fourteen-story building in Harlem that Bill Clinton was set to move into. We stood in the space that would become Clinton’s personal office. The Mountain Dew can that the former president had drunk from during a prior tour had been left untouched on the window sill. One of my students, a Harlem resident, charged the owner of the building, who had also grown up in Harlem, with being a sellout. Starbucks and Old Navy had just arrived on 125th Street, and rent was skyrocketing. Nothing would remain the same.
I’d thought I could bring the skills I’d learned at Urban back to the Bay, helping to create a school that not only engaged students in lively debates but would also send students of color to college in high numbers. The problem was I wasn’t equipped with the right set of skills, at least for the students at Robeson Rivera.
At RR, I was just trying to get respect. My loose teaching style resulted in kids spending most of the class cracking jokes at each other and at me. One wrote a dis rap: “Goddamn, Mr. Lam / Breath smells like ham.” This was Craig, the same student who had refused to participate in our class project where students were to read to the preschoolers in our building. As part of that project, I had students write letters to the preschoolers, introducing themselves. “I got no business acting like those kids should be listening to me,” Craig said. “I know better than that. You should know better than that.” A year later, after we both had left Robeson Rivera, Craig called me in the middle of the night. He might’ve been high. Sounded paranoid, like something in the room was about to pounce on him. Several years later, I’d bump into one of the mental health counselors from Robeson Rivera. He told me Craig was locked up. For what, I didn’t ask. The counselor also updated me on another former student. He just had a baby, and he’d named the counselor the godfather.
That year at Robeson Rivera, I threw out my student-centered playbook and became a busy-work teacher, a worksheet for everything. Mindless activities worked like a charm. Nothing like asking a student to write down definitions to shut them up. It’s what they were used to. But once I figured that out, I turned the worksheets into the baby steps of an essay, a thesis, topic sentences, and so on. When they combined the series of worksheets together, boom—they’d written an essay. It was the only way I could get them to do work, by tricking them.
In the spring, I heard of a teaching opportunity for the following school year in Oakland, at Dewey Academy, a second-chance school. They were cleaning house. A new principal and half the staff would be new. The one overseeing the hiring was the Director of Alternative Education, and not only had she been a principal in New York at a school similar to Urban, but she had in fact student-taught at Urban. Her vision of education reform sounded like mine.
I’d taken her job offer, but I wasn’t psyched about informing the students at Robeson Rivera that I was leaving, quitting on them. Fortunately for me, unfortunately for the school, the board of the nonprofit decided to pull out in its capacity as administrator of the young school. The collaborative fell apart, the school set to be closed down. Students would have to be sent to a traditional school where there’d be much less support. I feigned disappointment at the news. I rushed home afterwards to celebrate, juiced about a new start with new students.
a perfect family
For my nephew’s one-month old Red Egg and Ginger Party, my brother invited family, friends, and co-workers, everyone but Bah Ba. My father didn’t even know he was a grandfather, didn’t know my brother had been married for the last year. It was another thing I was expected to keep from my father. “He’s a stranger,” Goh Goh had said. “Why should I invite him?” I didn’t think it was my place to break the silence.
That’s not what my aunt thought. My mom’s younger sister, Sai Yi, took it upon herself
