Chapter 14: Becoming the Gringo Latino

All of the influences that I had felt from María, Iris, Ximena, Tom, Mr. Vallejo, La Escuelita, my first years of teaching, Alfonso, and from the Reading and Literature Project began to show themselves on a regular basis. Not only was I seeing life in a different way, I was now being asked where I was from when I spoke English. I was a totally different person from what I thought I was before.

I used to think that teaching had nothing to do with culture or with family background. Now, I made a point to find out about my students and their families because I knew that would make a large difference in what and how they were able to learn. I was the teacher pushing the others to be active in all of the cultural festivals. On Mexican Independence Day my class would always be active. On Cinco de Mayo, we would be there again. Why? Because, that was what was important for their families. If I could get them to be there on those occasions, they would more likely respond when I called about academic progress.

The first couple of years, I played the “ignorant gringo.” From Alfonso and the Reading and Literature Project, I had found out about el Día de los Muertos. Literally, that means the Day of the Dead, but instead of being a gruesome, zombie-like celebration, the day is a day to remember ancestors and others that have passed away. Usually, a large display is created to remember especially those that have passed away in the previous year. The celebration takes place on November 2nd, two days after Halloween. Instead of being the commercialized, scary day that Halloween has become, el Día de los Muertos is a day to remember important people. The tradition goes back to pre-Hispanic days in México and is still popular in some areas of Michoacán, where a good number of my students were from. I decided to try a celebration in my classroom.

My first step was to recruit parental help. I held a parent meeting, at a time convenient for the parents. The two keys that I think made all of the difference were 1) I took food and 2) I took Giancarlos, who was about the same age as the children in my class. I made the meeting familiar instead of formal. I talked about what I wanted to do, but stressed that as a “pobre gringo” I wouldn’t be able to be successful without their help. Not only was the evening a great success, the entire celebration worked out fantastically. I had parents volunteering in class on a regular basis to help out, even those that they themselves did not celebrate el Día de los Muertos. Even some of the families that the 1st grade teacher swore that she had never been able to get in touch with, were showing up at school to help with the celebration. We ended up having to invite other classrooms to view.

This viewing created a small problem that took a lot of my quick thinking to resolve. One of the non-Hispanic parents from another classroom heard that we had an “altar” in our classroom and “were making fun of the dead with gruesome displays.” She had not bothered to visit our room to see what we had on the walls. The largest display with pictures of the deceased is called an altar, but we were in no way being religious. As far as “gruesome displays,” the closest thing we had was a picture of one of the student’s cousins who had passed away. It wasn’t gruesome, it was the only picture that the girl had of her cousin. The woman took what she heard, and, instead of talking with me or the school principal, who was one of the first to view the display and appreciate it, she had called the district office to complain. I received a phone call from the Associate Superintendent telling me that I had to remove the display because of the religious overtones and the offensive things that it contained.

My first instinct was to get mad. How could someone, after so much work, tell me that I had to remove work that the children had put together? And work that was in no way offensive? How could someone who had not even bothered to look at the display know what it contained? How could this Associate Superintendent take someone else’s word on the subject without coming to view the display first? Instead of getting mad, I thought quickly. “What would Alfonso do?” I asked myself. I knew what I had to do.

I pointed out to the Associate Supe that the principal had already viewed the display, and had seen that it was neither religious or offensive, rather it was a respectful way of remembering those that had passed away. Then I was inspired. “Would it be,” I asked, “offensive or religious to talk about war veterans on Memorial Day? Would you have me stop Memorial Day celebrations?”

“Well, of course it wouldn’t,” the Associate Supe stumbled, “but . . . .”

“I’m sorry, sir, but with all due respect, this is the exact same thing. The children have brought objects to put in a display to remember their loved ones. There is nothing religious about it; and definitely not anything gruesome or disrespectful. If the woman who called you, would like to visit and see what we have displayed, she is more than welcome. Most of the school, including the principal, have already viewed the display. Why don’t you come yourself?”

There was nothing for the man to say. You couldn’t say that a memorial display was a problem. He said that he would speak with the principal, but I had convinced him to change his mind about taking down the display. I knew that the principal would back me completely, because he was the one that had invited the other classes to view the display in the first place.

Another of the lessons I learned from the Literature Project was the inclusion of dance in the classroom. Obviously, I knew nothing before about Ballet Folklórico, but I had been able to learn from one of my colleagues a fun dance from Michocán called El Baile de los Viejitos, literally, the dance of the old men. Los Viejitos was a perfect dance for me to teach. It involved having the dancers dressed up as old men that would do a dance while acting very funny. Try to imagine 80-year-old men doing ballet and you have a good picture. My personality of including humor in just about everything was a perfect fit for this type of dance. If I could make the costumes, I was sure that I could pull of the dance.

I was able to bring in a lot of the same parents to help make masks for each of the children. The children then decorated the masks to look like old men. We got ponchos and straw hats donated, and I found broomsticks to cut into canes. PE for about two months involved teaching the class the basic steps and adding the creative touches with the funnier students. The kids loved the dance, because it involved falling down and making people laugh while their faces were covered. Their footwork was good, but not perfect, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was that people would enjoy the show. The funniest part was that I decided to be part as well.

The day of the performance went extremely well. Enough parents showed up to help the children into their costumes including the talcum powdered hair. They looked great as they march/danced out onto the central viewing area in front of close to 1000 people. It was hilarious as old men danced, bumped, fell into each other and had a good time. The best part was watching the giant old man who was the only one left standing at the end of the music: me.

After the performance, we got a long, standing ovation. An older man came up to me to congratulate me. “Lo hacíamos igualito en México cuando yo era niño. We used to do it just like that when I was a boy in Mexico.” I doubt that they had a six-foot four-inch dancer taking part of the dance when he was a child in Mexico, but I took the statement as a big compliment. There were about 12 other groups that performed as well, but Los Viejitos was what everyone was talking about.

“Wow, Richard!” one of the bilingual teachers told me the next day, “you’re more Mexican than we are. You went all out!” I wasn’t trying to be Mexican or even Hispanic. I was just trying to include the culture of my students in what we were doing. I took it as a compliment. It was this type of thinking, however, that would again cause problems a few years later.

I continued to do similar types of activities with my students every year. Some of the years, the Día de Muertos would be big and in others they would be small, but they did continue. The folkloric dances continued as well, even when I moved into the upper grades to teach 4th grade. Since the other teachers weren’t as willing to work with me to switch students academically, I tried to work with them for PE. I offered to work with a group of interested students to perform some dances for the school’s big fund raiser, the spring Cinco de Mayo Festival. Our PTA raised more money, in that one day than they were able to raise throughout the rest of the year.

I taught the students the dances that I knew the most, Los Viejitos, and a couple of other dances, one from Colombia and one from Mexico. With 80% of the students at the school being Latinos, it only made sense to perform dances from Latin America. I was very surprised, however, by another phone call from a friend of mine who work as the Bilingual Coordinator for the district. She had worked with Alfonso and I on a few projects including the Spanish Language Development project that the district wouldn’t and couldn’t pursue. She called to share with me that she had received a letter from another teacher accusing me of being a racist.

That accusation came as a big shock both to me and to my friend. She was familiar with the work I did both in and out of my classroom, so she knew that I was anything but racist. She laughed as she read letter to me, however. “She says you are racist because you aren’t including any ‘white’ students in what you are doing with the dances.”

I wasn’t excluding any of the non-Hispanics. They were as welcome as any of the other students, they just didn’t show any interest. That wasn’t my fault, I would happily have included them. I chuckled at the accusation.

“I think that what she means,” my friend went on, “is that you are only doing dances from Latin America instead of folk dances from the US.” Again, if I were teaching at a different school or had a different make-up of students, I would have taught very different folk dances. My students, 100% of them, were Hispanic (99.99% from México), however. The vast majority of the school was as well. The accusation sat in the back of my head, but I didn’t let it bother me or let it show to the students. We had a fantastic time dancing Los Viejitos and, again, were the most popular at the assemblies and at the festival.

I continued to be popular with both the students and the families. I didn’t see myself as a Hispanic exactly, but a lot of what I saw and understood about the culture continues to be evident in my actions. I don’t think that I could change my culture completely, but I have referred to myself as the “Gringo Latino” when I made phone calls into radio stations. I’m definitely not the same person I was 25 years ago before I met Maria and before the cultural roller coaster that I have been on ever since. I wouldn’t change a single thing about it, however. I like being who I am, something that is not easily defined, a gringo latino.

Chapter 13: Moving the Tracks More Our Way

Alfonso was my ray of sunshine within the vast, dark clouds that encircled me everyday on the wrong side of the tracks. I didn’t meet him at first. It was as if, my days had to continue getting more and more depressing before I ran into him after one of the staff meeting.

It had been another long, boring meeting, where the teachers complained about the students and did nothing to work together to try and improve them. The principal talked AT the staff, but didn’t listen either to them or attempt to force a discussion about how to improve the situation. The response that most gave was one of “we have never done it that way before.” In the back of my mind, I thought, “maybe that is why your students have never improved,” but I always kept my mouth shut during those meetings, at least during that first year.

I was feeling particularly down, since I felt that what the principal was sharing could have a big impact on the school, if the staff was able to work together to make it happen. Alfonso had made some comment about how the idea would be of particular benefit for the students learning English. This had turned off a strong group of the staff since those “aren’t my students.” The principal had added that it wasn’t designed for English Learners, but if Alfonso felt that he could make it work, he was welcome to try. Unfortunately, none of the others were interested, and one teacher working alone would have a difficult time.

I was impressed with Alfonso’s dedication. He spoke English as a second language himself; and, at times, had to explain his idea more than once to some of the staff who hadn’t understood him the first time. The sad part was that Alfonso’s way of phrasing made perfect sense for someone who spoke Spanish as a first language, as many of the students of these teachers did. I wondered if they reacted similarly with their students.

I walked up to Alfonso after the meeting to talk with him about his ideas. He immediately started to talk with me in English. His eyes lit up when I answered in Spanish. Like so many others who continue to judge me by how I look, he had assumed that I could not speak Spanish. The more we talked, the more I could tell he was testing my Spanish to see how much I was really able to understand. I held my own throughout the discussion, only needing a few words of English here and there to explain myself. The key, however, was that we hit it off.

We both talked about of our frustrations to work with a significant number of the rest of the staff to fulfill the needs of the students. He had moved from Chicago two years earlier back to Modesto where his family lived. A lot of his family and his wife’s family lived in the area immediately around the school. Who better to know the needs of the community? Why wasn’t he one of the leaders of the school? Why were more teachers not willing to work with him?

Alfonso, it turned out, was not a pusher. He always had fantastic ideas and was capable of understanding what the students needed and modifying what he was doing to provide it. His students always outperformed others across the district in testing and other measures of academic succss. He would not push his ideas onto others, however. He would talk with them about what the issues were, but if they did not want to make the effort to change to meet the needs of the students, he felt there was nothing that he could do. “Tiene que venir de ellos. It has to come from them,” he would tell me when we would talk about how the staff had shot down another positive suggestion. Unfortunately, a large portion of the staff and the most vocal among them fell under the pobrecito philosophy.

“This is just our school,” I heard all the time. The expectations, because it was “just our school” were very low. Even at districtwide meetings, you would hear comments from other teachers about how they had “put their time in at” the school, but were now able to really teach. I thought that I was really teaching, because I was there. It was where I was most needed. Many of the teachers at the school, didn’t want to work hard, and knew, because it was “just our school,” they didn’t have to. Some showed up minutes before or, at times, after their students, and left again as soon as they left. I would arrive at 7 AM, an hour and a half before school; stay until 5 or 6 PM; and still feel as if I hadn’t finished everything. Alfonso’s was one of the few cars that would show up and leave at the same time as mine.

Alfonso became my mentor. When I was frustrated about how something was working or not working at the school, I would meet with Alfonso to talk about it. He had the long term perspective that I lacked, having taught for 11 years in México and 7 in Chicago. He could distinguish between those things that were bothersome but would pass from those that would last. He had much more patience than I in making necessary changes. I would want to move all of the negative teachers to another school, while he realized that wasn’t possible.

He was able to convince the principal, eventually, to make some changes that greatly helped the students. Before Alfonso’s arrival, children could bounce back and forth between bilingual and non-bilingual classes each year. Alfonso’s gentle prodding convinced the principal that the program needed time to be successful. You can’t keep a child in a bilingual program for a year, move them to a non-bilingual one the next because they spoke more English, and then move them back the third year because they weren’t successful with only English and no support. You have to give the children time to be successful before you transition them from a bilingual classroom, and then you still need to provide them support. We were able to create a series of effective teachers who would teach the English Learners. Most important of all, the teachers within that series began to work as a team. The Kindergarten teacher worked a lot with the 1st grade teacher, who worked a lot with me teaching 2nd. I, in turned, worked a lot with Alfonso, who taught 3rd, etc. all the way up to 6th grade.

We felt that we were successful in what we were doing. Children were learning and parents were happy. They were so happy in fact, that we began to have a lot of parents bring their students to the school just to be in our program. One year, 25% of my class lived outside of the area. The same was true with teachers. We had bilingual teachers working to try to move to the school just to be part of what we were doing.

It was also because of Alfonso’s leadership that I got involved with the California Reading and Literature Project. The project was designed to take potential leaders and develop them in a summer program to improve literacy across the state. Alfonso and I got involved with the Spanish Language version since we were bilingual teachers. Because teaching in bilingual classrooms has always been very political (there has always been a lot of people against the theory of developing English while building on the primary language), all of the participants did provide a lot of support for each other on top of the learning within the seminars. Some of us still communicate now 15 years later. The main structure of the seminars was to develop literate adults, who would not limit their own development as life long learners. We spent a lot of time reading and discussing adult literature in Spanish in addition to discussing effective teaching strategies. My comprehension and use of Spanish continue to broaden as I now immersed myself in university level Spanish. Now, I wasn’t limited to talking about lápices and cocinas (pencils and kitchen); I could discuss rimas asonantes, los noventayochentistas and protagonistas (assonance in rhymes, the literary movement in Spain starting after the loss of the Spanish-American War and the loss of Cuba and the Philippines in 1898, and story protagonists).

The more I developed my Spanish language abilities, the more I found myself speaking even more Spanish. Except for the 45 minutes a day of English Language Development, I would speak only Spanish in my classroom. Any communication that I had with parents was in Spanish as well, as all of my students were from Spanish speaking families. All of my friends at work, including Alfonso, were native Spanish speakers, so that was all we spoke. At home, so that the boys would be bilingual, we tried to speak Spanish all of the time as well. In spite of the fact that I had spoken English for so many years, I started to develop an accent in my native language. More and more people would ask me where I was from, NOT when I was speaking Spanish, but when I was speaking English. I couldn’t hear any differences in how I was speaking English, but I heard the same question repeatedly: “Where are you from? Your accent is so interesting.” My response would be that I was from the far off country of Lodi.

Spelling in English is a totally different manner. I had always been a good speller in English from reading and writing so much. Now that I had learned to read and write in Spanish, a phonetic language, I couldn’t spell in English anymore. I found myself repeatedly looking for a dictionary or using the spell check to find the spelling to what used to be easy words like carcass, thorough, and divide (hopefully, I’ve spelled them right here). Is it license, lisence or maybe its licence?

Alfonso and I took back what we had learned in the literacy project and tried to apply it at the school. We were recruited because of our involvement in the project to be part of a language development project for the district. It had a LOT of potential. We spent a lot of time and energy with other teachers from different schools. The program got a lot of interest from other school districts. Unfortunately, a school district is not the ideal place to develop a commercial product. This is especially true in a district that “allowed” bilingual education only because state law said they had to. Spanish Language Development was definitely not a priority for the district, even if it helped the students to improve their literacy abilities that could later be transferred to English.

We tried to get more teachers at our school involved with the types of ideas learned in the literacy project, but that involved a time commitment that no one else seemed willing to give. The two of us ended up leading a similar group of teachers the following two summers, but we had two strikes against us. The first was that the teachers in the group didn’t have a view to making long-term difference. They had signed up to get class credit to increase their salary. When Alfonso and I planned, continuation meetings to talk about results, updates, etc. in their schools, he and I were the only ones that showed up.

In addition to that, we had a large political atmosphere working against us. There was push by some in the state to eliminate bilingual education. A statewide proposition put together by a wealthy businessman in California painted bilingual education as a money drain and waste of time for students. In spite of the vast amount of research that pointed to the contrary and the local successes that we were having, it was a hard sell to the average voter that continuing to teach in Spanish had long terms benefits to learning English. The proposition passed, leaving the Spanish Language Literacy Project with no way of continuing.

Over the years, Alfonso and I would continue to develop a friendship that was deeper than any I had had with anyone other than with Maria. We worked together to create some extremely positive things; and began to change the picture that the community and others had of the school. Unfortunately, we were up against some very powerful influences that did not want the school to look good. I can’t say that we were entirely successful, but we did push things in the right direction to get the school to the “right side of the tracks.”

Chapter 12: The Wrong Side of the Tracks

After a lot of discussion, María and I decided that we would be better off living in Modesto, where her family lived, than in the Bay Area. There were a lot of advantages to living in Modesto. The cost of living was much lower. It would be quite a few years before we would be able to afford a house in the Bay Area, if at all. We were easily able to buy a house in Modesto within two years. Surprisingly, starting salaries for teachers in Modesto were actually higher than those in the Bay Area. The most important aspect of living in Modesto was the benefits of raising children. There were a lot fewer of the problems associated with urban life in Modesto. That isn’t to say that there were no problems: there still were gangs, car thefts, etc., but they were in much smaller numbers than in the Bay Area. In addition to that though (and probably more importantly), María’s family lived in Modesto. What better way to raise children than in an area surrounded by family?

I hoped that finding a job as a teacher would not be a problem in Modesto. I sent repeated letters to apply for different teaching positions within the main school district. Unfortunately, I never got a response. It was as if I was being ignored by the district. The good part was that one of the principals from a school that was exactly what I was looking for needed a Kindergarten teacher and was going through personnel files. He came across my letters and resume.

Modesto has always been easily dividable between haves and have-nots. The school was definitely in a have-not neighborhood with at least 75% Hispanic families. The poverty level was high and the education level of the parents low. After working there for about two months, I visited most of my students’ houses. I walked through the streets with no sidewalks or lights. I could hear the loud music blaring from the obvious gang or crack houses. I could smell the empty lots which served as dumpsters for people not wanting to deal with their trash. I saw the squalor of the trailers in which many lived, the entire trailer park reminding me of the slums of Colombia. It was as if I was in the third world while walking the streets of Modesto, well, walking the streets almost of Modesto.

The school itself was within the city limits, but the streets surrounding it were county. This created problems when the school or the families tried calling the police.

“That is an issue for the sheriff, that is county property,” the police would say.

“Actually, that is a police issue,” the sheriff's office would reply. “The incident started by the school so you have to call them first.” Meanwhile, the criminal would be long gone.

The main thoroughfare near the school was a minor highway, down which cars and large semi-trucks would race down to get to the main highway or into Modesto. On one side lived all of the families. On the other, were the majority of the businesses. On more than one occasion, I watched as children not far out of diapers, struggled to get their younger sibling across the street before traffic hit them.

At one point, the highway patrol had volunteered to serve as crossing guards to get the families across. They set up a crosswalk, warning signs, even speed bumps. They lasted about two weeks before giving up stating that “it was much too risky for our officers.” The families were still left to fend for themselves.

The worst problem, however, was another building that was in the neighborhood, almost across the street from the school. In spite of warnings in the 50s when the school was originally built, within view of the site chosen was a tallow plant. In case you don’t know (I didn’t until starting to work in Modesto), tallow is what is made from processing (renderring is the official term used) dead animal parts. Essentially, animals (cows, turkeys, chicken, etc.) and their left over parts (bones, feathers, etc.) are boiled to make tallow, which is used for soaps, candles and animal food. It is a very useful operation for the agricultural area that the county around Modesto continues to be. Unfortunately, this was not the cleanest tallow plant. It had more citations than any other tallow plant in the entire country.

Carcasses were found left exposed to the elements over long weekends. Wastes were dumped almost regularly into the river passing behind the plant. It didn’t have the “scrubbers” necessary to reduce the horrendous smell that emanated from the smoke stacks. The worst part is that it was almost directly across the street from the school. On some days, later on in the first year, I would be teaching in my classroom with no air conditioning on days in which the temperature reached or exceeded 100 degrees. We would open the windows and door to let the slightly cooler air in, only to be hit by the putrid smell coming from tallow plant. We would again close the windows to avoid the smell, only to have to put up with the heat again. To this day, when the tallow plant is finally closing, the school is more famous for its proximity to it than anything else.

The principal that hired me had wanted a qualified teacher that could speak Spanish. “I couldn’t believe that you were still available!” was what he told me after appointing me into the position to teach Kindergarten. “You had bilingual certification, a master’s degree, a long list of student-teacher placements and great references. Why no one else showed any interest, I’ll never know, but I took advantage and snapped you up.”

During my first year, I wasn’t always sure that it was advantageous, however. Talking with the parents, I felt like I was a good fit with the community. I still made some grammatical errors in Spanish, but I was able to relate with them in a way that they were able to comprehend. In talking with them, I always tried to take the perspective of another parent that spent 6 hours a day with their children and not “the all knowing TEACHER” since I wasn’t. They tended to be impressed by the idea that I would come out to their house instead of waiting for them to go to the somewhat intimidating school. Then, when with my looks, I spoke Spanish and went to the same church as many of them, I was able to be accepted.

I was able, for the most part, to work well with the students as well. I could understand where they were coming from and gear my instruction to their needs, instead of expecting them to understand things that they had no way of comprehending. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t push them hard to get to the level where they were “supposed” to be, but I had realistic expectations of where they started. There were a couple of instances that I had with behavior, but they were from more problematic children.

The problems at the school, as I saw them, were caused by some of the other teachers. My classroom, for instance, was created with an overflow of students from three other classrooms. Normally, in a situation like that, especially with a new teacher, you try to create each of the classes with a similar make-up of high, medium and low ability students and similar ratio of boys to girls.

I started my first day with a lot of anticipation. “Here I go into my new career!” I told myself. I was excited and very nervous, not sleeping for about 2 or 3 days before the first day, but it is normal for me to not sleep when I am nervous. My classroom seemed very rambunctious at first, but what did I know? I was able to keep everyone moving through the first week or so, keeping on task, for the most part. It wasn’t until about the 3rd week when I took the children outside that I noticed another Kindergarten classroom that seemed to be much quieter while playing than my class was. All of the other students seemed to be cooperating and playing instead of hitting and bouncing off each other. I started counting and noticed that, for some reason, that teacher had many more girls than boys. My classroom of 32 children had 25 boys. “That’s interesting!” I thought to myself.

Educationally, my students seemed to progress. It was not an easy task teaching the basics of language and math to students, some of which had never seen or held a pencil or scissors before in their life, let alone a book. I thought that it was strange how many of my students were pulled out of the class during the day for additional learning help, called Resource. It wasn’t until a couple of years later that I noticed that 12 of my Kindergarten student had been identified, before starting school, with a learning disability. I learned that it normally takes a child a couple of years in school before learning problems begin to show themselves. These 12 students showed learning problems before starting Kindergarten. My other colleagues teaching Kindergarten didn’t seem to have the same number of Resource students as I did, for some reason.

The most challenging students that I had were two siblings, TJ and Dita. Both had attended the John F Kennedy School for severely handicapped children in preschool. Why they were not placed directly into a special education classroom is still a big surprise to me. Not only were they not placed in a special classroom that could better fit their needs, they were both, brother and sister, in my classroom. TJ had a big heart, but could be mean at times. I caught him once with a pair of scissors getting cutting another child’s hair. He was bigger than the other kids, so there was not much that the other student could do to stop him. Dita would crawl off under a table at times, just because she wanted to. She wasn’t usually mean to the other students, but she also couldn’t do any of the things that the other students were doing such as counting, writing letters, cutting shapes and was frustrated because she couldn’t do like they did.

I was drained trying to teach them and the rest of the class. Here I was already with more boys than girls and more slow students than the other teachers; on top of that, I had to deal with TJ and Dita, neither one of which should have been in a classroom like mine. I had been dumped upon by the other teachers in making up my classroom. I tried to reach out to them in order to be able to work like I had at La Escuelita, but they had already shown how they worked with others in selecting which students to give me.

I didn’t find much support from any of the other teachers either. Lunch time in the teachers’ lounge was spent, for the most part, complaining about how little the students were able to do or how little the parents took part in their children’s education.

“Those lazy parents never do anything to help with the homework. They just barely dress the kids in the morning.”

I wondered if the teacher making those comments had ever bothered to visit the household to see the conditions in which the children lived. I ended up taking one student home once that kept showing up early for class, my class being the afternoon Kindergarten. Both mom and grandma were passed out on the couch. No wonder the child had asked why he needed to learn, he had no positive role models at home. I had to continue to be creative to motivate him during the rest of the year to go to class on time and to learn.

I came close to not finishing out the school year. After coming from a place filled with a sense of family, in spite of being on the wrong side of the tracks in Oakland, I had landed in a similar school in Modesto where even the teachers didn’t seem to create a positive atmosphere. I needed the same thing professionally that I did in my life, a sense of warm belonging, of family. What finally kept me going was meeting Alfonso.

Chapter 11: From a Totally Different World

Coming back to the US was a definite experience for me. All of my friends wanted to know how everything was in Colombia. I couldn’t easily explain it, however.

“It was . . . like . . . uh . . . well . . . there were . . . hmm. . . . They spoke Spanish.” That was about as good as I could do to explain it. It is not as if I didn’t have a good vocabulary. I mean, I am only a graduate from UC Berkeley. It is just that EVERYTHING was just SO different. It was as if it was a totally different world. I couldn’t find a way to sum up all of the differences in a few sentences.

All I did know was that the experience had changed me. I was now convinced that I wanted to work in schools that were “on the wrong side of the tracks.” I now had enough Spanish where I considered myself fluent, even though I still had a lot to learn, so I knew that I wanted to teach in a bilingual classroom to take advantage of my skills.

I was luckily able to get into a teacher training program at UC Berkeley where the focus was, and still is, to create leaders that are able to do “whatever it takes” to help the students be successful in school. The luck came into play because graduate schools tend not to choose students that have attended the same school as an undergraduate. The program was a perfect fit for me, however, since it had a developmental focus. That was a lot of what I had studied as a psychology major. The program lasted two years, a year longer than most teacher training programs, but the graduates came out with a Master’s Degree and a much better preparation for the classroom than most. Instead of the typical one or two classroom placements (where the students do student teaching) lasting eight weeks, if that, I was sent to five different schools and grades, lasting from nine to fifteen weeks.

On top of the length of the placement, each of the schools was very different. I went to a very well off school close to campus, a school with mixed affluence far from campus, a poor school closer to campus, a new school a medium distance a way, and a school primarily for children of college students and professors walking distance from the campus. I did my student teaching in a Kindergarten, 6th grade, 4th grade, 5th grade and finally 2nd grade classrooms each supervised by very different types of teachers, only one of which had graduated from the same program. I am still convinced that I started teaching much better prepared than any first year teacher that I have seen because of this diversity of practice experiences.

I’m sharing all of this, though, not as a commercial for the program, but rather to give a little background to another formative experience for me in my conversion to what I am today. We were a small group in the program: only 13 future teachers. One had actually graduated with me from the Psychology Department, but I had never met her before starting the program. We had taken a lot of the same classes, but because of the size of the Berkeley campus, we had never crossed paths.

One warm fall afternoon, before starting our longest placement, where we would take over the class and teach solo without the presence of the other, master teacher, we were out in one of the fields on campus playing frisbee. This was a normal activity, since, being a small group, we spent an awful lot of time together in and out of class. Frisbee seemed like an easy enough activity, especially for someone like me who played a lot of basketball, football, soccer even ultimate frisbee (played sort of like soccer, but with the flying disk as the ball) and other strenuous activities like that. What could possibly happen while just throwing the frisbee back and forth?

I found out quickly what could happen as I jumped up to catch the frisbee under my legs. I made the catch with no problem; it was the landing which gave me problems. I guess that I didn’t pull my right foot back underneath me quick enough and landed with my weight on the inside of the leg and my knee. I heard a “SNAP” and collapsed down to into a lump on the grass in severe pain. The others thought that I was kidding around, but I was serious. A pay phone was quickly found (this was definitely before the influx of cell phones into everyone’s hands or pockets); and María and an ambulance were quickly called.

After the various exams, X-rays, pushes, pokes, twists and turns and referrals to specialists, it was finally determined that I had torn some ligaments in my knee. I quickly became quite proficient in the language of arthroscopic surgery, ACL, LCL, and meniscus, none of which I had heard of before my accident. Just in case you are fortunate enough to not know what they mean, arthroscopic surgery is where a miniature camera is placed inside of your body in order to facilitate the surgery without having to completely open up your leg (which left two-inch scars instead of eight-inch ones). ACL is the Anterior Cruciate Ligament. It is the rubber band like substance that holds the bones of your leg together in the middle of your knee. It is also the ligament that is most likely torn by weekend warriors trying to relive their youth while playing sports. The LCL is the Lateral Collateral Ligament, which is a similar substance on the side of the bones of the leg. The meniscus is the spongy like substance that lies between the area where the two bones of the leg grind into each other. It also receives a lot of damage by older people playing sports.

While playing the extremely strenuous sport of throwing a frisbee back and forth, I had completely torn my LCL, partially torn the ACL and damaged some of my meniscus. I now had the privilege of being able to brag that I had survived football, basketball, baseball, only to be permanently injured myself by playing frisbee. I could just imagine sitting in a bar sometime in the future sharing “war” wounds with other men.

“Yeah, there I was running for the winning touchdown,” someone would share. “I was being tackled by 5 members of the meanest defensive linemen you’ve ever seen. All of a sudden, I heard a snap and I was down.”

“Well, I went up for the winning dunk,” another would add. “And I came down on top of the center almost the size of Shaquille O’Neil and heard the snap of my leg.”

“Oh yeah!” I would chime in, “ I was playing frisbee and came down wrong and heard this snap.” Oh boy! They would all be impressed by that!

The worst part of it all was the recovery. If I had broken my leg, I would have been in a cast for a few weeks. I could have gotten everyone to sign my cast. It would have been cool! But no, the recovery from arthroscopic surgery was 10 to 12 months. I would be on crutches for 3 of those months (all during my student teaching). Plus, there was no cast to get signatures and almost no one had ever heard about ACLs, LCLs, meniscuses or any of that. I would have to spend the entire time explaining the inner workings of my knee and repeating AGAIN and AGAIN how I had screwed it up.

By the time that I finally showed up to my classroom placement, I was way behind everyone else from my group. They had all started their practice at the scheduled time, when I was having surgery and beginning my recovery. I ended up having to do a good portion of mine between the two semesters, when everyone else was relaxing at home or visiting friends and family. I was able to spend some time close to Christmas with the students, something that no one else was able to do since the semester ended at the beginning of December. I was very touched by what a lot of the students did to show their appreciation to both the “regular” teacher and to myself before going on their two week winter break. We each got multiple gifts from the children, most of which were handmade either by the students or by their parents.

This was my one and only bilingual placement, since, at that time, the program did not normally offer anything along those lines. Now, with all of the attention (politically and otherwise) towards English Learners, each of the future teachers in the program has to be in at least one classroom with a large portion of English Learners. I was placed at a school called “La Escuelita,” the little school. It was actually the first bilingual school in Oakland, started by a group of parents (including my master teacher) who wanted their children to be able to maintain Spanish while learning English. It was a magnet school at the beginning in the 60s, but by this time, it was a neighborhood school bringing in students only from the immediate neighborhood. The atmosphere at the school was tremendous. In spite of being what in Oakland is termed a “flatland” school (the wealthy schools are all in the Oakland hills while the poorer, urban ones are all in the “flatlands”), there was a feeling of family amongst all of the teachers. They were all on the same page about the importance of education and how to impart it to the students. The feeling of family extended to all of the students; and the teachers worked together to provide the best education possible. It was as if, the teachers were reflecting the social environment that I had come familiar with by being around María’s family where the group, and not the individual, was the most important. It was very refreshing.

The vast majority of the class were native Spanish speakers, but there were 3 Asians and the typical (for Oakland at that time) “token” Afro-American. I say “token” since this student’s needs were very different than those of the rest of the class, but he was still placed in the class. This happened in classrooms across the district, even in earlier grades where the majority of the instruction (except for English Language Development) was either in Spanish or Chinese. The class I was teaching was a 4th grade classroom, where Spanish was used to support the instruction, but the majority was in English (at a level that was comprehensible to the students).

One of the things that most impressed me at the school, was how the teachers worked together, sharing students in order to better meet the students’ needs instead of forcing the students to meet the teachers’ needs. With a bilingual classroom, the students needed to develop their English, but there were a lot of different levels within the classroom, including the Afro-American student. It would not have been possible for one teacher to teach English Development to all of the students at the level they needed to be developed. The solution turned out to be simple enough.

All of the 4th-6th graders were assessed in English to see at what level they comprehend and produced. They were then grouped and assigned to different teachers. My master teacher and I were left with the least proficient English speakers, another teacher with a middle group and a third with the highest level. Another teacher taught an introductory Spanish as a Second Language (SSL) class for native English speakers, another taught an advanced class of SSL and a third taught story telling. The students were divided between all of the teachers based on their ability and needs. Yes, it did require a little more work on all of our parts to assess the students and share grades, but the students were all able to get their needs met and develop their language skills either in English or in Spanish. Our limited English speakers were able to flourish and develop their skills without being intimidated by more fluent speakers. At the same time, those more fluent speakers did not have to be bored with a level of English way to easy for them. Other native English speakers were able to pick up conversational Spanish which, later, they were able to use to communicate with their classmates and neighbors.

I was greatly impressed by how well this system worked and how it added to the sense of family at the school as a whole. I tried in later years to replicate it, but without the buy-in from enough other teachers, it was not easy to do. I would continue to strive to create a sense of family within my classroom and at times with a few other classes. I had seen how well in worked within families and now within the classroom setting, so I knew that I wanted to continue it. The challenge for me would be to turn around and explain the importance of doing it to others to whom the idea was as if it was from a totally different world.