As Bad as They Say?: Three Decades of Teaching in the Bronx

13. Bridging the Gap

13 Bridging the Gap There are so many other Bronx students that I could tell you about. Would you believe that a young man, our valedictorian some years ago, admitted to a few of his teachers, near graduation day, that he had been homeless for the last year of high school and had been living on the New York City subway, keeping warm and sleeping on the train? Then there was a female student of mine who showed great talent as a basketball player. Title IX in 1972 had made more funds and opportunities available for girls and women in sports, and Keisha benefited from this more equitable law. She became eligible for a college basketball scholarship; however, the night before the tryout for the award, she and her family were evicted from their apartment. Keisha spent a cold, damp night, sitting on her couch in the middle of a Bronx street! But—not to worry. She did get herself to the basketball competition and she was awarded a full college scholarship. I have to tell you about Alicia, too. When she was a ninth grader, she told me that her dream was to be an astronaut. That was all I needed to know. I think the poet Langston Hughes was talking to me when he asked readers to bring him all their dreams. While Alicia was in my ninth-grade class, I tried hard to find reading materials dealing with the space program for her. For the next three years, when she wasn’t in my class any longer, she would stop in to see me, and I would pull open my desk drawer and hand her all the articles, magazines, and tapes that I had saved for her, relating to her astronaut 102 Bridging the Gap 103 dreams. Her smile alone was worth my effort. Sometime before her graduation , she gave me a plaque that I have kept on my desk at home all these years that reads ‘‘Teachers Make Dreams Happen.’’ Did she become an astronaut? I don’t know, but I’ll put my money on her. You should also know about Donald, a more recent student of mine. He was a very large fellow, six feet two inches tall and over 250 pounds, and his reputation for being verbally and physically threatening preceded his arrival in my class. He was absent for the first three days of the new term and came late to class on the fourth day. I greeted him with a smile, naturally, and made no mention of his absence or lateness. Later on in the term, when we got to know each other better, and he was working well, he asked me why I hadn’t either yelled at him or sent him packing on the very first day that he had come to class. I told him that he probably would have cursed me out and left—never to return again. (He agreed that that is what he would have done and said that most teachers would have been glad to see him go.) I said to him, ‘‘I believe that no student, no matter how disruptive or poorly behaved, ever came to school to fail.’’ He looked at me curiously, thought for a moment, and said, ‘‘Did you learn that in college?’’ No, my dear Donald, wherever you are now, I didn’t learn that in college; I learned it, over the years, from my students and I used it to tap into their better selves. Most of the time, it worked! And then there was Robert. He was a brilliant young African American male who loved learning, took the most difficult classes, was an outstanding student in my multicultural literature class, accepted every challenge and won a full scholarship to Bowdoin College in Maine. In his junior year in college, he transferred to Amherst College in Massachusetts ; there he majored in political science and hopes one day to ‘‘bridge the gap’’ between blacks and whites. After graduating from Amherst, he won a scholarship to Oxford, England, and the last time I heard from him, he was pursuing a doctorate. We’re going to hear from him—he’s a younger Barack Obama—but even if we don’t, you now have met some of my ordinary but spectacular students who, in their own way, have made the world a better place—and will continue to do so. Are Bronx students really ‘‘as bad as they say...