The kids I'm observing Mrs. Ordonez teach are going over test taking in preparation for a state standardized test they take next week that helps determine if they get to go to high school next year or if they get retained, which is this decade's way of saying held back.
The test methods -- deciphering a question type by looking at the proper nouns and -ly adverbs and other key components -- are foreign to me as described but make sense in terms of how I silently (and without marking on the test sheet) take that kind of test. If something's in the text -- "According to paragraph 6" -- then that's where you look. If something's not in the text -- "What mood was the author most likely trying to convey?" -- then you figure out the answer based on context clues.
Today's context clues has these kids reading about the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall.
I'm sitting in the back being thoroughly unobtrusive here; my job is to watch the teacher do her thing, not coach the kids through the answers. I'm not supposed to chime in with some story about the Berlin Wall or how I was barely aware of it, through the '88 Olympics, and then became more aware of it as it was becoming less there to be aware of.
The kids aren't going to find out about Henry Nowak, one of my fourth-grade classmates, and how he came back from Thanksgiving vacation and had a piece of concrete that had been part of the Berlin Wall for 15 years or however long.
I came back from Thanksgiving break that year wanting it to be Christmas break already so I wouldn't have to be around my classmates.
Henry came back with a piece of concrete from the newly fallen Berlin Wall -- which I wasn't entirely schooled on, but it was one of those constants in life. (For those born after 1989, it used to be death, taxes, the designated hitter and the Berlin Wall.)
And then it fell. And I have all those memories of people dancing on it and taking all manner of innocent weaponry to it, taking it down only after it became a wall in name only.
And these kids were born in 1996 or so. The retained ones, maybe as far back as 1994. Call it 1993 just to be safe.
At least four years separated from the fall of the Berlin Wall, each of them. For most of them, it's seven years, maybe eight. They've only seen the East and West German Olympic teams in video footage, not a live feed or something taped from earlier that day or week.
How do you ...
How do they ... how could they not know?
Ah, but at 13, I had essentially zero knowledge of Watergate, Iran Contra, the Tiananmen Square massacre, all of that. I found out more about Watergate the day Nixon died than I had known before, and my parents were about as anti-Nixon as two bodies could be.
The teacher, returning to her desk for a moment, tells me these kids haven't had a lesson on the Berlin Wall since sixth grade.
It's all I can do to keep from crying at the thought of relatives reuniting after 28 years apart -- and surely several of them had given up hope of ever seeing each other again -- and these kids are just sitting there
JUST SITTING THERE
treating this like some exercise
which it is, to be fair
but still.
Ideally, I will be teaching English to my own crops of middle schoolers (the somewhat long-term goal is to get into teaching the younger kids, but I'd have to be bilingual in Spanish to do that around here, and while I can learn things at a pretty rapid clip, I ain't learning Spanish in six months) in six or so months, and these kids won't remember Clinton being sworn in, they won't remember Kurt Loder announcing Kurt Cobain had been found dead, Colin Powell being the first black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the cheering mass at the Republican National Convention shouting "Dole Kemp!" or the Cowboys winning three Super Bowls in four years or ... anything from before 1996.
And then the next year, if I'm still teaching teenagers, it'll be anything before 1997 for most of the kids and still not much before that for the others.
And then four years later, I'll be teaching kids who have never natively known the New York skyline with those two towers. Oh, by then something will have been built in their place (maybe), but ... not the same.
And every year, the kids will be more and more separated from the little and big things that made me me.
Like Sept. 11. Nothing will ever happen that will help them connect with that. They won't understand why I still remember the color of the blanket I was sleeping under when my mother's phone call (to a land line, no less) woke me up.
Or the Tech shooting. I drove past a half-dozen cop cars that morning and some hours later found out why. Five years from now, that kind of shooting will light up Twitter and get people texting like mad. They won't be relying on the same kind of mass media sites we clung to back in 2007, even as a news agency called us promising big bux for photos (I was kind of more concerned about the higher-ups who'd gone over to that incredibly unstable-seeming situation).
Or the first black president. Five years from now, eighth-graders will have been born in 2001. The 2008 election will for many of them be a fair blur. They won't understand going from the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to ...
Come to think of it, neither do I. Not properly. I can read about it, but I wasn't with John Lewis back then, didn't have a fire hose turned on me, didn't see the beatings and the buses and the Freedom Riders and all of that. I read about it, sought information out, but I wasn't there watching as the bloody noses and bone-deep bruises became the right to vote unmolested.
But I still understand it enough to understand what a ridiculous thing it would have been in 1965 to suggest a black president 43 years later. (Forty-four, technically. Huh. Forty-four years after things like grandfather clauses and poll taxes went the way of the white primary, we got our forty-fourth president. Why did nobody clue me in? Hmm? What do you people have to say for yourselves?)
And there are other barriers to hurdle. Our vice presidents have been white men. We've had one female speaker. The Senate majority leader's always been a white man, no?
Six years from now, one hopes, Barack Obama will pass the torch to someone else, and if you think that someone else is sure to be a white man, I imagine my students will have a thing or two to say about that because the first person to break the mold broke it for everyone.
Woman?
Hispanic?
Asian?
Person with a disability? (Roosevelt's was a well-kept secret, no?)
Or maybe we'll get someone who's a little of a lot of things.
And in the mean time, we'll have another school shooting -- like Tech, like Columbine, like Kent State, like the shooting at ... does it matter?
And we'll have those events where the kids remember something they didn't expect to be significant, like how ripe the pear was they were eating when that building exploded on television. The juice will drip down their faces and hands, tickling but not drawing attention because holy crap, did that building just EXPLODE? Was that supposed to happen? No? ... ... why did ... what just happened? Is that going to happen here? Are we all going to explode too?
And that day in class, we'll move the desks all close together so the kids don't feel vulnerable, and we'll talk about what happened, and I'm sure someone (probably me) will get live text messages as more details unfold, and we'll have the news playing, and their scaffolding for things that can happen to buildings or schools or presidents or walls or whatever will collapse and they'll have to either rebuild or be broken.
And we'll just work on rebuilding.
And then 20 years later, the kids won't have been alive when whatever happened and that peach juice just dribbled onto the desk and made pink dots on their pants.