This is a difficult post to write for a number of reasons. The
first is because I have let a full month pass without posting anything, and a
lot has happened in the past month that is worth recounting. Though it is
tempting to skip straight to the most pressing news (an update on how Baton
Rouge is dealing with the catastrophic flooding), I want to pay equal service
to my experiences here that laid the scene for everything that has happened in
the past week. The second is because the only reason I have time to write this
post is because my house WASN’T flooded, and I happened to get the week off. A
version of survivor’s guilt, I suppose.
Part one: First Impressions
This city has spunk. It ranks 90-something in terms of
national crime rates and is definitely rough around the edges, but it has a
kind of fierce dignity, as if it were staring you straight in the eye, daring
you to call it anything less than magnificent. The trees loom over the streets,
massive live oaks whose roots rip up sidewalks and dip down to the ground in an
almost prehistoric glory. The southern architecture is true to its reputation,
with stately white columns and wrap-around front porches that line the streets
in antebellum grandeur. The wealth of the Garden District is juxtaposed with
trailer parks and junk yards where creeping tendrils reclaim boarded-up houses
with eviction notices still fluttering on the door. Still, ask any local and
they’ll tell you they're proud to be from Louisiana. The culture and community
run deep, and I’ve been warned that more TFA corps members end up staying in
Louisiana than any other region.
I live in Spanish town, a historic district near the capitol
where Mardi Gras beads hang from every tree. (and sign, and fence post.) I live
in a baby blue house with hot pink and lime green trim and two giant, wooden flamingo
cutouts on either porch banister (more on the flamingos later). My other
favorite houses on my street are bright yellow and turquoise, and I must say that
I thoroughly enjoy living in a neighborhood where purple is an acceptable paint
color. Spanish town is where the Baton Rouge Mardi Gras parade takes place, and
my house is on the parade route. I’ve got three housemates, two of whom are
Teach for America alum and one who is a reporter for the local paper.
Being new to humidity, I feel like I’m in a rain forest, all
of the time. There are banana trees in my neighbor’s yard, and I work up a
sweat just WALKING outside. We have a tree house in the backyard that is
currently infested with massive banana spiders but they
eat mosquitoes so I can’t complain. Other spotted wildlife include tiny lizards
(in the house), an opossum, an armadillo (road kill) and about a dozen feral
cats which roam the neighborhood (fed by our neighbor, June.) There are also cockroaches, which are an unavoidable fact of living in the south. I have a particular discomfort with cockroaches that I think stems from a movie I saw as a child in which a cockroach is somehow baked into a piece of cake and then bitten into by an unsuspecting chef (I think it was called Mousetrap). When I first arrived in my classroom, there were about a dozen dead cockroaches on the floor. It seems that they only crawl out into the open to die, because I have never seen a live one.
Part two: Teaching
Holy shit this job is hard. I knew it would be difficult,
but I suppose I I thought that more of my working-with-kids skills would be
transferable. I think there is a common misconception that if you understand
the content and get along with children, you will be a good teacher, but the
reality is that everyone, regardless of natural affinity, has to become a good teacher. It’s a process of
acquiring a skill set that can’t really be taught in books, evidenced by the
fact that the other first year teachers at the school (who all have education
degrees from LSU) are struggling just as much as I am. The first year of
teaching is just hard, period.
The profession is like an iceberg. The content is the tip,
and everything else is keeping 23 little humans happy and engaged long enough
to absorb it. Every child has different needs, which change based on
their mood, the time of day, stuff going on at home, or something that happened
on the playground. Between lesson plans and engagement strategies and classroom
procedures and personalities there are about six dozen shifting parts to think
about at any given time. I think my real job title should be tiny human systems manager.
The first Friday of school ended in two of my fourth grade
girls getting into a fist fight on the way to the bus, an event which I couldn’t
help but feel partially responsible for given that the day had ended
disastrously and many of my students were visibly stressed-out. I am lucky to
be teaching at a school that has a leadership development curriculum well-equipped
to employ restorative justice practices, so events like that one were out of
the norm. The girl who started the fight was new to the school and has since
been forgiven and accepted back into the class. (The entire class had to
forgive her.)
Every day since then has gotten slightly better, though I
admittedly now have a much lower threshold for what constitutes a good day.
(Basically if no one gets in a fight and I don’t cry in the teachers lounge, it was a good day.)
If I can get my kids to read silently for 10 minutes, it’s a win. If they
manage to stay in a somewhat orderly line on the way to the cafeteria, it’s a
win. All I can do is just keep focusing on the wins and know that it’s going to
be a long and challenging year that will force me to grow in ways I can’t yet
imagine. Thus far it has been an exercise in patience and humility.
In the words of Jake the Dog…
Part three: The Floods
Last Thursday night I fell asleep to the sound of rain falling on the roof, thinking how nice it was to not live in a desert climate. The universe has an ironic sense of humor. I woke up to a small stream flowing down one side of our street and wondered immediately if "rain days" were a thing in Louisiana. Turns out they are. At first I was overjoyed. An unexpected three day weekend! Teachers must love weather days even more than the kids, I thought.
But the rain didn't stop. Around noon my phone started buzzing with flash flood warnings, and we were told to stay inside. Saturday continued much the same, and we started seeing images of streets starting to like real rivers. Houses were taking on water and neighborhoods were being evacuated. Our street was wet, but Spanish town is fairly elevated compared to other parts of Baton Rouge, and our house sits up another 5 feet from the street on raised brick props.
In another 24 hours, we realized it was going to be really, really bad. 20,000 people had been displaced, 10,000 of them in shelters around the city. My housemate Lauren's boyfriend works for the Mayor's office and had been gone from 7am to 1 in the morning every day, coordinating relief efforts. Videos of dramatic rescues surfaced, and the death count rose to 8. I felt immobilized, wanting to help, but unsure that it was safe to drive, as the floodwaters were starting to move around, washing into unsuspecting neighborhoods that hadn't been required to evacuate. I bought some requested supplies for a shelter off of an Amazon wishlist, and set up this GoFundMe page to raise money for students at my school who will need to replace uniforms, shoes, and other school items.
We got word that schools were closed Monday, and then Tuesday, and then the whole week. We were told to start calling parents, trying to locate families and find out who had been displaced. As of today, six of my students have lost everything, and I've yet to get a hold of four of them.
When the roads were safe to drive on, I volunteered with my housemates at a makeshift Salvation Army center that had been set up in an abandoned department store. (All of the actual centers flooded, along with the food bank). In the absence of any real organization, our team of volunteers sorted all of the donations that were being dropped off by the truckload. The generosity of some was clear-- people who had bought Costco-sized packs of toiletries or dropped of cars full of water bottles. Others had clearly given what they had, but some seemed fairly clueless about what was appropriate to donate. We found half-empty bottles of shampoo, clothing with holes in it, six inch stilettos, and several decades-old (and definitely expired) collections of hotel body wash and shampoo. (Fun fact: trial size samples of anything have a shortened shelf-life--usually not more than a year or two. So if you, too, have been saving tiny bottles of things for years, please throw them out.)
All in all, I have witnessed an incredible resilience in the community as people have come together to help each other out. The divisions that had been created in the wake of the shooting of Alton Sterling and the three police officers seemed for a moment to be healed. Blacks were saving Whites, Whites were feeding Blacks, and the only thing that mattered was that we were in this boat (sometimes literally) together.
On Friday my school held a training for staff on teaching in post-traumatic environments. The most heart breaking realization for me was that the trauma of this event is not limited to the flooding. Given that 95% of our students live at or beneath the poverty line, and almost certainly didn't have flood insurance, losing everything sets off a chain of events that may continue to be traumatic for months to some. Consider a child of a single parent who has lost their house, and more importantly their car, which is the only way for the parent to get to work. They lose their job, and now have no way of surviving except from the charity of others, or FEMA funding if it ever comes (which might take several months). To cope, the parent drinks. The child is sleeping on the couch of a relative, where they don't get a good night's rest and are exposed to the constant financial stress of the adults in the house.
The effects of trauma and constant stress on child brain development have been well studied, and one major effect is reduced executive functioning, which manifests in school as the ability to focus and control impulses. (Great TED talk about the ACE study here, the same study I talked about in my thesis and the essay I wrote for the Eli Wiesel Foundation.) Students who have been exposed to trauma in childhood are often misdiagnosed with ADHD for this reason.
So on top of learning how to be a teacher, I find myself in the position of learning to be an amateur trauma therapist as well. Just counting my blessings and feeling lucky to be in a position to help. I have, however, felt a good deal of guilt that I have the luxury of sleeping in while others sleep on cots in crowded shelters. I was in a coffee shop on Friday, ordering a pour-over, wondering how life was allowed to feel so normal. I felt like the city should be in mourning, but as a friend remarked, life has the remarkable ability to return to normal, even in the face of catastrophe. The only way through is forward.
The silver lining of this ordeal, if there is one, is that I have gotten a much needed breather with the whole week off of school. (I hadn't had more than two days off since January with my school and training schedules). I wish it weren't under such unfortunate circumstances. Another silver lining is that I can now clean up dead cockroaches without a second thought or even wrinkled nose. Problems are relative.
