In her memoir, “The Men We Reaped”, Jessamyn Ward talks about the young people she has lost in her life – five in four years. After giving the names of the young men and the month they died, she said: “It’s a brutal list that silences people. It silenced me for a long time…but I can’t forget it because my ghost was once human.” I have a terrible list too Masu. In my 13 years of teaching, I have lost so many students that I can count them on both hands.
Because of these losses and the structural realities that ensure their continuation, it was impossible for me to continue teaching without changing. I wrote my own guide to teaching and loving my children, knowing that I might lose them, and I wrestled with the white savior beliefs and practices that led me to believe I could save them. I had to.
This experience was brutal, but changing my priorities to honor my ghosts, my former students, and the meaningful relationships they formed while they were alive has made me a better person. and became a better teacher.
Below are the steps I took to deal with and cope with the grief when I lost another student, and the mindset I used to stay focused on what was important even as I lost another student. This is how I changed it.
Step 1: Feel the loss
The shock of losing a beloved student consumes you so quickly that you cannot act without feeling it. You may experience numbness, a familiar or frightening sensation. You may wonder what’s wrong with you and why you’re more or less unaffected.
As long as you don’t force it or run away from it, you’re doing it right. The timeline is useless now. Sadness does not remain with time.
If you have the patience and the opportunity, please come visit us. Find, participate, or create space and time dedicated to this loss. Bear witness to the pain not only of those who lost you, but also of those who loved them along with you. If possible, be present. Remember that it was a miracle of time and chance and more that allowed you to love each other in the first place.
Even if this isn’t your first loss, feel the same way. Fight the numbness that creeps in when you are exposed to too much harm, violence, and injustice. We respect each lost student as an individual, not as a number or statistic.
Step 2: Create a ritual
in “Rituals: Power, Healing, and Community.”Maridoma Patrice Somé, author of “Rituals,” details how rituals are essential to the health of the human spirit and how they are “incompatible with the rapid rhythms that industrialization has injected into life.” Masu.
My grief is clearly at odds with that rhythm, and the ritual creates a space where this rhythm is neither expected nor required. Frankly, the ritual keeps us sane in the face of the horrifying fact that not only are we losing students now, but we may lose them in the future, and there will inevitably be many more students to come. You don’t have to lose it. Contrary to what I sometimes fear, accepting and enduring loss keeps me from being overwhelmed by it.
Find a ritual that works for you. In New Orleans, people remember the dead by lighting candles. 2nd line, meals and T-shirts depicting their images with newly added wings. While these communal celebrations are meaningful to me, I have more private rituals that I perform when I am ready.
My ritual is as follows. Light a seven-day candle, sit in front of it, and write a pledge to continue to carry on what you have learned from the person who has passed away. As long as the candle burns, I will sit with it every night and read my vows out loud again, hoping to paste them into something deeper than memory.
Step 3: Understand that all the (white) savior rhetoric you have been fed is a lie.
It’s painful to discover that so much of what you expected to be true about education and America was fiction. Like many other white teachers, I was recruited on the pretext that I could change America’s public education system by simply showing up and teaching well. A system built on isolation and disparities in resources and opportunities.
A former student, one of the only kids I ever taught, clearly hated me from the first time we met. He was an outspoken and determined young man whose smile lit up a room when he decided to show it. During his senior year, he followed me twice a day. The second of these classes was to prepare me for the state exam I needed to pass in order to graduate. Our relationship is tenuous and slowly built around this common goal. On graduation day in 2014, he found me after the ceremony, hugged me, and thanked me for helping him graduate. It was a beautiful moment in our relationship. Unfortunately, he passed away two years later on Thanksgiving Day.
In New Orleans, 25.8 years difference Differences in life expectancy between white neighborhoods with more access and resources and black neighborhoods with fewer resources and opportunities. Our systems fail to serve Black children, whether criminal, legal, medical, or educational.
When white teachers are brought into the school system, as in New Orleans; isolated school They primarily serve black students and children of color, but often end up playing up white arrogance. Believing that the flaws in our education system can be solved simply by hiring better teachers (often a dog whistle for white teachers) avoids addressing the context in which students are being educated. This is a convenient way to do so.
The idea that if we teach enough we can save our children from the neglect, violence, and inequality in our cities appeals to our optimism at best and to our ego at worst. It’s a telling lie. That’s simply not true. We cannot teach all children enough to save them from an unhealthy society. Our teachings must be more than this.
Step 4: Make sense of it
As my students keep dying and I realize I can’t save them all, I have to think about what actually matters in the classroom. This changed my priorities forever. Lately, I have been making her three promises to my students and their families.
- Treat all students with care and dignity.
- Challenge all students.
- Teach something that is relevant to every student’s current life.
Every day at school, my children and I spend valuable time learning together in our community. I have not given up on preparing my students for future opportunities in college and careers, but I have used these efforts to reflect on these aspirations and what is meaningful in the here and now, today. I’ve been trying to find a balance by focusing on whether or not I’ll be able to meet you. see you tomorrow.
After my students leave my class, they will continue to follow incredibly diverse paths and experience the many beautiful aspects of life. But some continue to die. No matter what happens to my students, nothing can take away from us the relationships that come from prioritizing these efforts. My classroom experience and the community we build is more than preparation for a certain kind of life. They have meaning in themselves.
Death doesn’t end a life, it ends a relationship.
This summer, there was a young woman in my school community who was loved by everyone she met. As a growing senior, she just became her mom and was a great mom in that regard. Indeed, many of us have lost young people before. in fact, More than half of New Orleans’ young people I’ve lost people to murder, but losing her felt especially unfair.
At a candlelight vigil held in her memory, I passed around a basket of tea lights and encouraged students to take time to mourn her death in any way they saw fit. I reminded them that grief takes form in many different ways and shared my ritual.
For the first big project of the year, students created quilt squares depicting the faces of people they wanted to honor and artist statements detailing the impact these people had on their lives. Next to Halle Bailey, who plays Ariel, is Kobe Bryant, a self-portrait, and Princess Tiana, the student we lost, the person who made an impact we will never forget, and whose relationship we are not yet finished with. Several quilt squares honoring the were sewn.
When we center our instruction on challenging students every day rather than on the end result of “saving” them, and on building meaningful communities every day rather than relentlessly pursuing future outcomes. , I respect our values. Life and learning is lived without needing future successful results to validate it. Every day you get to challenge your students and build relationships with them is a gift, and not even death can take that away.
We remember all the students who were victims of violence in New Orleans and all the children lost to the gross inequities of America’s education system.