They say a picture is worth a thousand words. In this series I’ve chosen one picture per post which brings out strong memories for me and has a story attached to it. This picture is a homework assignment given the Friday before Katrina hit New Orleans.
“Do you know what it means, to miss New Orleans? ”
It makes me want to scream and cry at the same time.
I had wanted to go to New Orleans for a long time, but it always seemed so far away. I knew that New Orleans and I would be friends before I ever stepped foot in Jackson Square. Gaslights still illuminate the streets and doorways, music fills the sultry air and the smell of red beans cooking on the stove is still a Monday tradition. New Orleans assaults your senses at every turn as there’s always something new to taste, smell, see or listen to. I once heard it said that the mere mention of the words “New Orleans” can bring a smile to the lips of someone who’s never been there. I know it’s true because it was just that way for me. I made it there for the first time in the summer of 2000, my first year on the road guiding tours and went there dozens of times in the ensuing years. I loved it. New Orleans is the most unique city in the country and a big part of the amazing patchwork quilt that is America.
I moved to New Orleans in June of 2007, having accepted a job as an 8th Grade Math and Science Teacher at Francis Gregory Elementary School. I was there as part of the effort to reopen the school district in the wake of Hurricane Katrina which had devastated the city and shuttered most of its schools for 2 years. New Orleans had had one of the lowest performing public school systems in the country before the storm, and Katrina had made it exponentially worse. Most students had been behind already and then lost two years to the storm. I was teaching 8th Grade, but most of my students were 15 or 16 and most were functioning at a 3rd grade level in math. They could add and maybe subtract, but multiplication and division were a problem much less the algebra and geometry they were supposed to know. 8th Grade is a “high stakes” year, meaning if they didn’t pass their state testing, they wouldn’t go to High School. We expect the best teachers in this country to raise their students one grade level in a year. I was expected to raise them five grade levels, and that was only the beginning of the challenges I would face there.
The school I taught at was part of the Recovery School District, which was established to try and rebuild the city’s most challenged schools. It was going to be a big experiment with all eyes in the education world focused on the Big Easy. I got a crash course in the reform movement and learned very quickly that most of it was set up to please adults instead of to educate children. The entire focus was on improving test scores because that was something which could be measured. The students I taught and all of their challenges and complexities, ideas and interests were reduced to data points on a graph. I had all of the latest fad educational tools thrown at me, with very little research to back them up or resources to help me implement them. My valuable time, which would have been better spent making engaging and creative lessons to help my students, was instead spent writing a curriculum that made sense and met my students where they were.
Meanwhile, there were unbelievable discipline issues within the school. Whatever movies you’ve seen about inner city public schools, this was worse. Over the two years I was there, I watched seven of my colleagues leave campus in an ambulance and countless students leave in handcuffs. What they don’t show you in the movies is that the 15 minutes at the beginning when things are really bad – that actually lasts until Christmas. It was a challenging work environment, and after two years I was the only teacher left who had been there from the start.
The saddest part is that the students I taught were actually amazing kids. They were smart, funny, inquisitive and creative but not really great at taking these tests which quite frankly are designed to trip them up. My students and I slowly got to know each other. Trust developed over time. They knew I was going to be there every day and we were going to do math every day, no matter what. This consistency was important to them, and I like to think they looked forward to my class. They wouldn’t tell you they liked me, but they did. Don’t tell them, but I liked them too. Unfortunately our personal connection wasn’t going to get them into High School because there were simply too many cards stacked against them.
A few months into the school year, we moved into our 3rd and final building. It was a temporary FEMA school campus situated on the property that the school had occupied before the storm. Surrounded by barbed wire, it looked a lot more like a prison than a school, a fact which wasn’t lost on the kids. The old school building had taken 15 feet of water during Katrina and stood stoically across the field, molding and rotting away, a constant reminder of the devastation in plain sight. Meanwhile, out the other window was the levy which had been breached to let that water in. Try and imagine the effect staring at those two things every minute of the day had on my students who had lost everything in the storm. Every time it rained, they would tense up, tune out or pick a fight. It rains a lot in New Orleans.
I spent two years teaching at that school. I coached basketball and football and took my team to the city playoffs where we lost in a heartbreaking defeat in the last minute of the game. We even had a science fair. I did what I could with what I had, but I could have done more with the right resources. Meanwhile, New Orleans was my backdrop. Every day I got to go home to my little apartment in the French Quarter and maybe take a wander down Bourbon Street and listen to some music. I got to experience Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest and all of the little festivals and idiosyncrasies which make New Orleans special and unique. Slowly, I watched the city come back, and when I go there now it feels good to know that I played the tiniest role in that comeback. Spend enough time there and New Orleans is a city that gets inside of you. You may find that when you leave New Orleans, New Orleans may never leave you.
As I was winding up my second and final year teaching there, my curiosity got the better of me. I had been staring out at that old school building for most of the last two years. I brought a crowbar and a flashlight and a mask and my camera and I quietly pried a board off on of the windows and slipped inside. I just wanted to have a look around the old place before I left. I planned on spending maybe 15 minutes in there, but ended up staying for hours. In the aftermath of the storm, the buildings had been stripped. Papers and books and desks had been thrown out and lockers had been emptied, but it was easy to imagine what it had been like. It was the chalkboards and whiteboards though that hit me the hardest, because they were exactly as they had been left that Friday before the hurricane hit. This one had a homework assignment which would never be checked or collected and a test which would never take place. After the students and teachers packed up and headed home that Friday in 2005, all hell would break loose in New Orleans. It would be over two years before another class took place on that campus, a class I was there to teach, but there would never be another class taught in that room.
It made me sit and stare at it and think about the students and teachers there that Friday in August. Where were they now? That storm forever changed the course of the city, and in so doing, would forever change the course of my life. New Orleans is a part of me now, and I’m a part of it. I saw firsthand the iniquity in this country’s education system and the reality of what poor communities in America are faced with. When I was there, we were spending more every day to rebuild Iraq than we had in the entirety of rebuilding New Orleans. As hard as I tried, those kids deserved so much better.
It makes me want to scream and cry at the same time.