New Teacher Diaries
Uncle Sam wants my student
Apr 10, 2008 12:58 PM
I had never heard a student describe a set of ratio problems like this before, as being “just like the Army test.” It was a sophisticated way of broaching the subject, I suppose, of why Stephanie had not been in school on Monday. She had been at home with her mother, entertaining a visit from a U.S. Army recruiting sergeant. It was a productive meeting from the Army’s point of view.
Stephanie is a senior this year, by her age and by a ragtag band of credits that she’s scraped together, semester after semester. She’s somehow managed a passing score on every Regents exam she needs for a basic diploma, except for one. She’s failed the Math A Regents four times. This is why I meet one-on-one with Stephanie twice a week for a full period, coaching her to leap this one last hurdle separating her from a high school diploma.
Stephanie isn’t usually very academic, but today she taught me about yet another standardized test. “I have to get a 31 to get in,” she said. “I got an 11 on the practice test.” I asked her how many points there are in total. “90-something,” she said.
Stephanie’s eyes were tired and seemed softened by tears. I asked her several times how she felt about the decision to go into the military and heard several times about the views of her mother, including the standard bit about taking a few years to “get some discipline.”
My grandfather served in the Navy. He’s proud to have served, and I’m proud of him. He flew blimps over the near Atlantic, discouraging unfriendly submarine visitors. Did you know that people died, flying slow-moving Navy blimps along our Eastern seaboard?
Patriotic or not, I feel like the Army is snatching my student away. College funding or not, I feel like the happy and prosperous life I wish for my students is somehow incompatible with conscription. Maybe it has something to do with the sentiment expressed by Kurt Vonnegut, who fought in World War II, that the U.S. military today is “being treated, as [he] never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.”
I never thought that teaching math might actually send a student of mine into harm’s way. I finished working with Stephanie in a kind of daze and took my contradictions to the faculty bathroom, breathing hard. Of course I’ve heard about first-year teachers brought to tears on the job. I never imagined anything that would do it to me. But I never could have predicted this situation.
Eric Blair is the pseudonym for a first-year teacher of math in a Manhattan high school. A version of this post first appeared in the UFT blog, edwize.org, where “New Teacher Diaries” is a regular feature.
