In Memoriam

Not quite four months have come and gone since I last wrote an update, and only til now have I felt the need or the urge to rectify this long lapse. Glancing back over my last post, I can only imagine how shockingly diverse my new thoughts will be.

In October, despite the challenges on the home front with my family, teaching in the Delta was a plethora of self-affirmation, adventures, and enjoyable experiences. I felt a rhythm and a purpose in all that I did, and I was continually searching for new ways to make my presence known, influential, and appreciated. I even attended a school leadership summit, where I gathered information about becoming a school administrator in Mississippi, something that my principal has repeatedly endorsed. That early in the school year, everything was possible and the world was my proverbial oyster. And to an extent, of course this is still true. But perhaps my outlook has trended away from lofty idealism to more grounded pragmatism. At the very least, I have been sobered by a year that has gone not quite as I had originally planned.

I am in absolute awe of how schools function down here. I am perplexed and troubled by the monumental obstacles that make teaching such a fierce undertaking on a daily basis. Parental involvement is disjointed and frequently non-existent, which often means that learning ends when the school doors bang closed in the afternoons. Teachers would rather cheat on the state tests than admit that their teaching strategies are ineffective. Principals fear the state department and their school superintendents just as much as school superintendents fear parents, so that everyone constantly walks tremulously. And school districts across the region spend tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars on consultants and purported quick fixes to the varying ails of public education, none of which seem to address the real problems or to even fix things superficially. I know that education in Mississippi does reach its full potential in some places, as evidenced by one day of training I spent at a wonderful school in Jackson. Perhaps that is why I feel even more dissatisfied by the whole affair. It becomes complacently simple to think that this is life everywhere, so I might as well get used to it. But when confronted with something to the contrary, when experiencing firsthand the lofty idealism I had once entertained for myself, settling for underachievement becomes much more difficult. I find it more and more difficult to stomach the willful neglect I see at every turn.

I am charitable and perhaps still naïve enough to admit that I do not think that people themselves are ultimately the problem, since we all become only what we are taught, but we are the ones who continue to follow failing policy year after year and generation after generation. A sense of entitlement keeps people from learning hard work, low expectations and inexperience with the world make people complacent, and a persistent desire to find the easy way out means that no one takes real responsibility for the community’s troubles. The proper ideals, the mentality that breeds success, are all missing or corrupted beyond recognition. What starts as good intentions just further propound the problems.

Students steal without conscience because their parents don’t know what it means to earn something through their own efforts. Students exchange harsh words rather than compassion because their only worldview is from the bottom of the dog pile, where the default position is to scrap and scramble for yours before someone else tramples you. And students settle for the bare minimum because they know that, at the end of the day, those drug dealers down the street are going to have nicer cars and more “friends” than anyone who goes about life the honest way.

So when I look into their eyes, when I wrack my brain searching for the words that will finally penetrate their war-hardened skins, I mourn the losses that they will never truly feel. I regret that most will never know true happiness or true goodness. I am saddened that no one has told them, besides me, that they can do better and they can achieve better and the world can be a better place with them in it. I cannot help but bow my head under the weight of their burdens—burdens that they do not even know they have, having never experienced anything different.

I am angry at the system that is so broken, at the system that does not even give these children a chance. But how do you stay angry at a system without getting angry at the people upholding it? How do you fight the ideas without fighting the people incubating those ideas? This is my current struggle, and one that is requiring a great deal of personal growth and higher-road-ness.

And so this year, rather than becoming the beacon of promise I had envisioned, has rigorously tested my faith in so many things, even personally. My dad’s illness startled my sense of security. You never think that you will have to face the illness of a parent until you do. Though he is doing much better and the prognosis is good, I do not like the idea of being so far from home in the future. But perhaps my greatest regret is my aunt, whose short and difficult battle with cancer ended in early January. She meant the world to me, but only in retrospect did I realize how seldom I told her so. My grief was intensified because of the suddenness, but has proven resilient because of the magnitude of the lesson I have learned. It took the passing of someone I loved for me to realize that I cannot afford to waste time. I do not have time for the friends who have disappointed me. I do not have time to spend in a job I dislike, no matter how noble or well-intentioned my purpose. I do not have time to waste words on those who cause me more harm than good, and I cannot keep missing the opportunities to tell my loved ones the depths of my devotion. Throughout my life, I have witnessed the pain of regret in others. Now I sense the urgency of avoiding my own disappointments.

I have no idea where these musings leave me, ultimately. A whole range of people have persistently asked about my plans for next year, and I think eventually their patience will finally run out after just one more response of “I don’t know.” I am not entirely hopeless about teaching in the Delta, but I also realize the personal and professional shortcomings of this community. The difference I make here will not cause the hurricane halfway around the world, but I still hope that, in the life of just one child, I at least start a stiff breeze.