Wandering Warzones

Last night I watched the movie The Interrupters. If you haven’t seen it yet, I highly recommend it. It brought back a flood of memories from my experience teaching in Chicago in 2005. I was just back from Peace Corps and I wanted to apply everything I had learned in grad school to help underprivileged American youth. I had spent three years teaching in Africa and felt that I could make more of an impact teaching in my own country where I shared the same language and culture. I turned down a position coordinating a program to help demobilized child soldiers in the DR Congo and accepted a position at an innovative new charter school in South West Chicago.

The school was a total disaster with poor leadership and a dramatically changing agenda every week. The other two teachers had never taught before and they created no lesson plans or curricula. When I looked across the hall I saw students braiding hair and playing basketball. When I questioned these practices to the Director she told me that it was a new approach to teaching. I closed my classroom door and tried every trick I could think of to get my students to focus on their studies instead of what they could be doing across the hall.

The school was literally crumbling around me. One of the inexperienced teachers pushed a student against the wall and punched him. This student's father was one of the biggest gang leaders in the area. The teacher was fired and forced to apologize (while crying) to the student. Then I had the privilege of teaching both classes. The other teacher quit a week later, leaving me to teach all three groups of students. The students from the classes with hair braiding and basketball playing did not like my classes at all. The Director’s innovative solution? Take all three classes bowling! By January, the school was closed and I was out of a job. 

I went to work as a "permanent substitute" teacher at a school on the West Side for the rest of the school year. It was the most insane school I had ever seen. The students practically did no work at all. The English classroom had no books, the French teacher spoke no French, and the students pulled the most wild stunts they could maneuver, from throwing chairs at each other, to throwing all the History textbooks out of 3rd floor windows, to rolling up their Biology assignments like cigarettes and lighting them on fire. One day in class a loud roar in the back of the class was followed by a student bursting through the paper thin walls, leaving a cartoon-like hole in the wall the shape of the outline of his body with his arms in the air. The best teacher in the school handed out dollar bills for every completed assignment. Regardless of how I felt about her methods, I at least had to respect the results: The students did do the work!

Throughout all of the crazy antics I observed at these schools, I felt a deep pain for my students. There was never any doubt in my mind that they were the victims of a vicious cycle of poverty and a system that didn’t care. It would have been nearly impossible to leave these schools with the skills needed to compete in today’s job market. The students were intelligent and they knew that there was very little chance of escaping the circumstances around them. Nearly every day the students said, "we aint goin' to college." When I asked why, they rolled their eyes and looked around the room. I looked around too and then tried to give some encouraging words about rising up like a phoenix from the fire. 

One day I saw students exchanging papers among themselves. I heard one student saying, “I got two uncles, three brothers, my momma and my poppa.” When I approached them, they put the papers in under the desks. When I asked to see the papers, one student reluctantly showed it to me. It was a page printed from the Illinois State Penitentiary website. It contained a picture of a prisoner, along with the “stats” of his sentence. The students were trading these papers like baseball cards. Many of my students expressed their beliefs that no one could get through life without serving time.

My heart broke every day for countless reasons. Classrooms full of seniors who couldn't even write complete sentences. Students filled with so much rage they couldn't even spend an hour in the school without attacking someone. A list of suspended students pages and pages long. Only three students arriving for a class that should have 30 students. A generation of students raised by their grandparents because their parents just weren’t able to be there. And yet, there was always one or two students sitting in the front of the class trying to piece what they could out of their broken education. One time I asked one of these students how he manages to focus amidst the chaos and he said, "I just learned to block it all out." I wished that he could have given classes on this skill, as it could definitely save lives. my students taught me a lifetime of lessons in twelve months.  

Frustration and disappointment prevented me from staying in Chicago. In addition, I felt a growing awareness that I belonged to a global community. I am American but I am also an open-minded person who can make a positive difference in the lives of people around me no matter where I go. I have skills and experiences that will enable me to be effective in Africa, even though I am not and will never be African. In many ways, I feel just as much like a foreigner here in Mauritania as in the South Side of Chicago but that doesn’t mean that I can’t be equally effective in either place. 


When I tell people about my work in Africa with refugees and street children, many respond by saying, “Oh it must have been so sad.” Yet at no time in my life have I felt more helpless and powerless by the injustice around me than I did in Chicago. No where have I felt more defeated and defenseless to change the circumstances that these children faced every day. I left a part of myself behind those schools and I will never forget the loneliness, despair, resilience, perseverance, and courage of the students I met. I will always remember Bobby, Durell, James, Maribel, Tatiana, Tiara, Robert, Jeff, Eduardo, Vashtie, Kim, and so many others. I still cry for them often and hope that they made it out of that jungle alive. I witnessed  the war waged against these children and I believe it was just as much real as the one I avoided when I turned down the job in the DR Congo. 

I have a deep respect for the teachers in Chicago who continue to fight for their students and work each day to improve the conditions in the communities where they teach. Most of my friends in Chicago are teachers and their dedication, creativity, and perseverance has made them my heroes.