Nonviolence is not just about protest

“Nonviolence is not just about protest.” As I teach my high-school freshman English students about Gandhi and MLK and Thoreau, I tried to be very careful to temper it with the other side to this philosophy. Life is more than just reactionary, oppositional forces, and so it is for nonviolence. If nonviolence is only about resistance and protest, then it will never help to create the world it envisions – it will simply stop a worse world from existing. Nonviolence, like humans, must be productive in order to be successful. I did not want to infuse them with a cynical, angry, rebellious fire without also making them passionate to change their community for the better.

This weekend, my students volunteered at the local zoo. Though few were there on time, 30 students showed up for this 3-hour volunteering session from 9-12 on a Sunday morning. I was amazed, amazed by their presence, amazed by their enthusiasm, amazed by their interest and their work ethic and their excitement for volunteering. They were cleaning filthy cages, feeding ungrateful monkeys, sweeping dusty paths, making toys only to be torn apart by hyperactive parrots, and yet they served cheerfully and joyfully because they had internalized this lesson much deeper than I had imagined. Many of them had never been in the zoo before, though they’ve lived here all their lives. Likewise, many had never volunteered before in their 14 or 15 years of existence.

Driving home at the end of the day, my students’ questions about “when we would get to do this again” still ringing in my ears, I realized this was the most important thing I have taught in my teaching career. The writing’s important, but only as it is directed towards something positive; reading’s fundamental, but service is even more rudimentary; communicating with words and letters on a page is second to communicating through service or acts of love.

Nonviolence is so much more than protest. It took my students to teach me that. Who you are, ultimately, is not what you stood against but to what you contributed.

An adult’s affirmation

There she is, a freshman in the clarinet section. And there he is, hammering the dulcimer in the football halftime show. There she is, dancing with a winding colored flag; there they are, all of them seeking affirmation.

Too often, teachers underestimate the impact their presence carries. Simply going to a football game or a volleyball match could be all the self-esteem boost a freshman needs to stay in band. Some of these kids have parents in the crowd tonight, but so many of them don’t. By proxy, all these teachers in the stands who wave to students who may or may not have passed their class, they are the affirming parents these kids need this night.

Perhaps it is even more pronounced in such border schools, where students are often delving into new territory that their parents cannot affirm. As new immigrants learn a new language and culture, their parents are generally happy for their upward progress but also saddened by the rift which language brings. In this case, the students look to other adults for affirmation in their new tongue, and we as teachers must realize our awesome task of affirmation. A kind word, a specific praise, even your general presence of support can often be just the encouragement a student needs to press on to arenas their parents haven’t gone before.

Private vs. Public Language

You see them in the halls and understand the mindset of cliques and the way cities quickly divide up into ghettos by nationality. Este vato! No’mbre hue! No manches hue! Que onda? The phrases fly back and forth as fast as the teenage hormones. Newcomers separate into cliques with other Spanish-speakers, partly out of fear that another student will make fun of them in English. The few students who speak solely English keep to themselves as well, strangers here in a border school. But when the bell rings, they are all thrust into my English class for 50 minutes, and I need to make it work.

“Speaking Spanish in an English class is like using a baseball bat at soccer practice.” The nods from my soccer players give me all the impetus I need. “I am not a hater, but I don’t want to cheat you. The state tests you in English, I test you in English, so I would be remiss if I allowed you to speak Spanish within these walls, other than for direct translation.”

Private language meets public language meets a freckled outsider from Pennsylvania. I know it is hard, will be extraordinarily difficult for some of these students to achieve fluency, but it is still my job to try.

It always rains the first day of school, Mister…

Another school year begins in the Rio Grande Valley. As expected, it rains. The freshman in my class look as if my room were the last refuge from a deluge just outside my door. They are young, malleable, innocent and idealistic (though they would indignantly deny it). This will not always be so.

Working with freshman English students, and specifically with ESL (English as a Second Language) students, gives one intimate insight into the ways in which politics, immigration, and language acquisition all converge on the shoulders of students too young to make sense of the word “adolescence.” How many of these students will disappear as the borders tighten and the border wall begins changing from a symbol to a concrete structure? How can a school encourage pride both in a Spanish-speaking heritage and in an American dream they’ve only seen in our oh-so-pervasive media?

Immigrant students, be they legal, illegal, or refugees, inevitably struggle with the sense of identity I am tinkering with on this first day of school. Mexican students wish to please their parents by doing better than they, but these teens also worry about becoming “pochos” who are no longer Mexican. In the Rio Grande Valley, specifically, it is all too easy for newcomers to speak broken Spanish, fractured English, mish-mashed Spanglish – at what point do students no longer feel the necessity to develop a proper language of official discourse?

All these things flow through my mind as I take attendance on the first day of my sophomore year of teaching. There is a primal desire for language here, something which might go uncharted by state tests and NCLB legislations but is evident in these students’ giddiness for the first days of a new school year. Given the right tools and a learning environment which respects other cultures through the particulars of English language, these students could move out of the Valley, could succeed in New York, in Chicago, in Houston, in Minneapolis. Given only some vocabulary without direction, though, they will be stuck in the netherland which is the border towns along the Rio Grande, a “ghetto” both distended and remote.