Teacher Man

Today is Kara's first day of substitute teaching. She started a graduate degree in education recently and decided to get out of the bank world and into the classroom.

As she left this morning, I was reminded of my one-year stint as a substitute school teacher in the Metro Nashville Public School System while I was finishing seminary. Nashville Public Schools is an interesting outfit. The overwhelming majority of students are minorities for, unlike Metro Detroit for instance, most of the white kids in Nashville attend a private school. Anyone who's taught in Nashville will attest to this. It's unusual. While I don't think every child should enroll in public school, I'm also skeptical of the idea of those who believe every child must, in the name of family values, be home-schooled or private-schooled. Every child is different. It's complicated. Jesus seemed awfully interested in being salt, light, cities on hills.

Laotian. Hispanic. Kurdish. Black. These were the four major groups I interacted with the year I taught in Nashville.

These kids are bussed all over the city, to sit in the classrooms which used to be filled with the more affluent white children. When Jim Crow Segregation fell in the South, the complexion of the school system changed. Some say Jim Crow didn't die; Jim Crow just went under-ground.

I will never forget one of my first teaching experiences in MNPS.

I reported to an elementary school on the east side of town in a well known Hispanic- Latino section. I was to teach First Grade.

I reported early (I frequently left our apartment early for fear that the engine in my Dodge would overheat, leaving me stranded and unable to get to the minimal paying job) and began to take attendance. These kids were shy. More so than most six and seven-year-olds.

We stumbled through the beginning, the Pledge, and the morning story-time. Late in the morning, I took the students to music class. One of teachers struck up small talk with me.

"So, how's the morning going so far?"

"Pretty good," I said mustering the most bravado one could hope for in light of the fact that as a substitute, I was a recognized, ordained, labeled Outsider.

"So, do you speak Spanish?"

"Me? No. I ummm . . . I had four years of French. No Spanish though."

"Wow. How are you connecting with the kids? You do know that it's an ESL class?"

In that moment, I ran the call letters E-S-L through my head a dozen times. ESL, ESL, ESL . . . I know that code. It's code for . . . oh my . . . it's code for English as a Second Language. My face must have turned into the same face I make when I drink sour milk.

"Oh, sure. It's a little difficult but were managing," I whispered with a lump in my throat.

Immediately, I turned around, walked back to my classroom. It turned out that I was "teaching" (if you could call it that) a class with students who barely, if at all, spoke English. No wonder I'd received large smiles and blank stares the entire morning.

Oh mon dieu. Que pasa?