No Way Out

Like my last class, the current students adore the Kahoot! game. I create questions and they play a game on their phones. There's a group of women who do particularly well. Students play the game with nicknames and recently someone logs on as “Ganjah.” He's giving the girls a run for the money. I ask every time when the game is over, “Who's Ganjah?” and the students explode with laughter but no one cops to owning the moniker. I notice however a marijuana leaf etched onto Daniel's name tag. I'm pretty sure that I've outed “Ganjah.”

I bring in some art supplies and we make Christmas cards. A handful of them haphazardly slap on a few stickers and call it a day but many are rapt, skipping the coffee break to pour over their creations, cutting and glueing and pasting. I hang the finished creations on a rope above the whiteboard and we all admire them. We practice writing possible greetings and some of the more advanced students compose their own. As neither of my children is capable of addressing an envelope, it doesn't surprise me that my students are largely clueless. We do a few practice envelopes. The advanced students are bored and the lower level students manage to write them upside down and confuse the sender with the recipient. We go through a whole box of envelopes. After everyone produces a practice envelope that wouldn't vex the U.S. Postal Service, they draw from a hat and pull the name and address of a fellow student. The envelope is addressed to their secret friend and they choose from my selection of Christmas stamps. I'll mail the cards off right before Christmas. Yolanda, probably my smartest student, sits across from from Pedro. Yolanda is wary and sniffs out irony. My best jokes rate her grudging grin but Pedro cracks her up. I cheat to insure that Pedro will receive Yolanda's card and vice versa.

I tell them that if they're sending a card to someone who might not celebrate Christmas to say “Season's Greetings” or “Happy Holidays.” “But everyone celebrates Christmas Teacher.” Given time limitations I don't tell them about the Jew thing but I tell them that there are indeed some people who don't celebrate Christmas. “Really?” “I don't celebrate Christmas,” I tell them. Some are befuddled by this but a few of them look me up and down and nod knowingly.

Caleb, one of the two Ethiopians sometimes gets stuck in traffic and rushes in, late. He performs the high-five/half-hug bro greeting thing with some of the Hispanic guys. The other African immigrant is Zala, a portly attractive woman in her forties. She works at a Burger King. She doesn't like it and sometimes she's assigned overtime causing her to miss class. I make a lesson about Ethiopia. Himself actually writes the copy and finds some art and photos. Caleb delicately points out that there's a spelling error. Himself defensively objects to the correction, as the word is TRANSLITERATED.

The night of the lesson I am sad when Zala texts me that her husband is in the hospital, for the second time in the last few weeks. I hand the yardstick I've taken to using as a pointer over to Caleb and he tells them about his country and writes the Amharic alphabet on the board. Then we watch a glossy short travelogue. Caleb is proud but there's lots of stuff you wouldn't show in a travelogue. Caleb says emphatically that if money were no object he would choose to stay in the U.S. and not return to Ethiopia. When I ask my Hispanic students the same question, many of them indicate that they'd prefer to live in their homelands.

To the astonishment of my fellow teachers, I take my students on a field trip. I arrange a Spanish tour of an exhibit of Martin Ramirez' paintings and drawings at the Institute of Contemporary Art. Ramirez left his family in Jalisco in the early 1930s to find his fortune in California. He worked sometimes for the railroad and bummed around. Finally, apprehended by police and unable to communicate in English, Ramirez is admitted to a psychiatric hospital. The diagnosis is schizophrenia but some biographers posit that he suffered mainly from cultural displacement. Ramirez died in 1963, having spent thirty-three years institutionalized.

Field trips apparently aren't the norm at my school but a form exists so I fill it out. Students have to sign a waiver and provide their phone numbers and the name and number of an emergency contact. I resort to explaining the thing in Spanish and a lot of them still don't get it. I attempt to prepare them with a Powerpoint that starts with pictures of 35,000 year old Indonesian cave paintings. I explain that art has existed for just about as long as man. Then I ask them if art is only for the rich and some of them think it is. I ask if someone can be an artist without a formal education in the arts. Most believe that training is essential. I talk about the compulsion to create and project a photo of a jewelry box woven out of Kool Cigarette wrappers made by prisoners. We talk about how satisfying making our little Christmas cards has been for most of them. We finish with a level 1B appropriate biography of Martin Ramirez and a slideshow of paintings.

We all arrive late at the museum, caught in traffic. Everyone's flushed. I've dragged Himself along. The staff greets us warmly, even though we're about 45 minutes late and it's fifteen minutes until closing. The students take to the guide and the art immediately. They hang on Eddie's every word. He's a handsome Chicano whose college internship has led to a permanent job working on community outreach and education. I do my best with the Ethiopians. They get that the art reflects the immigrant experience. We note how similar some of elements of Ramirez' work are to the Ethiopian art we'd looked at the night before.

Most of Ramirez' early drawings are made with scrounged materials. Saliva is the main ingredient of his homemade ink. His work fuses folk-art style elements with wildly modern composition. The artist draws and paints endless railroad tracks, horses, tunnels. Motion and stasis. A psychiatrist with an art degree is struck by Ramirez' work and provides art supplies. The later works are more colorful although mostly painted on paper bags or the brown paper of discarded examining table covers. A collage/painting of Ramirez' hometown Tepatitlan highlights the exhibit. It's been compared to a photograph and Eddie describes how vividly and accurately Ramirez remembers his home, even after decades of absence.

When the tour's over Eddie asks the students to share opinions. Stony silence. “They don't speak for me either,” I assure him. Ice broken, they start saying that they like the paintings. Daniel, the pothead, steps a bit forward. “This is our lives. We leave our families. The railroads...long tunnels you can't get out of. We're not locked up, but our lives are on the edge The paintings show how hard it is to be away from our homelands even though we know that it's much harder back at home. It's important to remember our countries and our cultures, and keep this close in our hearts, even if we can't return.” The museum director and I tear up. Ganjah indeed. But Teacher likely does the same thing that you do after school. Do you need to flaunt it on your chingada name-tag? Just be cool.

After the museum we walk over to Farmer Boys. Eliza, from Cuba, hopes that they have milkshakes. I stupidly leave the coupons I've carefully clipped in my car. Tables are moved and we all sit together. Eliza works packing airline meals and it is a busy travel season so she's missed a lot of school. She's hit it off with a bunch of the girls and they tease each other about their funny accents. I interrogate Eliza about Cuba. The economy suffers since Trump. Everyone expects things to get worse. Most people don't have cellphones. There is scattered Internet service. She tells me how much she misses home. I tell her that I'd like to go see the old two-toned American cars and she laughs. I teach her to say “homesick.” We walk back to our cars, around the corner from the Greyhound station. We navigate around huge piles of reeking trash. The destitute set up camp on the sidewalks. I ask Eliza if there are homeless people huddled on the streets of Cuba. There are not. We both shrug.

Zala doesn't want to eat. We offer to buy her something but she declines. I hope that she was full or on a diet. She sits with Caleb. They laugh and laugh. I realize that they sit on opposite sides of the room and that they've never spoken.

Octavio is the gorgeous boy who does all my tech stuff and installs apps on the students' phones. I've never seen a sweeter, more earnest smile. He's flirtatious, in a shy way, with both boys and girls. He probably could have hacked the next level. I am on the fence and I ask him about it. He asks to stay with me and I admit that his technical prowess likely influence me when I relent. Octavio is twenty two and works at famous chicken stand. He has a five year old daughter in Guatemala. Octavio arrives for our Christmas party hoisting vats of chicken and rice.

A few students show up for the Christmas party with their kids. I'm surprised that some of the young ones are parents. Natalie, a Madonna-like serene beauty, arrives with her three year old son. The boy, like everyone else, is drawn to Octavio. They color pictures together and play with a toy car. Maybe Natalie and Octavio are dating. They seem kind of familiar. I wonder about the mother of Octavio's daughter back in Guatemala. Octavio leaves, beaming, with Natalie's little boy on his shoulders. I don't know how long it's been since he's seen his own little girl.

There is a school dance with a DJ. Some of the students dance gaily and others stand on the sidelines and watch. I shoot a little video and then go back to the room to pack up all of the leftover chicken into little bags for them to take home. Half of the big tray of brownies I've baked remain. After several attempts, I've figured out that Hispanic people, for the most part, aren't interested in brownies, although mine are particularly excellent. Cookies, I'll remember are always a bigger hit, although Himself is happy with the leftover brownies.

I take down the Christmas decorations from the classroom and get stuff set up for returning in January. A file drawer is stuffed with tests, test prep materials, forms and memos, evidence of the ceaseless impediments to the actual instruction of English. I dump a lot of disorganized paperwork into a carton to take home and sort over the holidays. There will be additional testing when we return which I'll have to plan lessons for and hope I'll make up for the instructional time I've wasted making Christmas cards and taking them to the museum.

Donna, from last semester, pops up as I'm getting ready to go and dreading all the crap I'll face when I return in January. Donna's styled out for the dance. She babbles confidently in barely intelligible English. We embrace tightly. “Me missing my teacher. I loves you.” I lock up the room and sign out.