In his memoirs, “Men who reap”, Jesamyn Ward talks about the young people she lost in her life: five in the span of four years. After naming the young men and the months in which they died, she said: “That is a brutal list that silences people. It silenced me for a long time… But my ghosts were once people and I can’t forget it.” I also have a brutal list. In my thirteen years of teaching, I have lost more students than I can count on two hands.
It has not been possible for me to continue teaching unchanged due to these losses and the structural reality that ensures they will continue. I had to develop a guide to teaching and loving children knowing that you can lose them and deal with the white savior beliefs and practices that made me believe I could save them.
This experience has been brutal, but I am a better person and a better teacher for shifting my priorities to honor the people who were once my ghosts (and former students) and the meaningful relationships we built while they were alive.
What follows are the steps I took to manage and process grief when I lost another student and the ways I changed my thinking to focus on what will always matter, even when my students continue to die.
Step 1: Feel the loss
The shock that comes when you lose a student you love consumes you almost immediately, and doing anything but feeling it is not an option. You may feel numb in a way that might feel familiar or scary. You may be wondering what’s wrong with you and why you aren’t more or less affected.
You’re doing it right, as long as you don’t force it or run away from it. Timelines are not useful to you now. Pain is not governed by time.
If you can bear it, if there is an opportunity, apply. Find, join or create a space and time dedicated to this loss. Bear witness not only to the lost person, but to the pain of those who loved them with you. Be present, if you can. Remember that it was a miracle of time and opportunity and even more so, that you were able to love each other in the first place.
If this isn’t your first loss, feel it anyway. Fight the numbness that comes over you when you’ve been exposed to too much harm, violence, and injustice. Honor each lost student as the individual they are, not a number or statistic.
Step 2: Create a ritual
In “Ritual: power, healing and community”Authors Malidoma Patrice Somé detail the ways in which ritual is essential to the well-being of the human spirit and how it “is not compatible with the rapid pace that industrialization has injected into life.”
I find that my pain is decidedly not compatible with such a rhythm, and the ritual creates a space where this rhythm is neither expected nor required. Frankly, the ritual keeps me from losing my mind not only to the students I have lost in the present but also to those I may lose in the future, and the terrible fact that there will inevitably be more to come. Contrary to what I sometimes fear, it is letting the loss in and accepting it that keeps it from overcoming me.
Find the ritual that works for you. In New Orleans we honor our dead with candlelight vigils and second lines, meals and t-shirts with their images and newly added wings. These community celebrations do something meaningful to me, but I have a more private ritual that I use when I’m ready.
My ritual is as follows: I light a seven-day candle and sit in front of it to write a commitment to carry forward what I learned from the person I lost. As long as the candle is lit, I sit next to it every night, reading the commitment aloud again, fixing it, I hope, in something deeper than memory.
Step 3: Realize that all the (white) Savior rhetoric you’ve been fed is a lie
It is painful to realize that most of what was expected to be true about teaching, or about America, is a myth. I, like many other white teachers, was recruited under the pretext that simply by showing up and teaching well we could change the public education system in the United States, as if the problem was a lack of good teachers and not a system built on segregation and the disparity of resources and opportunities.
I once had a former student who was one of the only kids I taught who straight up didn’t like me when we met. He was a simple and determined young man whose smile lit up the room when he decided to show it. During his senior year, he was with me twice a day, the second of which was a class designed to prepare him for a state exam he needed to pass in order to graduate. Our relationship was fragile and was slowly built around this shared goal. On the day of his graduation in 2014, he found me after the ceremony and hugged me, thanking me for helping him get there. It was a beautiful moment in our relationship. Sadly, he died on Thanksgiving Day, two years later.
In New Orleans there is a Difference of 25.8 years in life expectancy between white neighborhoods, which are often rich in access and resources, and black neighborhoods, where resources and opportunities are lacking. None of our systems, whether criminal, legal, medical, or educational, serve Black children.
When white teachers are hired in school systems, like New Orleans segregated schools that predominantly serve black students and children of color, is often to appeal to white arrogance. Believing that the flaws in our education system can be fixed simply by hiring better teachers (often a whistleblower for white teachers) is a convenient way to avoid addressing the context in which our students are educated.
Saying that if we teach well enough, we can save our children from neglect, violence, and inequalities in our city is a lie that, at best, appeals to our optimism and, at worst, our ego. It’s simply not true. We cannot teach well enough to save all our children from a sick society. Our teaching has to be more than this.
Step 4: Give meaning
As my students continued to die and I realized I couldn’t save them all, I had to figure out what really mattered in my classroom. This changed my priorities indelibly. These days, I make three commitments to my students and their families:
- Treat each student with care and dignity.
- Challenge each student.
- Teach something relevant to each student’s current life.
Every day at school, my children and I have precious time to spend together learning in community. I have not given up on preparing my students for future opportunities in college or careers, but I have used these commitments to balance these aspirations with a focus on what is meaningful today, here and now, whether we see each other or not. tomorrow again.
My students will continue to travel an incredible variety of paths and experience many beautiful aspects of life after they leave my class, but some will still die. No matter what happens to my students, the relationships we can have when I prioritize these commitments cannot be taken away from us. The experiences we have in my classroom and the community we build are about more than preparing us for a certain type of life. They are significant, in themselves.
Death ends life, not a relationship
Last summer, in my school community there was a young woman who was loved by everyone she knew. She, a rising senior, had just become a mother, and a fantastic one at that. Certainly, many of us had lost young people in our lives before; Actually, more than half of New Orleans youth I’ve lost someone to homicide, but losing her seemed especially unfair.
At a candlelight vigil we held in her honor, I passed out a basket of tea lights and urged my students to take the time to honor her passing in a way they felt was appropriate. I reminded them that grief manifests itself in many different ways and shared my ritual.
In our first big project of the year, my students created quilt squares depicting the face of someone they wanted to honor and artist statements detailing the impact these people had on their lives. Stitched alongside Halle Bailey as Ariel, Kobe Bryant, self-portraits and Princess Tiana, were several quilt squares in honor of the student we lost, a person whose impact we will not forget, with whom our relationship has not ended.
When I focus my teaching on challenging my students each day rather than on the end result of “saving them,” on building meaningful community in the day-to-day rather than tirelessly pursuing future outcomes, I am honoring the value that our lives and the world have. learning without the need for a successful future result to validate them. Every day that I am able to challenge my students and have a relationship with them is a gift, and nothing, not even death, can take it away from me.
In memory of all my students who have been victims of violence in New Orleans and all the children we have lost due to the profound inequality of our American educational system.
