Archive for February, 2010
February 27, 2010
Today is Friday and it feels like the week has already left the room. Most of my students are at a handball/basketball tournament, playing against another rehab. It’s the last day of the week in this month and somehow I feel entitled to just relax. On my way to the dining hall to warm up last night’s leftovers for lunch (stuffed red pepper), I saw William sitting on the ground. He was surrounded by at least five staff. One went into the kitchen to get a cold towel for his forehead. I just walked by, didn’t say a thing or ask how he was, like the car accidents on the highway I often ignore. Now I feel bad. Maybe William noticed me breezing by without out a care to his fall. They took him away to have his head examined. I’m sure he will be fine, at least I hope so.
I called Victoria to ask how William was. She said, “When the paramedics came, they assumed the 911 call was for Jensen.” The paramedics had come so many times to rescue Jensen. They were expecting to take him to the hospital again.
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February 24, 2010
Yesterday the community went quiet. The entire rehab was called to the big dining hall for an announcement. A long-time resident who’d been in the hospital died of a heart attack. He’d become a fixture in our community, funny and beloved. He had relapsed and re-entered the program, was just about to finish and go back out into the larger community. Though his mom and girlfriend showed up for the gathering, it seems this place was also his family. For close to two hours, fellow residents stood and sang, told their favorite memories, and gave prayers. One of his friends asked everyone to point to the sky. “That’s where Jensen is, ” he said, “in heaven.” Jensen was never my student so I didn’t know him very well. I did appreciate the complete shift when we gathered, the quiet, and the open grief.
Today, when I came into work, I noticed someone had put Jensen’s name on the completion board. Students get their names on this board when they graduate and leave the program, move on to the greater community.
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February 23, 2010
I didn’t always teach adults who dropped out of high school. There was a time when I taught K-12 and specialized in secondary school Art. I taught watercolor painting and beginning art history and aesthetics. But I was also required to teach subjects I had no training in, like science and physical education. I still have materials from when I taught Middle School, extra-curricular worksheets in basic art techniques like shading and perspective. Now, sometimes when my adult students are studying geometry on our classroom computers, I hand out a worksheet on shading the basic geometric shapes. One worksheet shows a cartoonish mad scientist in his laboratory. It instructs the students to pick one light source in the picture and, using a pencil, shade the lab. I passed out a few of these sheets at the rehab. “Why are you asking us to shade a meth lab?” my students asked. “It’s not a meth lab,” I said, “the scientist could be inventing a cure for cancer.” I quickly took back all the sheets. “I don’t want to get anyone in trouble here.” Including myself.
Posted in adult education, meth, parolees, rehab, teacher | Leave a Comment »
February 17, 2010
Carlos knocked on the back door of my school today. “Can I come in? You know I split and I’m not supposed to be here but I was wondering if you could look up my scores on the GED test I took two weeks ago?” Carlos looked different. He had cut off his dark curls, he looked…conservative. He told me he was living with his family and had a good job. I looked up his scores. He passed all five sections of the GED, but he failed the exam because he was short 20 points. Carlos scored 2230 and he needed a score of 2250 to pass. His average was 446 and you need a 450 overall to pass. Heartbreaking.
Still, he was optimistic. We both agreed he should retake the writing section. He blamed his low score in this area on a malfunctioning pen they gave him. “I gave you a brand new pen for the test,” I said as I handed him my card. “Call me when you get the results on the re-test.”
Carlos giggled. It’s odd to hear a grown man giggle but I got used to it and will even miss it a little.
Posted in adult education, education, GED, parolees, students, teacher, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
February 15, 2010
Last Friday I put out art supplies for my students to make Valentines. I was struck by how busy the crafts table was. In prison, myriad art practices and ideas for homemade cards get passed on, especially amongst the men. One of my students made a half-dozen cards to sell to other residents at the rehab. Another student constructed cards with suspended photographs on hidden threads that spin inside a heart-shaped cut-out when you lightly blow on them.
The pest control man also came to spray the resident’s housing. Several of the women brought their fish bowls over to my classroom so the fish would not be exposed to the toxins. So today my classroom was full of big tattooed guys cutting on pink paper and colorful Japanese Fighting Fish swimming in faceted containers.
Posted in drug recovery, education, handicrafts, parolees, prison, students | Leave a Comment »
February 9, 2010
Several of my students will be out tomorrow getting their teeth pulled. These extractions will be done for free by university dental students. Needless to say many of my students have destroyed their gums by smoking crack or meth. Recovery isn’t just about avoiding old habits, it’s about confronting and working on the devastation caused by old habits.
I had my first dental scaling last Sunday and was reminded of trepanning and other archaic medical practices. I asked the hygienist if the scraping was harmful to the teeth. “Oh no,” she said, “it’s like removing the barnacles from the bottom of a boat.”
So now my mouth is seaworthy.
Posted in adult education, drug recovery, meth, parolees, rehab, students | Leave a Comment »
February 7, 2010
While surfing the web I ran into this announcement: “The Museum of Criminal Anthropology, dedicated to Cesare Lombroso, has reopened after years of restoration and access to specialist researchers only. The institution was founded by Lombroso in 1898 under the name ‘The Museum of Psychiatry and Criminology,’ documenting his beliefs and research into detecting criminality through physiognomy.” You can now see this collection for yourself but you will have to fly to Turin, Italy. How you feel about this kind of pathologizing is another thing. Here’s some history: “For many years, Lombroso’s text on the female criminal would have great influence. It described the female offender as worse than male offenders, contending that they had more masculine than feminine characteristics. Lombroso also popularized the notion of a ‘born criminal’ which represents an extreme statement of biological determinism which had great influence well into the 20th Century.” The Museum of Criminal Anthropology serves as a reminder of a past that must be known but never repeated.
Posted in Cesare Lombroso, crime, parolees, prison, psychiatry | Leave a Comment »
February 4, 2010
Today I read an affirmation to my class. It was from a book of daily affirmations from the mid-eighties. Then I handed the book to a student to read aloud. I need to remind myself to let the students read aloud and short affirmations, simple and direct, are a great start. It’s easy to be the teacher on the pulpit. I asked my students what they think their children do most often after school. Watch TV or play video games was the common answer. “Not like us, we were getting our exercise gang banging,” one of my female students said. “Yeah, we never sat down,” another chimed in. “I wonder if there isn’t some activity between watching television and gang banging,” I asked them. Back to math, time to study ratio and proportions for the GED.
Posted in drug recovery, education, gangs, parolees | Leave a Comment »
February 3, 2010
Carlos is taking the GED exam tomorrow. I gave him several new pencils to take with him, solid cedar, not like those inferior “Depot” pencils. He was definitely a little nervous, coming and going today, not knowing what to do with himself. I told him to relax. He’s studied for over 250 hours and passed every section of the Pre-GED. Carlos is only 24. He has the potential to get his diploma and move on. I was trying to think of some success stories over the years, students who got out of the system for good and closed the door behind them. Students who went to art school, who entered the university, became drug counselors, they are the exceptions. Parolees who got their GED stand out. I’ve seen real progress. Maybe Carlos will become an X-Ray tech or maybe he will work in the oil fields like others in his family.
Posted in adult education, education, GED, parolees, students, teacher | Leave a Comment »
February 2, 2010
My school is inside a drug rehab for adults just out of prison. The entire community is in a week-long workshop. Some students will come to school to get out of the workshop and others will ask to get out of school to attend the workshop. Either is fine. I like to sit in on the gathering, drop in for fifteen minutes. Today they were showing a documentary on the big flat screen. They said for every 200 men in prison, there were approximately 700-900 children missing a father on the outside. I couldn’t stop thinking about this. Even when my students are on the outside they often fail to parent their children. The children are the forgotten victims of the criminal system, of drug use, of crime. I give my students clear-vue binders and they most often use them to display photos of their family and friends. It’s like a bunch of teenagers decorating their notebooks.
Posted in drug recovery, education, parolees, prison, rehab | Leave a Comment »
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