Every year, I teach There There by Tommy Orange and have seniors do a creative writing assignment. My students contribute chapters to a mosaic narrative that structurally loosely mimics the book. Fifty or so chapters usually make the cut (proofreading is the only criteria). Each student writes a short work of fiction through the lens of a single teenage character. The task? To capture their collective high school experience. What is it like to be a teenager here and now? What is going on below the surface? What do adults — and all outsiders — not understand? Students can write from experience or be, in essence, journalists of a sort, basing their story on observations of their surroundings. I emphasize that they may craft comedies or tragedies, romances or satires. They are advised to think about their characters as real people created to represent an authentic experience and perspective — to tell truth through fiction.
In There There, Tommy Orange captures the experience of American Indians living in Oakland and also their efforts to understand and express who they are and what gives them meaning and purpose. This happens in the context of history: 500 years of massacres, bullying, discrimination, poverty, relocation, assimilation, and the perennially upsetting knowledge of that history. Orange portrays the place these characters call home and uses the voices of the interconnected characters in There There to proclaim a vital urban Indian identity.
One character, Dene, who once tagged the word “lens” around Oakland, applies for a grant to make a documentary. A panel judge surmises he’ll let “the content direct the vision,” but, in Dene’s case and my students’, that’s pretty tough. You decide when to turn the camera on or off, what to focus on, what to leave blurry and at the margins. When you’re in the thick of what you document, when it feels raw and fresh, you can’t help but shape the story.
Unlike Orange’s book (and A Visit From the Goon Squad, which they also read a bit of earlier in the year), there are no links between chapters in terms of specific plots or relationships between characters. The narrator of one is not a bit player in another. That would require more control on my part. But, every year, the chapters coalesce around clear themes, even motifs, that persist in their lives.
I joke with them about putting me in their stories, suggesting that a portrait of a bright, funny, and big-hearted English teacher through the eyes of a grateful student would likely do well at the proverbial box office. No one takes me up on that.
Last year, when my students were learning remotely and in the laughably disconnected hybrid context, the whole notion of school being a place to capture changed; the relationships students normally documented were inherently different. I didn’t give them a choice, but students chose anyway: to write about quarantine or produce a revisionist account, a chronicle of an imagined senior year in which only the “normal” concerns loomed large. Nonetheless, either way, you have messy bedrooms, weed, isolation, the black holes of phones, bullying, driving around, dumb parties, teachers who don’t understand or care, parents who don’t parent, parents who parent too much, romance and rivalries, drugs, eating disorders, video games, listlessness, self-doubt, backstabbing friends, and future-tripping.
This year, all of my students are back in my room. Will they see their world any differently?
Their stories are always subject to shifts in the terrain outside and yet somehow also always the same. Some of it is timeless — like The Outsiders, a book many of my students loved reading in eighth grade — and some of it is time-bound (although, it’ll be interesting to note how what’s ostensibly in the latter category turns out to fit in the former). I’ve done this project for four years. What might it look like in a decade? In two? I know I won’t last that long as a teacher, especially if conditions like the ones I’m experiencing now persist, but what a way to document a career. Vastly more importantly, it’s a way to collect the experiences and inclinations of students, potentially over a generation. Not just what they go through and how they feel assaulted or nurtured by their environment but what they think peers go through and how they decide to adjust the lens, what to focus on, where to add shine and where to strip it away, how they gravitate toward specific storytelling strategies and structures.
This week, I wrote an opinion piece for EdSource about the enduring appeal of anti-teacher narratives that dominated the 2020-2021 school year. Jonathan Chait is the latest high-profile and well-paid writer to trot out (in 2022) 2021’s specter of unions and child-harming “progressive activists.” He did this in light of the very temporary moves to remote learning made by a relatively tiny number of public school districts. It’s weird, this desire to relitigate last year — which, on the merits, is fine by me, considering how the same people who say things are safe mostly because of vaccines (they are) were, a year ago, saying things would be safe without them. As I touch on in the piece, it’s really this curious demand for penance that most entrances me, the idea that, for last year’s episode to resolve and finally give way to this next one, some people not at all responsible for the bottom falling out of American society have to very seriously say they are sorry.
I have joked that the best way of performing this penance would be for all unionized teachers who worked remotely for a portion of the 2020-2021 school year to be marked, branded, tattooed. Somewhere prominent. The face, ideally. With perhaps the outline of a board marker. Maybe a rotting black apple like my newsletter’s logo. So we and others can never forget the role we played in this drama — as the greed, entitlement, anti-intellectualism, and empathy vacuum that feel so essential to the American disposition continue to prance around the stage in puppet form, bludgeoning people.
As written and repurposed by so many, The Narrative of Covidschooling has kids and parents come off as flat, stock characters: the unwilling sufferers of what I like to think of as existential genocide and the exhausted, embittered professionals who cannottakeitanymore, respectively.
They’re not that.
My kid has been getting individualized attention in her first grade class for two weeks because two-thirds of class no longer comes to school. Why? Because two kids have tested positive over the course of a few weeks. She can’t go to her city-run after-school program because of her perpetual “modified quarantine” status, but things are okay. Yeah, she’s struggling with friendships, always bristling over some beef with some portion of her social group (which is larger than it’s been since preschool) but that’s probably normal. She feels things intensely, let’s just say, and this year is a crash course in learning to meet both banal and significant challenges with appropriate emotional responses. When I’m around her and her friends, they seem joyous, free, tempestuous, bright, bizarre. The more affluent parents (that absolutely includes me) at her downtown Oakland school are sending their kids to class. Vaccines have been widely available. And yet, the kids we’re told are suffering most — non-White, low-income, historically marginalized —- are at home with worksheets while seven kids write and read poetry with a really good elementary school teacher in a cozy classroom. I am not criticizing the families who keep their kids at home. Socioeconomic, historical, and cultural forces shape the decision-making in complex ways. But these families are definitely not on Twitter exclaiming that they cannottakeitanymore. So they’re merely a faded, pixelated corner of the portrait unless someone with power decides to scoot them into the spotlight.
The truth is nuanced, weird to Twitter-tuned brains but quite logical. According to Rachel Cohen, writing this week in The New Republic, the insistence of Chait and others on an “artificial dichotomy” doesn’t reflect what “actual parents and voters” believe. “They can hate the harms of distance learning while determining when the pandemic has altered how they want to live and school their children,” Cohen writes. “They can express frustration with their circumstances but maintain that not all problems have immediate resolutions and clear villains.”
An Oakland teacher friend works at a high school where students organized a “sickout” to demand better masks, more testing, and umbrellas and tables for outdoor meals. The teacher friend believes a few colleagues perhaps somewhat overzealously encouraged the actions. He would have preferred to teach. Yet he participated out of solidarity with students who vocally valued his participation.
What came first?
Teachers letting impressionable students know that they think conditions aren't safe?
Teachers following the lead of brave students, who, in Oakland, have a rich history of activism?
I don’t know the real numbers, but, hypothetically, if 1/10 of teachers at a school encourage activism-inclined students to protest and another 5/10 aren’t involved in planning but choose to stay home to show support, what’s the story? If you conclude that the school’s teachers made children pawns in a guerrilla war against families and the economic imperatives of a healthy society, you’re wrong. That privileges a few shards of the mosaic and coats it in a disingenuous filter. Are these students villains? Is my Oakland teacher friend harming them for wanting to support them? Is a national crisis not a cornucopia of teachable moments? Does helping students articulate positions and learn to advocate for what they believe is right and fair count as teaching?
Many of the loudest participants in The (online) Narrative of Covidschooling are more dedicated to the rekindling and amplification of favored storylines than what’s actually happening in schools. These coaches, advocates, agitators, developers, and self-styled visionaries. Even real journalists too often aren’t unwilling to write the nut graf before they’ve done the reporting. It feels distant and dreamy and odd, so disconnected from the daily experience I know, one that I know for sure many other teachers know: essentially, students once more flooding into classrooms as they did two years ago, challenged by academic expectations and the bubbling cauldron of feelings that have always stymied students, from my daughter, age 6, to the high school seniors who’ve practically turned the newly constructed Wellness Center into their lounge. The teens are understandably shakier with deadlines and class participation, as I’ve written about before. They are less mature. They wear masks. Otherwise, new year, same shit, just more grueling.
I try to remind myself that the reach of these voices is somewhat illusionary, puffed up to exaggerated proportions in magazines and on social media. Someone with tens of thousands of Twitter followers appears to control a narrative about Covidschooling but, as they post and aggregate, millions of parents and teachers and principals and counselors and administrators have no clue who they are. The people who do are hate-skimming in order to participate — directing their ire in comment form at the posters or piling onto the entities that the posters assail. Chait, who has a big and mediocre reach, imagines some new “American carnage” afflicting kids that just doesn’t line up with the reality. The carnage is real, but it’s not new and it definitely wasn’t born in sad bedrooms when students couldn’t go to school for a while. When a data journalist and reporter get into a public post-spat over various reports on the efficacy of different mask types in school settings, you know that it doesn’t matter either way, because kids don’t finish their vaccine series, pile into cars unmasked on the weekends, eat unmasked in hallways even though they’re not supposed to, and walk around with their noses hanging out. It doesn’t matter what mask a kid wears if they have it hanging off their face. It’s like poking a hole in a condom and then wondering if the spermicidal jelly will do the trick. You read this stuff and you feel like you’re hallucinating. And then you laugh.
For their short stories inspired by There There — texts that are supposed to teach readers about the real lived experiences of teens — sometimes my students kick these pretty dull day-in-a-life Meursault-on-a-Sunday-lite vibes. The narrator wakes up, has a breakfast (described in excessive detail), goes to school, feels tired, sees friends, considers leaving early, does or doesn’t, plays on their phone, does homework, plays on their phone, goes to sleep, and still feels tired. They are definitely telling the truth through fiction! Life is often pretty dull. The story usually loses intensity about halfway through, just like in a real day. They’re excited to describe the breakfast, to practice a writing strategy we went over, but then they’re like, damn, that description of a muffin was a whole paragraph — I gotta get through the rest of this shit in another half-page!
I acknowledge that this approach both reflects lived experience — the sense that each heavily scheduled day is a hazy procession through a series of events steadily diminishing in value, increasingly tugged at by nagging exhaustion — and a fittingly dull storytelling choice. I know it well! I once drafted about twenty chapters of a charter school memoir that I pitched (ha ha) as Heart of Darkness meets Thrown meets Grit in Inglewood. An agent told me that the first chapter didn’t grab the reader’s attention enough, that structurally, it needed to pop sooner or something (don’t worry; I actually edited it, unlike these newsletters). I was like, the highlight of the 15-hour orientation with teary testimonials by cultist colleagues and sudden hearty drinking and potential late-night adultery involving administrators was the morning bagel; that’s why I spent two pages describing it.
I’ve shelved that project.
The best stories students produce are tiny, finely wrought snapshots, when they elect to capture just one scene or a series of vignettes, evoking larger realities but avoiding the temptation to let what is essentially microfiction sweep across many hours, even days. I share “Tyler” (written by a 2020 grad) as a model. It’s five minutes of class, with a comfortably unaware teacher haranguing a concussed and frazzled student who can’t stay awake. The kid’s parents just split up, and the concussion is from a bike accident sustained the night before, as he frantically pedaled away from the argument roiling his home. When the narrator finally explodes at the teacher, she cuts off communication and writes a referral. She notices only the symptoms of what’s ailing him and has no interest in the cause, the real story. A teen’s life, the context, lurks unseen below the surface. I also share “Abby” (by another 2020 grad), in which two girls who hate one another nonetheless hang out in the bathroom during class, apply lipstick, vape aimlessly, and talk shit about teachers. The narrator admits she does homework compulsively but with the same glazed detachment with which she reaches for the Juul.
Sometimes, the plots are quite contrived, as if they’re concocted with more than one eye on existing texts. I find this fascinating too. Even when they’re capably written they can read like much less terrifying episodes of Euphoria in miniature. I’ve read more than a few that feel reminiscent of “Ask Me if I Care,” which, of course, they liked when I had them read it (see what I’ve written about teaching A Visit From the Goon Squad). It’s almost, just almost, like they superimpose the features of their world — different drugs, different hangout spots, different cliques, different standards for appearance, same desire for belonging — onto Jocelyn’s narrative cadence. Or maybe it’s that Jocelyn’s cadence is timeless and comfortable, her self-destructive friend Rhea something of an ancestor of Rue, the protagonist of Euphoria. Sometimes students straight-up name a narrator after a character from a show, comic, or movie, like, in one instance, Ramona Flowers from Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, which I first watched eight years ago — a DVD loaned by a student. The tell-truth-through-fiction maxim is tough to pull off when it’s hard to psychologically separate what they personally know about their real teenage lives from the stories they’ve been told about themselves, the cracked mirrors or whatever that have been held up.
A few of them indulge in clear fantasies. Years ago, I had a student write a story for a similar project about rescuing a manic pixie mutant-girl-squirrel from bullies. This one was supposed to be nonfiction, believe it or not. I wish I still had it. There was a distressing romantic element. I could not believe what I was reading. Daisy, if you’re there, do you remember this?
You can imagine students going too far with this project. Peddling stereotypes, appropriating identities, butchering cultures, being salacious — things getting mighty problematic really fast.
With rare exceptions, students don’t do this. The vast majority just write as themselves, usually using a pseudonym to maintain anonymity with the public audience. They embrace the armor of autofiction. Yet students also chronicle tortured relationships they may not have had. Students who follow classroom rules recount reckless driving exploits. Their narrators don’t have to be participants though, just observers, tellers of their “truths.”
It’s hard to know if content has a ton to do with the vision. But the vision is what’s usually most interesting.
Maybe they’re telling me truths that lurk below the surface, truths I don’t want to accept. Maybe they’re telling me what they think I expect. Maybe they’re trying on a costume to see if it fits, to see if the role is one they want to play. Sometimes, I get the sense they’re mostly asking me if I care. Which I do.
In the end, their approach doesn’t matter. What I love about the project is that it’s always illuminating. For all the themes and motifs that bob to the surface again and again, the product is complicated, confusing, messy, moving, authentic and artificial — which suits a mosaic made by many artists instead of a single virtuoso. There’s no way for it to go wrong, no way for it not to genuinely matter — as both a process and a document, a story about how people decide to understand and tell stories.