Should I go back to my ruined city, and help to rebuild it, or should I stay somewhere safe and try to move on? This painful dilemma was the question I faced in December 2005, when schools began to reopen after Hurricane Katrina. I made the choice to go back, and to teach some of the first high school students making their difficult way back to the city from wherever they had fled. It was an exhausting and stressful experience, but one that taught me so much—about resilience, innovation, and what even teenagers will put up with for the love of their home city. I arrived at O. Perry Walker High School on January 6, 2006—a Friday. I had never seen the school before. I was hired on the spot, spent the rest of the day cleaning out m classroom
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We had few books, so we did a lot of writing. My sophomores wrote long memoirs about their neighborhoods before the storm. In New Orleans, your neighborhood IS your identity, to a large extent: its close-knit families, its colorful rituals such as second-line parades, block parties, and crawfish boils were the cherished memories of these students. They also wrote about their storm experiences. Some were trapped on rooftops, others waded through water to the dark, scary shelter of the Superdome, some had managed to evacuate and found themselves in strange and unwelcoming new places. My seniors tried to figure out their next steps: were they technically seniors if they had lost a semester? Clarity was hard to find. But one of the greatest honors of my life was helping the two valedictorians—Thomas and Prince—write their graduation speeches. Never have there been so few dry eyes in an auditorium as there were for those first surviving seniors. I found myself challenged as a teacher, during this time, in ways that stretched me beyond what I thought I knew about teaching or about teenagers. Many of the things I tried were absolute failures; many days some students were unable or unwilling to try. But the lessons I learned have stayed with me. I learned that you should never hold a grudge from one day to another, because you never know what someone is going through. Therefore you can’t give up on your students, because tomorrow they may be in a whole new frame
We had few books, so we did a lot of writing. My sophomores wrote long memoirs about their neighborhoods before the storm. In New Orleans, your neighborhood IS your identity, to a large extent: its close-knit families, its colorful rituals such as second-line parades, block parties, and crawfish boils were the cherished memories of these students. They also wrote about their storm experiences. Some were trapped on rooftops, others waded through water to the dark, scary shelter of the Superdome, some had managed to evacuate and found themselves in strange and unwelcoming new places. My seniors tried to figure out their next steps: were they technically seniors if they had lost a semester? Clarity was hard to find. But one of the greatest honors of my life was helping the two valedictorians—Thomas and Prince—write their graduation speeches. Never have there been so few dry eyes in an auditorium as there were for those first surviving seniors. I found myself challenged as a teacher, during this time, in ways that stretched me beyond what I thought I knew about teaching or about teenagers. Many of the things I tried were absolute failures; many days some students were unable or unwilling to try. But the lessons I learned have stayed with me. I learned that you should never hold a grudge from one day to another, because you never know what someone is going through. Therefore you can’t give up on your students, because tomorrow they may be in a whole new frame