Photo from the Washington Post
Each hour, the news of the aftermath of the more-than-mile wide tornado that hit Oklahoma City and its suburbs on Monday afternoon seems to worsen. I am especially thinking about the kids and teachers at Plaza Towers Elementary School and Briarwood Elementary School. The reports I have read tell me that many children were trapped under the rubble at Plaza, well after rescue workers had cut through fallen beams on Monday evening. At Briarwood, cars were thrown through the school and the roof was torn off. I can’t help but think about those kids and their teachers during those moments that this twister came right through their schools.
I grew up in Toledo, Ohio and every year, all the way up into high school, we had tornado drills as soon as the schoolyear started. I heard the city’s tornado sirens growing up in Ohio many, many times. When that rather smallish tornado hit Brooklyn years back, I knew exactly what was going on when the wind picked up and it turned pitch black instantaneously. Most of my neighbors, born and raised in New York, had no idea what had happened as we watched the overturned semi-trucks on the bridge within our view. As a child in Ohio, we were taught how to cover our heads and how to squat under our desks. In the upper levels of my high school, we came to the lowest floor possible and covered ourselves in hallways. Despite all that training (I can only remember a tornado hitting nearby once, not touching us), I would not have been prepared. In elementary school, I used the moment under my desk to make glue fingernails, my favorite pastime when the teacher was not looking (which was often). In high school, I used the drills as a time to have a gossip session with my girlfriend sitting next to me as we delighted in NOT being in class. No tornado drill can prepare you for what might come when that pitch blackness hits you from nowhere and the winds sound like a series of semi-trucks rolling on top of your head. You need storm shelters for that (the tax breaks that oil companies in Oklahoma get could alone pay for such shelters.) That teachers and students, young children at that, survived amazes me. My heart and thoughts go out to them this week!
As I read these teachers’ collaborative research, watched their protests, and followed their blog, I couldn’t help but think of a Latino high school teacher who I met at 4Cs (Conference on College Composition and Communication) a few years back, himself an educational activist and researcher. He had come to 4Cs to learn new radical literacy approaches for high school work with his predominantly Latin@ students but instead was dismayed by how irrelevant almost everything he heard was to any critical awareness of race and the experiences of students of color in schools today. It was the BEST conversation I have ever had at 4Cs and, perhaps, the most engaging. When I think of him and these teachers at Garfield, I think about how far, far behind we are, as compositionists, in terms of educational activism for communities of color. I am often surprised by how many compositionists think they are doing something so much more advanced than what happens in high schools with their traditionalist notions of discourse and college curricular content. I have never met a person who moves towards this self-congratulatory gesture who I thought actually deserved the praise they were bestowing on themselves. I am grateful for the high school teachers like the ones being chronicled here. They remind me of what is possible beyond the social limits of composition studies.
The third Stole of Gratitude I purchased is for my fiancé, Stefanie Douglas. We have been together for almost 8 years, I’m pretty sure that’s considered being legally married in a number of different Commonwealth states. We also share the responsibility of raising our extraordinary daughter Kaylee together. I haven’t shared this story too often, but I will share it with all of you now. Stefanie was a returning student and became pregnant with our daughter while she was still in school. Once Kaylee was born in June, Stefanie still had to complete one last semester to fulfill her degree requirements. So we spent the summer together as a family. And then the time came in late August where Stefanie had to return to school – to actually complete a semester of student teaching. So Stefanie would go to student teaching in Bensalem, PA from Monday to Friday. Then on Friday, she would get in her car and drive up to New Jersey to spend the weekend with me and Kaylee, who was an infant at the time. And then on either Sunday night or early Monday morning, Stefanie would drive back to Bensalem, and continue through a week of student teaching. Now many people said “Todd, you’re an amazing father – you’re taking care of Kaylee by yourself during the week.” But my response to that is Stefanie is even more of amazing mother. Because to this day, I still do not know how she was able to muster enough mental and emotional dexterity to leave her newborn daughter. And mind you, there were tears and crying and all sorts of emotion that can ONLY be explained by the saying “there is NO greater love than that of a mother for her child.” But I never told Stefanie how much I admired her, how much she was my hero and role model for being able to make it through those darkest of times. I never told Stefanie about the times me and Kaylee cried when she wasn’t looking. I never told her about how tough it was for us, that she wasn’t alone. But what I learned from her in that moment is that you must be willing to make sacrifices for a greater good, regardless of what the cost may be. So what’s almost two years of collecting data at the most obscure of places in the most unorthodox and inconvenient times? What’s 6 or so months of 2-4 hours of sleep nightly to finish a dissertation? What’s a year of teaching a 5-5 course load at 3 different schools? After what Stefanie did for our daughter’s greater good, I felt empowered to be able to do just about anything. We always wanted Kaylee to understand that she stands on the shoulders of those who came before her, and that she is cut from a cloth so exquisite that people WILL be mad at her later in life. But if there is one thing Kaylee will never be able to do is say that she CAN’T do something. After all, if mommy was able to leave you during the week to finish school, you can do ANYTHING. Things might be hard, they might be difficult – you may not fully understand HOW to do something…but never will she be able to say she CAN’T do it. Because sacrifices have been made for her greater good, so that she could absolutely do it, without any question whatsoever.
I started listening to Phyllis Hyman back in high school, the time when her album, 
I woke up at 4am to prepare for the day’s work, a day that will have me on campus until at least 9-10pm (and I am just not someone who can handle this 3 hours of sleep per night thing!). Since arriving to work at 8:30, the only moments of real joy that I imagine that I will have are when my undergraduate students stop by to say hello and pick up their anthologies. At 4am, that’s how I knew this day would be and for some reason, I just wanted to hear Phyllis Hyman’s voice, as if I thought she could get me through and would understand. I suppose I am reaching the end of this set of growing pains as a post-tenure professor pushing myself to put myself in situations where I am only doing the kind of work I truly believe in. Before tenure, it was all about that get-that-tenure-grind, now it’s more about me …and what and who can intellectually, politically, and socially sustain me. That said, I still needed to get through this day, a day that won’t actually approximate that previous sentence.