For the billionth time, one of her customers exclaimed “Wow, you’re brave!” when Gina Coggio told her she teaches New Haven public school kids. That prompted an early-autumn moment of clarity for the Independent’s teacher-by-day, waitress-by-night diarist.
Monday, Sept. 26, 2005
I think the best feeling all year is the first morning I wake up and know I can’t go outside without a sweater. I look forward to the crispness of fall days. In Vermont, I used to feel this kind of day a lot earlier in the year than here in New Haven. The beginning of the school year up north signaled jacket weather. It meant putting on the flannel sheets; it meant waking up in the pitch black and coming home in the pitch black.
Here in New Haven, I can still get away with wearing flip-flops and T‑shirts well into September. I sleep with just a blanket, and just this morning I turned off my A/C for the season. I love fall. I like the clarity of the air in the fall. Clarity is a good thing. I had a moment of clarity this weekend, but it was a moment having nothing to do with the season.
I worked at the restaurant all weekend — ”-Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights. On Sunday, I stopped off at a table to check how their meal was. We started talking about what we do for a living. I told them that I teach, and the woman told me that she, too, was a teacher. The couple was up from Maryland because their daughter was looking at Yale.
As this conversation typically goes, people will ask what I teach and where I teach. I reply, “I teach 9th grade literature and 10th grade humanities.” When I tell them I teach in the New Haven public school system, their eyebrows raise. I get comments like, “Wow, you’re brave.” Or “That’s really something.” Or, “Little you? You teach high school? Those kids must be terrible to you!”
I’m not lying. This is the impression of New Haven kids: They are bad.
I don’t know how to defend this impression, so mostly I say, “Well, they’re teenagers.”
I want to challenge these people’s ideas of New Haven students. “Where are you getting this information from?” I want to ask. “What have your experiences been to make you think this?” “Have you formed your opinion from seeing small groups of young people, who incidentally have black and brown skin, gathered together walking on the sidewalks, sometimes late into the night?”
Youth scares people. I think the idea of so much energy in so many young bodies is intimidating, and I admit at times I feel uneasy around these young people whose unpredictable emotions so often dictate their actions. But it doesn’t mean they’re bad. And it certainly doesn’t mean that all New Haven kids are bad.
Jackson, my 9th grade student who wrote me the Roses are Red poem, turned himself into the cops last week for having committed a crime last summer. He’ll be gone from school for either two weeks or two months. No one yet knows. And today, one of my former students was arrested in school, or so goes the rumor. Both of these students have made bad choices. It does not mean they are bad kids. They are teenagers; teenagers are known to make bad choices. I made plenty of them. And I learned from my bad choices.
So will my two students.
Remembering that we have all been victim to our own terrible choices, I know my students have made choices that they will have to both live with and learn from. I am confident they will pull it together enough to come out (relatively) clean in the end. But I am afraid that no matter what struggles my students — ”or other New Haven students for that matter-”-have to go through to overcome their bad choices, the community-at-large will not allow them to live a life label-free. Whether that label is “teenage parent,” “drug dealer,” “thief,” or even as general as “bad,” I’m afraid the community’s opinions debilitate young people in this city. We have an opinion about New Haven youth that prevents these young people from having access to the same opportunities and respect we readily grant to people outside of this (the young, black or brown, “urban”) demographic.
We hear bad things all the time about the youth of New Haven. Why is there no outlet for the amazing things our children do? And not just the youngest children, who naturally seem to draw most of our attention because they are harmless.
I advocate that more positive attention be paid to high school students in New Haven. If that is the population most of the community seems to fear, why not debunk stereotypes and myths associated with that same population? Why not tell it like it really is instead of relying on fear and paralysis to shape our opinions?
So as I stood in front of the table and heard for the billionth time, “Wow, you’re brave!” I smiled and reassured the woman I was glad to be teaching in New Haven. I told her I didn’t think I could work in a suburban district, a Greenwich or a West Hartford. I told her that while I appreciated the different struggles of Greenwich or West Hartford students and families, I am just naturally moved to work with students here in this very segregated city of New Haven. The woman replied, “Yeah, but you should try a Greenwich or West Hartford. Because then you’ll really appreciate what you’ve been working with.”
I didn’t want to tell her that I already appreciate who I’m working with. I didn’t want to tell her that there are no other students I’d rather work with than the ones who sit in my classroom every day — -“the ones who give me migraines from noise and give me stomach aches from stress and give me sore throats from talking. I didn’t want to tell her that no other students make me laugh harder, and make me stand by my word stronger, and make me play fair more consistently, and make me keep my promises more firmly than ever in my life than the students who sit in my classroom every day. I didn’t want her to know how many Sunday nights I’ve convinced myself I didn’t want to be a teacher only to be met with hugs on Monday mornings by the students I can’t wait to see get their diplomas next year.
So I smiled, and her husband told me that my students are lucky to have me as their teacher. “You have no idea,” I wanted to say, but didn’t. “It’s the other way around.”