It’s been a while, lots of drafts started and stopped. Student teaching, recent home ownership, and tying up loose ends for graduation have kept me busy. Excuses, excuses. It seems I traffic in them as often as I hear them from my own students. Nonetheless, my most recent reflections follow:

A moment ago the wall I was leaning on began to flex and undulate. In the hallway behind me, a fight was underway. Students filing into my cooperating teacher’s AP English class announced the fight, and as I got up to assist, one stopped me, explaining quietly, “they got it.”

It was this quietude that I found remarkable. I watched as some of the other students came in, and while some were clearly pumped up from the commotion, even more came in slowly, wearily. I don’t pretend to see into their psyches, but from my seat in the corner of the room I saw something akin to shame, as if the weight of their peers’ fights somehow rests upon their shoulders.

Maybe that makes sense. These kids have worked so hard, have taken on extra responsibilities, and have made school their top priority. This despite the odds that are stacked squarely against these mostly urban students who are mostly of color. (One student lives forty miles north of here, but it is important to his family that he attend this school. Another student is white.) For their peers to succumb to the low expectations that society has placed upon all of them has got to be a disappointment. Perhaps more to the point, when their peers act crazy, it makes these kids that are trying so grasp what must seem more and more like a golden ring.

Anyway, I don’t teach the A.P. kids, as I haven’t had the training, but these are the kids who inspire me. I still wrestle with how I do or don’t feel about this kind of academic tracking, and I still love my other students (who also inspire me), but there is something uniquely rewarding and inspiring about spending time amidst this fifth hour class.