My favorite part of “We Are Marshall” is when Red and Coach Lengyel are sitting in a church, and Red is absolutely distraught.
They’ve just seen how bad the team actually is, and Red is trying to figure out how he fits into all of the chaos. How does he feel about even having a team after the tragic plane crash that took 75 members of the Thundering Herd family?
As Red storms out of practice prior to going to the chapel, he looks at Jack and says “we aren’t honoring them, Jack. We are disgracing them.”
He believes that by fielding a team (basically guaranteed to lose) the entire football staff, as well as the university, is dishonoring their fallen brothers, sisters, sons, and family.
That’s a lot to hear, a lot to try to make sense of, and even more to try to connect to my own life.
I never knew what it meant to really question whether or not you’re actually helping another human, or if you’re hurting them. Until now.
This weekend, a few of my friends and I met in Asheville, North Carolina. 3 of us Kentuckians, 3 Eastern North Carolinians. We all met two a couple summers ago while we were preparing to teach for the very first time. I guess technically, Asheville is a brand new tradition, as we met in the Mountains last year, about this same time.
My friends are wonderful – in fact, last year I wrote a blog mentioning the wonderful things they were and are doing in their own classrooms, and how much they each inspire and encourage me.
They are still wonderful, and are all still impacting students. But there is something very different this year. Something that’s very difficult to put your finger on. Blink and you might miss it.
Maybe we are just exhausted. Maybe we are going to teach for 25 more years.
Or maybe we are realizing just how difficult this job is. Maybe we are fully grasping what it will have to look like to recognize full educational equality in the United States. Maybe our brains are bogged down with all the reasons why nothing will ever work. Maybe we are already bitter, hardened by a raw truth: there will never be one solution, and there are never any blanketed, foolproof answers. Maybe we are all just wasting our time.
Yesterday, I spoke with one of my friends who emphasized how much he still loved his kids and loved the population he gets to work with. He also, however, was unafraid to admit how much he doesn’t love the administration at his school. I can empathize, as I believe there are always structures and policies that prevent me from doing my job to the fullest extent. For example, if I really consider what it would look like to hold my students to high expectations, I would have to grade accordingly. Some of my students would, and have, failed my class, and it is or will be because they needed more time in 9th grade English.
There’s another factor at play. Social Promotion has, in my opinion, devastated rural education. It hurt students at the high school I attended, and it continues to rear it’s ugly face at the high school where I now teach. I can’t believe what some of my students present as a final draft. I can’t find one piece of punctuation, nor can I find capitalization. Don’t even ask about the actual content. Disjointed, discombobulated, disgraceful. How could we, as educators, do this to children? How could we simply pass them on, year after year, when they perform at a 5th grade level?
But then again, how could we not? Drop out rates for Appalachian students are higher than more affluent regions of the country (my mind is going a million miles an hour right now, or I would throw in a statistic). “What if we keep failing them, and then they just give up.”
Last week, my principal reminded me that I “need to give them hope.”
“What about the false hope that we give students,” I asked with tears in my eyes. “I can’t give them second and third and fourth chances to do something as simple as turn in a sheet of homework. I won’t.”
In that moment, looking at my Principal – my boss – and realizing how much I believe in what I said, I felt something inside me crack open. I am still trying to grapple with what I felt in that moment, and over a week later, I’m still trying to answer the million questions I have in my head.
The number one question I’m trying to reckon with is a question of love. What is love, and how do we truly show love? At what point are we enablers, hell bent on proving love through only kindness and positive feedback? I would consider myself a fixer, but I’ve always believed that you can only fix people by showing them kindness. But isn’t it unkind to tell a child the world is theirs, offer them thousands of opportunities, remind them of their potential, and then rip the rug of those promises out from under their second-chance-loving, re-tested, socially-promoted feet?
“We aren’t honoring them, Jack. We are disgracing them.”
Here I sit, home from Asheville, working on my Vision. In that vision, I’m supposed to figure out what I want my class, and all it’s moving parts, to mean for my students – 5, 10, 15 years down the road. Imagine having 137 students to think about, care for, and worry about. I can’t imagine what I want my own life to look like 5 years down the road, much less each individual student’s life.
And yet.
I see one student, who is 100% positive school isn’t for him. He’s working as a mechanic in Inez. Work is steady, but not busy, because, unfortunately, the area has only continued to lose families due to mine closings. I see my student changing the oil on one car, and I see one man approach the garage, looking burdened and distracted.
“How can I help you,” says my student, clearly not having caught on to this man’s despair, staring into the belly of the car in front of him.
“Well…you see… I just found out I got laid off at the mines, and wouldn’t you know it, my back tire just blew out a little ways up the road. Listen, I know you don’t know me, but could you possibly come help me change the tire? If not, I get it, but I was just kinda hoping…”
In that moment, I imagine my student remembering my class. He doesn’t know why, but he remembers some quote about “walking in someone else’s skin,” and something about sympathy. Or was it empathy? He has an oil change to finish before his customer gets off work, but he finds himself nodding his head. He grabs the wrenches and the car jack, smiles lightly, and heads out of the garage.
“I’m sorry to hear about your job. Let’s do something about that tire.”
They both walk off, not really understanding why it is we do the things we do, as humans, to show each other kindness.
This snapshot moment I imagine for my student is worth all of these relentless questions of love and value and disgrace and honor. They are unanswerable – quite literally – but never seem to leave me alone. So, what is love? Love is finding the better parts of living, showing kindness and compassion, all the while realizing that some things in life aren’t going to be flawless, and you handle those things with grace, too. But what does that mean day to day? Who knows. My students and I don’t always love fully – it’s often messy, blurred with lines of fading and shifting complexities.
I am reminded tonight of another moment in “We Are Marshall.” It is the moment at the cemetery where Coach Lengyel is trying to remind the players of their purpose. He reminds them that technically, the score doesn’t matter at the end of the game. What matters, instead, is remembering those you play for. Honoring them, the players and family lost in the plane crash, is as simple as trying their very best.
Coach Lengyel says, “If you do that, if you play like that, we cannot lose. We may be behind on the scoreboard at the end of the game, but we cannot lose.”
I feel like I’m disgracing my students, sometimes, not knowing how to do this thing called love. Not knowing which ways I can help without hurting. Not knowing when I should be firm in my expectations, while still showing compassion. After a very exhausting first quarter, a weekend getaway, and some imagining, however, I am sure that I agree most with Coach Lengyel in his pre-game speech. I’ll walk into the classroom tomorrow, and I will try to be tough and effective, while still trying to love each student. I may be behind – on data submissions or email reminders – but if I try, and I love, then I cannot lose. If I remember whom I’m playing for, I won’t disgrace them. Hopefully, they’ll show others kindness, too, and in that, we cannot lose.
haliewanders 