Lessons in Humility From Teaching in the Mojave Desert

During your first year of teaching, a plague of grasshoppers invades the Mojave Desert. When you walk from the mobile home classroom where you teach an unruly crew of seventh grade language arts students and cross the black tarmac of the basketball courts, dead grasshoppers crunch under your loafers. You watch in dismay as one of the boys swallows a live grasshopper whole on a dare from classmates. This is not the worst thing that happens that year.

Some of your students have grown up poor, so the lunch the district provides may be the only square meal they get all day. That first year, a black widow spider creeps from the dirty collar of one boy’s shirt and crouches there, fat and poisonous, near the pulse in his throat. You freeze, but the girl behind him smashes the spider with her bare hands. When you use a Kleenex to pluck the crushed corpse from the shag carpet, the boy looks at it, shrugs, and goes back to his grammar book. Neither child comments on the matter. That’s not the worst thing, either.

In this district, a tracking system insures all the best students go next door to the experienced teacher and the rest come to you. The students know this. They call themselves your “castaways” on good days, and on bad days they set thumb tacks on your chair when you’re not looking, but some teachers have it worse. You’re there in the staff lunchroom when the band director has a nervous breakdown. Another day you finally get up the nerve to ask that one teacher, a former army drill instructor, where the jagged scar running down her cheek comes from. “Brown recluse spider bit me,” she says, “down at Camp Shelby, Mississippi.”

One of these kids is named Michael. You learn early on that his father died, and you understand why he looks up to you, so you want to be a kindly presence for him, the older brother he doesn’t have. But when his mom’s newest boyfriend is murdered right before his eyes, right on the front lawn, Michael changes. He goes from being one of your top students to one of your worst tormentors. Daily you kick him out of the classroom, until one day he just stops coming. The special education advisor counsels you: “You can’t save them,” she says, “sometimes you just have to let them fall.” Maybe this is the worst thing, you think, the scene they don’t show you in the bogus inspirational movie where the teacher saves everyone.

Somehow you make it to summer break and you’re pretty sure you’re going to quit before the second year starts. You spend weeks with cousins who live near the beach and you take up bodysurfing. You bleach the tips of your hair and grow a goatee. It’s the 90’s, dude. Before you can quit the second year is already starting and you’re in the thick of it, but something is different now. You have bleached tips and you surf. Without any planning on your part you have become the cool, young teacher, a reputation you don’t deserve. You’re teaching all the same stuff, but you teach it with confidence now. Listen, you hated the desert when you lived here as a student long ago and your dad was a pilot at George AFB. You hated middle school, the worst time in your life, and now you teach in a middle school in the middle of the Mojave Desert. But you know what? You love the stories. You love the words. You love the poems and the songs that give meaning to our struggles. Some of that love comes through in the fumbling way you teach. Plus, that hair, dude. It’s really hard to hate someone with nice hair.

The special education advisor counsels you: “You can’t save them,” she says, “sometimes you just have to let them fall.”