How The School System Taught Me To Have Hard Hope

When I first read How School Taught Me I was Poor by Jeff Sapp, my cynical nature judged the author for his victim mentality. We are adults. We should be beyond our childhood traumas. But I related to the article, his writing triggering my own memories of hand-me-down corduroys from my sisters which were worn out in the knees. I tried to remember when I shopped for my first pair of new pants, but I couldn’t. I only remembered the pair of Easter pants my mother wanted me to wear which made me look and feel like a boy when I was already mistaken as a boy due to my pixie short hair.

In elementary school, the popular girls in fourth grade, who I thought were my friends, told me how they had discussed taking me into the bathroom and forcing me to strip like the scene in Judy Blume’s Blubber. Some higher force never had them actually carry out their plan, they just told me about it.

My mother made brownies for some fundraiser and wrapped them in tin foil. When she sent me to school with them, I was too embarrassed to give them to my teacher because they weren’t in plastic wrap like the other kid’s mothers used. I wanted to fit in. I came home with all the brownies, lying to my mother, saying the teacher didn’t accept them.

In junior high, my mom took me shopping. I tried on a pair of designer jeans which I really wanted, but couldn’t reconcile the cost.

Now that I am a professional, I can afford to buy my own new clothes. Diane told me that she and Carole wanted to submit my name for the show “What Not to Wear.” When she told me laughing, I felt that same teasing of the bullying chanting of other children as I approached the morning line in elementary school. Michele, my sister’s friend, yelled, “Leave her alone.” On “What Not to Wear,” they buy you a new wardrobe, but you have to throw out all your clothes. I tried to explain to Diane that I had spent many years and a lot of money shopping for my wardrobe through Victoria’s Secret catalogue. Just last year, I was able to bring myself to buy a pair of corduroys, after never wanting to wear them after childhood. A colleague once called me, “the patron Saint of the misfits.” Perhaps if you have never been an outcast, you just don’t know what it is like not to fit in.

Someone once said that they thought I would have been a very cute little kid. I didn’t show them my first grade picture with the lump in my hair. There was a picture of me in The Saginaw News making a valentine for Valentine’s Day. When my sister threw out all my childhood memories which were stored in a box under the bed of the room I grew up in, I mourned losing that picture, like I mourned losing all the good memories of a childhood I wanted to honor within a family who didn’t.

In the book, Wall of Fame by Jonathan Freedman, I read aloud the quote, “But as the gap between rich and poor widened in the 1990s, I spiraled downward into despair about the future of America’s children.” The chapter is called Hard Hope. It is so hard for me to have hope. A ninth grade student asked me, “Do you have children?” I told her that the man I had been involved with for many years had been through chemo and radiation for Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. “What’s that?” she asked. “Cancer,” I said.

I haven’t written with my students for quite some time. The demands of the profession have not given me space as a creative writer. “Everybody blamed everybody else: Administrators blamed teachers, teachers blamed students, students blamed families, families blamed the system, the system blamed society, society blamed race, race blamed history, history blamed human nature….Nobody accepted responsibility.” (Freedman, 4) When I saw Angie’s blog from 2009-2012, I decided to keep writing with my students. Through hard hope, maybe we can all heal.