front page - editorial archives  - search - community

Class Notes
	Mourning a great teacher's loss (Published April 18, 2005) By MATT WENNERSTEN

How do you mourn someone you barely know?

So much changes in a year, so many things transformed, so much passed from one way to another. Walking home one evening last week, I saw a bunch of kids hanging out on the corner by the school. As I moved through them, I realized this was a gang, that one of the girls was my student, a girl who dropped out. I said hello to her, and she, surprised, quickly said hello and looked away, her gang pose broken, then restored.

Will she be lost forever, a high school dropout, wrapped up in gang colors, mirror sunglasses; just a bunch of kids posturing on the sidewalk, but with denim jeans so tight they're sprayed on, or baggy pants holding machetes, or in apartments on 14th street where kids hang out at "skipping parties," or locked up, or dead? Or will she come in from the urban wilderness in only a short while, get her G.E.D., move on with her life?

In many ways, I've lost her – something heavy was going down that Wednesday. There was no good reason for 10 kids to be waiting at 8 p.m. by the Columbia Heights Metro with hands in jackets on a warm night. I didn't stick around.

As I walked to the police station to ask the cops what's up, I thought about my colleague Ann Woodson. Ms. Woodson died April 13 in the hospital, never emerging from the coma caused last week by an aneurysm, a burst blood vessel in her brain. The kids sometimes called her "Ms. Chemistry" or "the Chemistry lady," a pugnacious, barely 5-foot ball of fire who taught chemistry and advanced placement chemistry, ran the National Honor Society chapter and loved her kids fiercely. Ms. Woodson started her teaching career at a university, but moved down to high school in her late 50s because she saw a need.

On Thursday, the entire school wore green in her honor, a tip of the hat to her Irishness, a spontaneous tribute organized by the kids on her behalf. The kids filled six composition books and a corridor of posters with tributes to her. "In Loving Memory" in 6-inch letters. There was love and grief in equal measure, collective astonishment and dismay throughout the school. In many ways the students were smarter than the teachers, who kept on with standardized test prep, trying to make sure that we made "adequate yearly progress," doggedly following lesson plans and drills as the National Honor Society members came around seeking donations for flowers and a memorial.

Sometimes I think in teaching that nothing is wasted, that even when you completely bomb in the classroom, the kids get something out of it, if only that even adults make mistakes. That's why it hurts so much when kids cut class, or drop out, or transfer to another school where they may or may not catch hold and learn. It's hard to learn when you're not around. But there is a certain acceptance of loss and change, that sometimes, a kid won't make it and it's not because of something you did or didn't do.

As a teacher, you see a lot of kids float through your classroom – after a few years, it's easy to lose track of who went where. Graduation takes the lucky few off to greener pastures. You have to develop a certain fatalism when teaching or else you go crazy. There is always more you could do, yet every day you have to make a choice that's inherently immoral: how hard to try, where to draw your personal line on what you will do, as opposed to what you could do, or (hopefully not) should do.

Now that I've been teaching a few years, I've seen good teaching, sometimes even in my own classroom, and I often know what to do to solve classroom problems, even if I don't always do it. I've seen Ann Woodson teach. I know she was a good teacher. She knew how to run a classroom. She pushed her kids properly, and she got great results out of them.

My first year at Bell, I taught in Ann Woodson's classroom during second period. We don't have enough space at Bell for everyone to have a classroom, and rookies "float" around the building using other teachers' classrooms during their planning periods. Her classroom was meticulously organized, a quintessential science lab – sinks, lab tables, cabinets of chemicals, equipment in racks along the wall. I had a rambunctious class of ninth graders in Algebra I, and little classroom management skill. Despite my best efforts, there were days when my kids wrecked the place. In hindsight, I never made an effort to reach out to Ms. Woodson. Sometimes I apologized for the craziness I brought in, and I always made sure to erase the top of the board where tall me wrote and that short she couldn't reach, but I can't say that I really knew her beyond colleague and acquaintance.

A question being asked among the staff: Is school a place where you could get to know people well? There were times when Ann got riled up, like when the Boston Red Sox won the World Series, but how well did anyone know her? As she dies, does she become like my student Jessica, wandering other streets, a new mode of being, a shadow in the old neighborhood, forever lost to our high school? I can't imagine Ms. Woodson without direction or purpose, or trapped in a limbo. Always determined, I'm sure she blazed a path straight up to heaven, legs churning. I see her in jeans and the Birkenstock sandals she wore on Fridays. I wish her well on the trip.

With sympathy to the Woodson family, and in loving memory.

***

Wennersten teaches mathematics at Bell Multicultural High School in Columbia Heights and a graduate of the D.C. Teaching Fellows program (http://www.dcteachingfellows.org). Please send stories, comments or questions to mwenners@yahoo.com.

Copyright 2005 The Common Denominator