“Ms. Smith, I think you are resilient,” my student Antonia said, with a lilt in her voice that indicated to me she was just fully realizing the definition of resilience as she put this thought into words. “You just moved to a new country, and you don’t have any family here. That is so scary. But you…you…”
Her eyes darted around the circle. “Parece?” she whispered. “Seem,” a boy across the circle quickly responded.
“You seem fine,” Antonia continued. “I think that means you’re resilient.”
I was quite floored by this. The question on the board was: Think of someone you know who is resilient. How do they show they are resilient?
Up to this point, my A2 class had presented a variety of responses to the question: Joaquin told us about Rafael Nadal, his favorite tennis player, and the story of how he rose to prominence in his sport despite traumatic beginnings with his first coach. Martín described how hard it was for his mother to get her Master’s degree at Harvard, and how she moved across the world with her young family to do it. Agustin talked about his cousin who’d broken his shoulder in a car crash and spent months in physical therapy to be able to ride a mountain bike again. Tomás shared that he himself had had surgery as a young child but was here now, healthy; Maria and Luciana, two best friends, each said that the other is resilient because of how hard they work in school to get good grades.
“Thank you, Antonia. That is so kind of you to say,” I said, taking the talking piece and passing it to the student on my left.
As humble as I want to sound, I must say that I agree with Antonia’s generous assessment. Over the course of August, I had breathed out the grief of the summer, packed up my life, my dog, and my bike, said goodbye to my closest friends and family, and, for the first time in five years, started completely anew. On the day of the “resilience” conversation with my A2 class, I was about four weeks into my new life in Ecuador. In that time, I’d moved into my cozy basement apartment with a backyard for Katembe, met dozens and dozens of new colleagues, started taking weekly Spanish lessons, established myself as a customer of the bike shop around the corner, found a local grain-free dog food, started teaching 7th graders for the first time ever, explored the huge forested park near my home, learned how to pay my electric bill after I came home one evening to a dark basement apartment, and laid the groundwork for how to navigate long distance friendships and heartbreak from afar. And I did seem fine. And I felt pretty fine, too.
I am teaching at Colegio Americano de Quito, a private school made up almost entirely of Ecuadorian families. (It is, technically speaking, an “international school,” but I think “bilingual school with an international curriculum” is more accurate; every single one of my students is Ecuadorian, and the genuinely “international” families make up a very, very small percentage of the school population.) As I write this, we are beginning the fifth week of the school year, and I can still say that I adore my students: they are sharp and organized and respectful, and they impress me every day. A lot of my fellow colleagues—particularly those who have more experience teaching in “genuine” international schools—are entering their fifth week with very different opinions of their classes, but they’ll just have to write their own blogs and you’ll just have to read them, I suppose.
My first impressions of my school and of my students were very superficial, but they were poignant, nonetheless: the library had books, and the kids had notebooks. Stay with me here.
The first day we (“we” meaning me and the nine other new foreign hires, much more on each of them later) visited the Americano campus was on the morning of August 13th, a mere 30 hours after Katembe and I landed in the Quito airport. We went on a tour of the massive campus, and I saw countless elementary classrooms that I knew I would likely never see again in my life, as well as more soccer fields than I think I ever played on myself in the span of 12 years of youth soccer. At one point on the tour, we passed by my classroom in the 7th/8th grade block, and I asked the MYP (Middle Years Program) coordinator David to unlock it for me so I could take a peek. I was astonished to find only 15 desks inside. David reminded me that my classes would be capped at 15 students, and I nodded, and I made some comment about how years of working in American public schools had taught me to be wary of these things called “caps,” and David, a guy whose Midwest accent cuts through in his English and his Spanish despite the fact that he’s been working at Americano for close to 20 years, chuckled and said, “I actually think your classes might only have 12 or 13 kids this year,” and I told him not to get carried away, and we joined back up with the tour. As we walked past the 9th/10th grade block, though, I did allow my mind to wander a bit into what if territory: What if I do only have 12 kids in a class? What if we had the space to sit in a circle and have meaningful class discussions or read stories together? I pulled myself back from getting too carried away. (I teach five classes: two groups of 13, one group of 12, and two groups of 11. I have the space to arrange the desks into most basic shapes.)
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| One unofficial stop on the tour was taking photos in this picturesque spot. Because the campus felt overwhelmingly huge, I was worried I would not find this spot again, but it turns out this is about 30 yards from my classroom. |
The tour ended at the Secondary Library. I was looking forward to seeing this library, because my upstairs neighbor Monica had just started working as Head Librarian, and she’d told me a bit about the library when we’d met the night before. When I walked in, I gasped out loud. There were just so many books. I know that this is an obvious statement, like remarking that there are soccer fields at a school in South America—there are books in the library!—but more than the volume of books, the curation of titles really impressed me. I quickly split from the group and started perusing the shelves: Oh, it’s not just a few Raina Telgemeier books, it’s all of the Raina Telgemeier books, most of them with copies in English and Spanish. And oh, it’s not just One of Us Is Lying, but it’s One of Us Is Next, and over there, there’s the full Matched series, and look, there’s a whole Nicola Yoon block on that shelf. I felt a flood of emotions start to swirl in my head the more I looked at the rows and rows of shelves. I had to pause to breathe. Is this...more grief? Altitude sickness? Why do I want to cry in the library?
After some reflection, my best estimation is that I was feeling something close to healing. I spent five years in Arizona working relentlessly in my campaign to allow my kids to read good books. At the first school I worked at, there was no library. When I decided that I wanted to try independent reading in my classes, I had to go out and find books. My personal classroom library started as a stack of 16 books I bought one weekend when I drove over an hour to Bookmans, an amazing used book store in Tucson. Many weekend trips to Bookmans quickly followed, and after another year, I did my Master’s research thesis on restorative independent reading practices in high school, and a few more months passed, and I got a grant to get more books for my little library. Summers passed, and I sorted through boxes of donations and I picked the brain of every employee I met in the Young Adult section of bookstores wherever I went. I researched modern authors whose stories reflected my students’ vast identities. I poured so much of my heart into finding good books, and reading good books, and sharing good books with my kids. When I announced to my classes at Buena that I was moving, I had a few students come up to me and ask, panicked, what would happen to my library. After five years and many, many hundreds of dollars, I’d amassed a library of just under 400 books. I was able to pass the books on to Catie at Buena, and I entrusted her with the responsibility of making sure kids are allowed to read good books.
Standing in the library at Americano, I realized that I wouldn’t have to fight as hard to put books in front of my kids. In fact, I might not have to fight very much at all. I realized in that moment that my shoulders had been tense for years about kids and books. Giving older students the space, time, and permission to read for fun, and teaching them that they are allowed to read books by authors who look like them, was, frustratingly, ever radical. And as I lived and worked in a conservative county in Arizona, I was always bracing for a book ban, or a meddling decision by the school board, or a sweeping piece of legislation that would target access to books by diverse authors. I realized on the morning of August 13th that I was in a very different place now, and I could drop my shoulders, and I could simply trust that the kids here would be allowed to read good books. Exhaling with that thought in my heart did feel something like healing.
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| A little part of the Secondary Library. Books are organized by genre first, then alphabetically by author. |
Now, to my first impression of my students. On the evening before the first day of school, the evening of August 31st, as I was eating dinner in my basement apartment, it occurred to me that I did not know where I could buy sheets of blank labels, the kind my mom would put in the printer to make return address labels for Christmas cards growing up. I hadn’t found an office supply store yet. I had a stash of blank labels that I’d used for years to have students label their class notebooks, but that stash hadn’t made the move across continents. (Tearing out pages and putting blank labels on top of used labels is also a good way to repurpose an old notebook when a student can’t afford to buy a new one.) I made a mental note to ask someone the next day where I could go for office supplies. It was only the first day of school—I hadn’t even met my kids, let alone told them they’d need a notebook for my class. The labels could wait a few days.
It turns out, the person I could have asked about office supplies was every single one of my students’ moms, because, in the morning, I learned that I actually did not need to find labels, and I did not need to tell my students that they’d need a notebook for my class, because each of them arrived with a notebook and a printed label already on the front cover. Some had fonts I’d never even seen. One student came up to me to say he didn’t have a notebook, and I started to launch into my, “Listen, I know it’s the start of the school year, if the idea of going home and asking your parents to take you to buy one more thing makes you start to feel nervous, just let me know and I’ll find you a notebook…” speech, but before I could explain my labels-on-labels system, the student interrupted me, saying, “Um, no, I just meant it’s in my locker.” I passed by another student’s desk and tapped the cover of his notebook and reminded him he’d need to write his name on there. He looked up at me, and then politely tapped the cover in a different spot, and I realized that both his full name and the name of the course were incorporated into the personalized design printed directly on the glossy cover, as if this kid were raised in a notebook factory and had managed to get into the machines. I nodded and gave him a quick “oh, but of course” thumbs up and kept moving.
That whole first day, whenever someone asked me how I was doing, I couldn’t stop saying, “I’m great! My kids have notebooks!” Most people just laughed in response and changed the subject, but when I encountered an American teacher who’d also gotten their start in public school education, they’d sigh knowingly, and say something to the effect of, “You’ll find…it’s very different here.” Don’t even get me started on pens and pencils.
Again, like soccer fields in South America, and books in libraries, and me hitting 2,000 words in a blog post about minutia, I know we’re not breaking any new ground here. You’re thinking: Shouldn’t...shouldn’t kids in school have notebooks? And my point is, YES, they should. I desperately wish that every student I ever taught had a notebook with their name on it on the first day of school. But this year is the first year of my career where that is the case.
And after one month, I am still acutely aware of how much easier the project of education becomes, from the teacher’s perspective and the students’ perspective, when the kids start with notebooks. When a student walks into my room, and they haven’t eaten breakfast, and they don’t have a pen, and they’re exhausted, and they’re worried about their dad finding a new job, and they’re thinking about when they’ll get to see their younger sister next, and they’re self conscious because their hoodie has a stain, but it’s the only hoodie that fits right now, and they haven’t been in school in a few days, and they can hear their stomach growling from hunger as they sit among the 32 students that are crammed into one room: they are categorically not set up for success. And they might be extraordinarily successful in my class—but the obvious truth is that gaps in basic needs just, plainly, make it harder to learn. I did not discover this; I am merely offering you a very simple explanation of trauma-informed teaching. What is new to me here in Quito, though, is witnessing the flip-side of the concept at the heart of this lens of teaching: when students show up to class everyday, well-fed, well-rested, not worried about their next meal or their parents’ or siblings’ security, pen in hand, notebook with their name on it? Those students are absolutely set up for success. Each day that passes here, I feel deeply lucky that I get to teach students who are so set up.
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| Notebooks and independent reading books for my five small classes. Unlike my labels, my “rainbow” letters did make the move across continents. |
It honestly feels a little strange to shift so dramatically in my teacher identity from someone who mostly taught non-notebook kids to someone who teaches 100% notebook kids. As I reckon with what it means to teach in this school, in this city, and in this part of the world, I take comfort in knowing that this era of my career will probably stave off years of burnout that was headed my way had I stayed in an environment where I had to fight for books and address the unmet basic needs of 30 kids, every hour, every day, before I even thought about teaching grammar or analysis. No matter how much I wish this weren’t true, the fight and the needs will still be there when I get back.
One last thing, to be clear: teenagers are still teenagers, whether they have money for notebooks or not. They still get sad, and get anxious, and struggle with self-esteem, and panic about getting good grades, and worry about being “enough” for everyone in their lives. Everywhere in the world, teenagers face adversity, and everywhere in the world, teenagers need to learn resilience.
And in my little classroom in Ecuador with 15 desks, we have the space to sit in a circle and discuss exactly what that word means.
