What were you doing 10 years ago today?

(As a heads up, I am a math professor, and my grammar and spelling are not always the best)

 

What were you doing 10 years ago today? It was a Tuesday. Two days earlier was the Tampa Bay Buccaneers had just won the Super Bowl over the Oakland Raiders. Four days later was when the tragic day when the Space Ship Colombia disintegrated over Texas and Louisiana. Those days were memorable days. But ten years ago today was just a day, like most any day. But for me it wasn’t.

That was the day I was attacked.

I turned 24 in the summer of 2002. I was fresh out of college with a teaching degree in mathematics. There is an old Billy Joel song that says “A young man is the king of every kingdom that he sees.” So I accepted a position teaching Algebra and Geometry to High School students in inner city Chicago. I was filled with enthusiasm. But most of all I felt God’s calling to teach in the inner city. What could be better for the students then learning day after day from a teacher that is praying for each of them? I wanted to make an impact, to do something important, to make a difference in the lives of young people using the thing that I know best … math.

I knew it was going to be tough. That was a given. But what I didn’t know about was the roll that first year teachers play in many inner city public schools. There I was one of 13 first year teachers at that school in the Fall of 2002. There was ONE second year teacher. That should indicate something. At the time (and I am guessing not much has changed today) over half of all new highers in the inner city schools leave to go someplace else with in the first 3 years.  During in service in that first week before classes, the older teacher do what they call “fleecing” the younger teachers. Over the lunch break they take the younger teachers out to lunch. What they don’t tell the younger teacher is that they are splitting the bill evenly. So the young teacher with all his new college debts to pay and tiny apartment to rent orders the $4 BLT. The four older teachers order the $11 steak. The check comes and dividing it evenly everyone pays $9.60. Surprise! The four older teachers get a discount on their steaks at the young teacher’s expense. Welcome to the city kid. Good luck when the students arrive tomorrow. Often the older teachers would joke about betting pools on which first year teacher would quit first and how soon.

Mentorship is a word that is used when you are hired, but it basically has little meaning.  No first year teacher was given a classroom on the first floor. That is because the main office is on the first floor. They know the chaos that is about to start. The further away you are the less likely you are to come ask for help. Additionally they deliberately cut the wires to the speaker to the main office for any first year teacher. They know the only way you can contact them is if you leave you room and walk all the way down stairs to the office to see them. The only time you would do that would be in a real emergency.

The students didn’t see me as teacher or mathematician. They simply saw me as a white man. And hear what I am saying, I loved those kids. I wanted to provide for them a quality education. But in their eyes, I was the enemy. And no, not every kid felt that way. In fact looking back I think most of the kids for the most part actually like me. But in the group setting like that you don’t want to look like the teacher suck up. On the whole I walked in to a room of angry stares. Someone the students were actually angry. Others were probably acting angry just for show.

Maybe one in five days was I actually able to teach something. It was like glorified babysitting. One day a student threatened to jump out my second story classroom window. The other students egged him on yelling, “jump, jump!” Another student frequently would flop on the floor and spin around whooping and hollering like you would see in a three stooge’s movie. One student missed the first week of class because he was in jail. A week after he made it out his mom was put in Jail. He brought it up in class saying “My mom’s in Jail. You know what that means. Party at my house this weekend you guys!” Bizarre! One girl (I can see her face so clearly when I think about her) did nothing but sleep and mumble. I was so naive. Years later it hit me so clearly, she was stoned. Every day she came in to my classroom she was completely strung out. I suppose the difference between a rhombus and a kite have very little importance when you are high on drugs.

Lots of students slept. At first I was upset about it. Then a couple months in I left something at the school and I had to go back in the evening. When I opened the classroom door it looked so different to me. First thing in the morning, that room looked like a gladiator arena. Get ready, the anger and insults are coming. But that evening I opened the door and what I saw was a sanctuary. And I thought about what horrible home life many of these kids must come from. What sort of threats are they hearing on the way to school or in the lunch room? This forty-five minute Algebra class might be the safest time slot of their entire day. I never scolded a kid for sleeping in my class from that day forward.

In the six months I taught in the building, there had been one stabbing, one shooting and probably hundreds of fist fights. None of those made the local news. I’m guessing are way too many of those to even be reported on.

The year before I went to Chicago I had a college friend who spent 4 months on a mission trip in Japan; a different culture, a different language. She said she cried herself to sleep most nights. She said it was life changing for her. I remember saying to myself, “I wonder what that is like”. Within less than two weeks of teaching in Chicago I knew exactly what it was like. It was exhausting. In fact there was one night I slept 14 hours straight. I came home from school and fell asleep at 4PM just to wake up at 6AM to teach the next day.

This was not the path I had anticipated taking right out of college. Growing up I always wanted to be a husband and a daddy. I always wanted a daughter.  And today as I write this I have a gorgeous wife and two adorable daughters. But ten years ago I had no one. When I was younger I had picture in my mind what the worst possible outcome for my life would be. That was alone, in a trailer home, eating a TV dinner and watching Wheel of Fortune. Well one evening in Chicago I decided I would try cooking myself some bratwurst from the supermarket. I turned on the stove and popped the TV on in the background. Prior to that Fall I had mostly just had my Mom’s cooking and dorm food. So I cooked the sausage to the best of my ability. I sit down to eat it and spit the meat out immediately. The middle of the sausage is still cold and raw.  And just at that moment I hear on the TV “.. Pat I would like to buy an O”. Sure enough there are three O’s. Ding, ding, ding.” My tiny cockroach infested apartment, the lumpy $45 futon to sleep on from target. That moment I dreaded was more than a reality. And trailer home and the TV dinner sounded significantly much more appealing than the raw meat and roaches.

There was one friend who I leaned on during that time. I went to high school with Nate Statezni. He was going to school at the University of Chicago. I moved in to the apartment I did because it was close to where has was living. If you remember the Lord of the Rings story if I was Frodo, he would have been Sam. Every Sunday he picked me up for church. He would call me 10 minutes before picking me up. He would drive me to church and afterword’s we would usually go for lunch. I love Chicago style pizza.

Sunday nights were the darkest part of my week. The sunlight would dwindle away across the Chicago skyline. The blackness would stretch across me. The next voices I hear would be those angry voices. The next faces I would see are those angry faces. How can I face the morning? How can I even get up?

January 28, 2003 was right at the midpoint of the school year. So that was the day I gave my second term exams. One student in a fit of anger ripped up his test and stormed out of the classroom. I said off handedly, “Well you aren’t going to get a passing grade like that.” He caught word of this from one of the other students and decided he would stop by after school and rough me up. He was a defensive lineman on the football team. He was easily more than a hundred pounds heavier than me and all muscle. He never got the chance to take a swing at me. At one point he had me slammed up again a locker. I just did my best to get away from him. Before anything serious was able to happen I caught sight of a security guard. The student pleaded innocent and left.

In many ways the 29th was worse than the 28th. When I came to the building I was no longer a first year teacher, I was a first year teacher that had been attacked. The students clearly looked at me different. Every teacher had a different opinion about what I should or shouldn’t do. But the real issue was that the administration was not going to pursue any legal action. I alone would have to pursue justice, if I wanted justice. This sense came over me THAT was not what I came here to do. It was clear that this was the time to resign.

I find that when I tell people about these events there are usually two ways in which they response. The first way is abundantly false. The second is true, but frankly it barely scratches the surface of what that six months was about.

The first response is “Dave that’s horrible. You should have never gone through something like that. Hated by you students and abandoned by you administration? That is no way to start a teaching career. It just wasn’t worth it.”

To that I respond no, no, no, ABSOLUTELY NOT! Certainly I have regrets about the day in and day out choices I made during those six months. Who wouldn’t? But if you asked me a thousand times, “Would you go through those six months all over again?” Every single time I would say yes!

Now you ask “But why?” Before I answer that let me tell you about the other response.

The second response is as follows: “Well done Dave. You were called to go and you went. You were asked to serve and you did. You don’t know all the wonderful things that will happen in those kids lives twenty years down the road because of those months you spent in South Chicago. God will work all those things for the good.”

To that statement I say, “Yes. Good. Right. That is all true. But if you asked me to go through those six months again and the ONLY HOPE that you could give me was this hypothetical abstract concept of good things happening at some time in the future I would say that I can’t go! I can’t do it! For some abstract good in the far off future? That’s not enough to relive those six months. That blackness was too black. The loneliness was too bleak. And the tears cut too deep.”

“But Dave you just said with a thousand times to do it again you said you would?” And I would say “Yep! No doubt!”

It is good and true that there is a God that makes good out of our suffering. But was it really important “Is there a God who is WITH those who are suffering.” Time after time in the New Testament it is said God’s grace and peace be WITH you. And in the Old Testament Joseph having been lied about, thrown in jail and abandoned it says “But while Joseph was there in prison the Lord was WITH him and showed him kindness.” If my two little daughters learn nothing else from me I want them to know the sweetness of Joseph’s jail cell at the end of Genesis 39!

In early November of 2002, two and a half months before the attack, the last of my enthusiasm was being squeezed out of me and in to that school. My buddy Nate brought me a CD with a bunch of sermons on it including a sermon by the title “The Radical Cost of Following Christ.”  That one sermon became bedrock for me; an anchor for me in that roach filled apartment. What I was longing for was my Mom’s cooking. I was longing for my Dad’s hugs. I was longing for my brothers’ laughter. And I longing for distance hope of a wife and kids. And that sermon said, “There is something better than all that Dave and it is RIGHT HERE!” The worst nights I had there, I would put that sermon on loop on my computer, so if I would wake in the middle of the night I would hear it.

There is a quote in that sermon from a Scottish missionary in the South Pacific. John Patton was ministering to the cannibal tribes of island chain known today as Vanuatu. His wife and child had both died from disease. A nearby cannibal tribe had decided to rise up to kill him. Some other natives had told Patton if were to hide in a tree and wait there, the hostile natives would pass and when the coast was clear he can follow a path down to where there is a boat. Then he could leave the island safely.

And imagine as I am listening to these words I am in the blackness and isolation of one of those Sunday nights. The next morning, I’ve got to teach something like the area of a parallelogram to a room full of teenagers who hate me. And every fiber of my being is screaming “You can’t do this! How can you survive the morning?”

So this is what Patton wrote:

I climbed into the tree and was left there alone in the bush. The hours I spent there live all before me as if they were but yesterday. I heard the frequent discharging of muskets, and the yells of the Savages. Yet I sat there safe in the arms of Jesus. Never, in all my sorrows, did my Lord draw nearer to me, and speak more soothingly in my soul, than when the air played on my throbbing brow, as I told all my heart to Jesus. Alone, yet not alone! If it be to glorify my God, I will not grudge to spend many nights in such a tree, to feel again my Savior’s spiritual presence, to enjoy His consoling fellowship. If thus thrown back on your own soul, alone, all alone, in the midnight, in the bush, in the very embrace of death of death itself, have you a Friend that will not fail you then.

So I listen to this on my lumpy $45 target futon, with the roaches in the closet and crummy food in the fridge, in MY midnight, thrown back on MY soul. And I think, “This is a vacation compare to Patton’s midnight. Yet there he found delight.”

And I am reminded lyrics from the old time hymns:

Because he lives I can face tomorrow.

Because he lives all fear is gone.

Because I know he holds the future.

And life is worth the living just because he lives.

As well as:

There’s no other we can turn to, that can help us face another day.

Gentle Shepard come and feed us. For we need you to help us find our way.

And as the moonlight flickers … snow starts to fall on the fire escape, outside, three feet from my face. Silently falling.

I am calm. I fade off to sleep.

Alone.

Yet not alone.