This is one of my favorite old LA Southwest photos (scanned from our 1996 yearbook) and epitomizes how easy it was in those years to teach students what irony was.

That and the "Quiet Zone," which was--of course--the noisiest part of the campus.

It was the fall of 1992 that the LA Southwest administration discovered that more than half of the Cox Building (the part in which most of its classrooms were houses) sat directly over an earthquake fault. It was immediately condemned and the college had to scramble to create what they called "the south campus" on what is now the baseball field.

I started at Middle College HS that semester. It was, for me, a crazy and exciting time. The school was like some frontier on the wild west of education--these dilapidated shacks with no bells, this school with virtually no external order or discipline, just these mobs of students moving from room to room and teachers, like me, trying to perform a little magic and make them pay attention to something academic and learn something.

The LA Riot had happened just a few months before and the four officers who had beaten Rodney King on video tape were being tried again on civil rights violations. My students were certain they would be found innocent again there would be another riot. I asked them what would happen if the officers were found guilty and a girl said, "Then the white people gonna riot."

I became a basketball coach--my first day, actually--when Mr. Kennedy asked me to go out on the black top and help math teacher Roger Butcher who had agreed to help put a team together.

We practiced on the weed-cracked cement court behind the "bone yard" where broken, mangled equipment and furniture got piled up. Two backboards faced each other on either side of a jaggedly painted sideline. The basketball hoops had been stolen or vandalized so many times that we had to hang them up for practice and then take them down afterwards. Only a few guys really knew how to play the game. The rest just slammed each other around a woofed and hollered.

Somehow, while the college was being deconstructed, Roger and I were building a basketball team--and all of us tried to build a school.

At best we had a tenuous hold on many of our students. Never knew when one would just stop coming--incarceration, violence, family turmoil, a full-time job to mitigate financial catastrophe. We taught them always aware that it might be their last lesson.

One afternoon, a rumor spread that the college was going to tear down our bungalows and close our school. Students panicked. Many of them talked about dropping out of school that day. We told them not to worry and meanwhile we worried. Perhaps the college had decided that as long as the demo crews were coming to tear down the Cox building, they might as well raze these 1967 temporary plywood shacks.

We were the only real stability in the lives of so many of these students.

Not anymore.