The Spot

I‘m not sure whether this photo was taken my first day at MCHS but I’m pretty sure it was my first week. A lot of these guys had a rough road but I hear from a few and they still remember all the fun we had inventing a basketball team out of nothing.

A few years after that picture was taken, the backboards and their poles were uprooted and the yard filled up with old equipment and furniture and other trash. We called it the “bone yard,” and occasionally found treasures we could recycle for our classrooms. Years later the refuse was cleared from that spot and a shipping and receiving dock was built there. Now that structure has been demolished to make way for our new school building.


I paid some serious dues my months at MCHS.

Those overpopulated classes were like teaching in a crowded elevator. They wore me out. I knew I wasn’t reaching everyone and it weighed on me. I tried to keep them all busy and on task. I gave out jobs—writing discussion notes on the board, passing out this, collecting that, looking up words, I even assigned one boy to perform sound effects if we read a story aloud. When, toward the end of one short story we were reading, a car exploded, my sound-effects master detonated a firecracker.

My room became a lunchtime hangout, and then I never had a break from the kids—from their noise, their hysteria, and their profane bravado—but it was what I needed, to be immersed in the energy of the kids. Those chaotic lunches provided teaching opportunities. Students encircled my desk and we would talk—and they would listen much better than during class, and I began to believe that I could do more teaching in these informal moments, once the charade of a class no longer bound me or my students. I broke up fights by hurling my body between the slugging students and miraculously never got seriously hurt. It was the thing I did best, and I had a lot of practice—probably because I never reported the fights and thus the kids knew they could do battle in my room with impunity. Sometimes I had to chase after a boy to talk him out of “dropping a dime,” calling “the homies” in order to carry out some vengeance for an offense no one would probably ever remember. I should have reported anyone who threatened to make such a call but I believed so strongly in the underlying goodness of these kids that I just wasn’t willing to give up on anyone, even if it meant risking my safety, my credential, and the lives of a lot of people I had no business risking. Thank God nothing ever happened because of my recklessness.

It almost did. One day a huge fight involving six guys wound up in my room. It had started outside and then moved like a hurricane through several other rooms before bursting through the door of mine as if into a safe house. Before I could intervene a police officer charged in and grabbed one of the combatants. The young man struggled and the cop put him in a choke hold. The students in my class that period, already terrified —though also exhilarated—watched in horror as one of their peers fought against the night stick at his throat. I pleaded with the officer to let go, to ease up, but he seemed, like the student, to be caught in an adrenal trance. I yelled at the young man to stop, to relax, but that seemed impossible. I leaned up to his ear and in an irrational but inspired moment, whispered to him:

“We love you, man. Everybody loves you.”

I hardly knew him, just from those ragged basketball practices. But those simple words from a virtual stranger meant something to him in that moment. He stopped fighting—and the officer stopped trying to kill him.

Battersbee had a zero-tolerance policy about fighting and so all six of those boys were kicked out of the school. One of them died of AIDS a few years later. Another went to jail a few weeks later. The day after that Roger Butcher and I drove to his grandmother’s house to retrieve the basketball uniform we’d issued him for our upcoming season. Someone fired a gun somewhere behind us as we stood on his porch. We didn’t think it was at us. We stood there together and smiled at each other stupidly while the grandmother looked through her linen closet.

The boy who was almost choked to death—I’ll call him Brian Thomas (not his real name)—was exiled to a continuation school but told he could come back at the end of the semester if he’d exhibited good behavior. There was no other safe high school for him. He’d severed his gang affiliation and now Crips and Bloods alike considered him an enemy.

I let him continue to practice with the basketball team, even though he no longer attended our school. It was the only thing that mattered to him. He had been the one who’d organized the team, who’d gotten all the other boys to agree to practice together and had then badgered Mr. Butcher to be their coach. After practice one day, Brian got in another fight and knocked a teammate down. I helped cover that up. I was so impressed with Brian’s courage—to me he was such a magnificent exemplar for having defected from the cycle of gang violence that in one way or another plagued virtually every student at our school. What did a few post-gang punches matter? He didn’t seem to know how else to respond to conflict. Someone had to teach him. I didn’t know how to do that. I just knew I wanted him to have the chance. And if, in the meantime, he killed someone, (he had been convicted of murder when he was eleven), then the blood would be on my hands.

For those of you waiting for me to get through all this history and tell the story of how we saved the school, I’m almost there—I think. But it is important to note that 2005 was not the first time MCHS was nearly closed. That first semester, in the fall of 1992, LA Southwest College informed us that they would be demolishing the old bungalows that housed our school. The rumor spread wildly throughout the school and students bolted from classrooms as if from a bomb scare. Kids were crying in the office. We tried to reassure them but no ne of had much faith in our future. Soon the turmoil of our students’ lives eclipsed the crisis of our school, which was all but forgotten. And then somehow the college forgot to demolish the bungalows—or just changed their minds and forgot to tell us.