The image was the Twin Towers. One plane had hit the building while the other was on its way. My blood started to percolate. I turned the image face down as if there had been a mistake. Maybe I was dreaming or hallucinating. Or maybe it was a poster from some other class. I turned it over again and it was still there. I looked at the quote the student had selected to support the image he drew from the speech by Martin Luther King. “We must make full and creative use of the freedom we already possess.” I kept looking at it, trying to make something understandable, if not good, from it. But there was nothing. He was mocking the assignment; no one could have misunderstood it so severely.
I knew a few things about Freddy Pena before the t-shirt incident. From his journal I knew that he believed in hard work. And that hard work meant money, and money meant you could buy things you wanted – mostly cars and parts and car accessories. He worked in the fields with his parents and siblings and cousins, and when it turned out that he couldn’t get work, when his weekends were open, he was disappointed and annoyed. After I read that in his journal I began to look at him as an adult who saw finishing school only as a thing to pass through in order to increase odds for a better paying job. Hard work equals money equals things was a formula that was working for him and talking, writing and thinking about things, about why people make choices and what the results are, were things that were not that meaningful to him. And talking, writing and thinking about all that stuff was about all I was interested in getting them to do.
He also caught my attention when I took them to the library. “Pick something that’s interesting to you,” I tell them. Freddie picked How to Interview to Get the Job. He sat in the front row and once during our silent reading time I interrupted him to comment on it.
“Interesting book.”
“Yeah, man.”
“Good advice?”
“Yeah, like how you gotta wear a suit and show up early and…”
“Not say yeah?”
“Yeah. Ha-ha. Yeah.”
“Gets you that job, though.”
“That’s right. Yeah.”
He was big but not in a sloppy way. He was wide and square. I asked him once if had ever considered playing football. “No time for it,” he answered. He outsized most of our varsity linemen and did not appear to be uncoordinated or unable to learn. I saw days of glory and a lifetime of memories. But he was right; the hard work in sports had rewards that were abstract. Freddy was pragmatic and single-minded which wasn’t necessarily bad; it was just where he was.
There are lesson plans that come and go, even when they are good. A teacher sometimes finds a more efficient way to teach the same principle, or maybe just gets tired of teaching it. Sometimes the times change and the lesson becomes irrelevant. Some lesson plans though stay for an entire career arc. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1964 speech “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution” is one that is so old that I typed the speech out on a typewriter off a cassette player. I used the speech for 25 years.
“This speech is old. It was given in 1964, before your parents were born,” I would tell them. “I want you to go back through the speech and find five quotes that say something to you, right here and now in…” whatever year is was.
“We must go all out now.”
“Freedom isn’t given by the oppressor. It must be demanded by the oppressed.”
“Be the best at whatever you are.”
“How long will prejudice blind the visions of men?”
“If you are students you must burn the midnight oil.”
“Doors of opportunity are opening now.”
“Doors are opening that were not open to our mothers and fathers.”
“We must prepare ourselves to walk through those doors as they open.”
“If a man has not found something he is willing to die for he isn’t fit to live.”
“An eye for an eye leaves everybody blind.”
“It isn’t by tide that you rise or fall.”
Afterwards I’d have them write about the quote that they liked best and what it meant to them.
I got the t-shirt idea from Carole Hendsch, who was the department chair at the time. She had students take a quote from a play they were reading and then they brought a t-shirt and did some kind of iron-on appliqué process. Later she changed it to making a quilt of quotes from each class and hanging it on the wall. Well, both those projects seemed a little too labor intensive for me so one year I had them cut out a t-shirt shape from poster sized paper and put their favorite King quote on it, along with an image to support the idea behind the quote. The results were good and I still had them writing when we were finished; the t-shirt was a process by which they would have the time and opportunity to think about what the quote meant to them.
One of my favorite t-shirts was done by a Hmong girl who picked the quote, “God is not merely interested in the salvation of brown men, yellow men, black men or white men. God is interested in the salvation of the whole human race.” The accompanying image was a heart with stars in it being held by the hands of God.
So near the end of my career I came to work and I gave them the assignment as I had for many years. There were other things I had to talk about with them, but I stayed in the moment, looking at them working contentedly on their t-shirts, while my Classic Soul playlist picked out the bouncy, jaunty “Knock on Wood” to roll in the background. I stood up and spoke from my desk.
“You had a day off for King Day. I want you to know why. Give me some good ones now, come on.”
After school that day I fell asleep twice and woke up twice achy and disappointed and restless. Quarter to five. I had other things on my mind. I had told them I was going to be out for a month for surgery and I hated being away from them for more than two days. I looked at the stack of completed but ungraded Martin Luther King Jr. t-shirt-shaped posters with a quote from a 47 year old speech and I absently started grading and entering. I got restless and it was getting late so I decided I would grade one more and go home. That’s when I picked up Freddie Pena’s t-shirt. I didn’t gasp but my mouth fell open.
My first impulse was to crumple Freddy’s t-shirt and throw it in the trash. Then I thought I would do it in class and tell him publicly he must have some serious problems and send him to the SAP counselor. My outrage wasn’t going to do anything for Freddie though. I was the teacher and my job was to teach. Freddy clearly didn’t understand what he had made. Everything else about him indicated he was a decent guy with no real malice in him. I was angry and didn’t know what I was going to do, but raging at Freddy wasn’t going to be it. At first I thought I would just give him a D-, not post his t-shirt with the others and not say anything else. But a few days later I knew what I was going to do.
When they came in I had Freddy’s work taped to the whiteboard. I greeted them, took roll and described the day’s agenda to them. We did our sustained silent reading and then our journal writing.
“Ok,” I said, “I had one shirt that confused me a little and I’m going to ask Freddy to come up here and explain it. Can you see it here? Twin Towers and the quote by King. All right, Freddy? Come on up, man.”
He smiled and blushed and waved his hand at me as if I had asked him to dance. After some coaxing he got up but stood before the class with his hands in the pockets of his jeans and his head down in a bashful manner.
“So help me out, Freddy. What’s it mean?”
He shrugged. I waited.
“That’s what they did,” he finally said.
“Ok. It is a universally recognized image, an unforgettable image, an emotional image. And the quote?”
“They made use of their freedom.”
He said it as simply as someone else saying you needed two eggs and a pat of butter to make scrambled eggs.
“And their full and creative use of the freedom they possessed was to crash the planes into the Twin Towers and kill 3,000 people.”
“Yeah,” he said.
There was hope in his voice that I might understand him.
“And those 3,000 people weren’t soldiers in a war. They were just people coming to work. And the guys that used full and creative use of their freedom crashed into the buildings at 9:00 when everybody was at work.”
“I guess.”
“So the part I don’t get is… Well, see, Dr. King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, an international award. He was a man of peace. It was 1964, same year as the speech. So, I mean you’ve taken that and mixed it with something the opposite of peace.”
This time when he shrugged I shuddered. I fought to contain myself but at same time I thought it would be ok if the class saw how upset I was. And they did. Except for one student.
“Excuse me, but I don’t think you’re being fair,” a voice called out from the back.
It was Roland, a new student, or I should say a student who appeared briefly late in August then vanished only to reappear just about a week before that day. When I asked him where he had been he gave me a rambling, muddled explanation that had words like “self-discovery” and “disengagement” and “court appearance.” His features seemed to include every race and creed. He had a cube-shaped, rust-colored goatee, straight brown hair combed to the side, and mismatched rumpled clothes like some resident of Venice Beach. His peers loved his “randomness.”
“You don’t think I’m being fair? Why’s that?”
“Mr. Chavoor, allow me to amend that. It’s not just something I think. It is something verifiable.”
“You think so, huh?”
“I would say that given the difference between your age and Freddy’s, the likelihood of his knowing whether or not King won a Nobel Prize for Peace is slim.”
“That may be so, Roland. On the other hand I bet most of the students here, including Freddy, have listened to or even memorized the “I Have a Dream,” speech as far back as what, fourth grade?”
“Third grade, Mr. Chavoor,” a student two rows over from Roland put in.
“Ok then,” I said, “I think one could gather from that speech alone the general idea of what King was about. You know, like mutual respect good, hating and killing bad.”
“I suppose,” Roland said, “but your feelings about his work shouldn’t mean he gets a bad grade. He completed the assignment.”
“But it makes no sense,” I exclaimed.
“To you,” Roland replied, “but this was the artist’s vision and you can’t interfere with that.”
“Yeah, Chavoor,” another student called out, “You can’t give Freddy a bad grade just because you didn’t like it.”
“Yes I can! That’s my job. That’s what I’m supposed to do. Evaluate, assess. They gave me a credential. State of California, ok?”
I looked over at Freddy. He was quite pleased that others had taken up for him.
“What are you going to give him?” another student demanded.
“I’ll tell you right now, it’s an F.”
There was an immediate uproar.
“That’s not fair, Chavoor.”
“Freddy’s the artist, not you.”
“You didn’t tell us that’s what you wanted.”
“You know, my Dad told me that the artist has a responsibility to the audience to not cross certain lines,” I finally said.
“Actually,” Roland countered, “the artist’s obligation is to smash restrictions.”
“Ok, I’m going to give two examples and then we’ll be done. Yes, I’m the teacher, I get the last word.”
“All right, go ahead.”
“There was an artist in Chicago around 30 years ago. His art piece was a flag on the floor and a podium like mine here and he put his podium on the flag. On the podium was a guest book.”
“So you had to walk on the flag to sign the book?”
“That’s right.”
“Couldn’t you, like, come up from, like, the side?”
“No. The whole point was to step on the flag. That was his art. It was in an art museum.”
“That sucks, Chavoor.”
“No it don’t, Chavoor. It’s nothing wrong with it.”
“Art is political,” Roland pointed out.
“Point is, some of you don’t care either way, some of you might like it, and some of you who might be joining the military in six months don’t like it at all, and then some of you whose uncles or older brothers or dads…”
“Or sisters or aunts or moms, Chavoor.”
“Yes, I stand corrected, them, too. Your family members who served in the military, put their lives on the line for this country, or some who may have even died, well those students really don’t like the idea at all.”
“Some of them might though,” Roland said.
“But my point is some things you just don’t mess with things that way. In Chicago, some people went to see the art, some didn’t go, and some stood outside the museum asking people not to go in because it was disrespectful. Some people were so hurt by it that they made threatening phone calls to the artist.”
“Damn that’s messed up.”
“Yes I agree that threatening phone calls, well, that is wrong. But you see my point, right? Look, I’m going to put a word on the board. Check it out.”
“What’s that?”
“Sacrosanct. It is used for things that no one should mess with.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Me neither.”
“Ok, that’s why I have the second example. Now in this case the artist took a crucifix. Know what that is?”
“Yeah. Like, Jesus on the cross.”
“Right. Ok, I’m going to tell you this one and I don’t like it but it will prove my point. There was this artist…”
“From Chicago?”
“No I think this guy was from New York City. He took a crucifix and put it in a jar. And then he filled the jar with urine. That was his art.”
They were in shock. The room was completely silent. I couldn’t tell whether they got the point or if they were just thinking that their teacher was twisted. Before I could make my point, Roland broke the silence.
“Wait, was it his own piss?”
The room exploded. Everyone was making a comment at once. I had to override all the voices by shouting.
“I DON’T KNOW WHOSE PEE IT WAS! WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE? THE POINT IS THERE ARE SOME THINGS THAT ARE SACROSANCT. YOU CAN’T MESS WITH IT, OK?”
“Chavoor lost it!”
“I didn’t lose anything, I made my point.”
“He’s right, that’s pretty sick.”
“Thank you, Sandra.”
“This is cool, Chavoor. We’re good debaters. We should do this every day.”
“You mean, go off topic for half an hour? I don’t think so, Tomas.”
“It’d be bomb, Chavoor. Every day you come with a different topic and we debate it.”
“Especially since Roland’s here now.”
“Yeah.”
“Well,” I said, “maybe someday Roland will be a teacher and have debates every day but we’ve got to get back on track. It was interesting though.”
“Yeah, so let’s do it every day.”
“No. I’ve got one more thing to say and then we’re done.”
“You said we’d be done after the two things.”
“I did say that but too bad. I’m old and can’t count.”
“Go ahead.”
“It’s a Bible verse.”
“You can’t tell us Bible verses.”
“Oh yes I can. I just can’t tell you what to believe or not believe about it. You can decide that. And it has to do with our conversation. It goes like this…”
“Go ahead,” Miguel called out from the middle of the room. “I got my Bible to make sure it’s a Bible verse.”
He was a football player and his parents were lay ministers. He produced an enormous ten pound Bible from his backpack and let it thud authoritatively on his desk.
“Ok, Miguel. Hope I got it right. I am free to do all things but not everything is good for you. Get it? I think Paul said it.”
“McCartney?” Roland asked.
“No. Look, many of you have been saying that the artist has the right to make whatever he wants, but not everything he does will be good for any of us. Ok?”
“Yeah but what are you gonna do about Freddy’s t-shirt?”
“Yeah, you still gonna give him an F?”
“Here’s what I can do. Freddy, here’s your choice. You can keep your artistic integrity but I have to keep my teacher integrity. So you can turn this in for a grade and take the F or you can make a new shirt with the same quote and a different, more appropriate image.”
Freddy smiled and put his hand out for the new sheet of paper I was offering him. He drew flying cars high in the sky, and kept the quote. I wasn’t sure what freedom had to do with imagining flying cars, but it was better than what he had before so I gave him a C. Miguel could not find the verse, put his Bible back in his backpack, shrugged and drew football plays on a piece of paper. Roland started to say something but changed his mind and took out his book of poetry and busied himself with it. The rest of them were ready to go back to our routine so I put them on it and the room hummed with something positive and good. None of us imagined the life lessons that came with Freddy’s t-shirt.