Word Dancer, a Memoir

In 1994-1995, I kept a daily journal of my teaching experience. That journal is the foundation for Word Dancer, a year in the life of a teacher.
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The high school where I taught in 1994 was an oasis in a desert of simmering violence.

The student population was more than seventy percent Latino. This was the neighborhood where I had taught for most of twenty years starting in 1975. I had ten years left to serve.

The first school I had taught at in the late 1970s was a grade school two blocks away. At that time, the grade school’s roofs were protected by strands of coiled razor wire. The lights in the teacher’s parking lot were shot-out most weekends only to be replaced before the next shoot-out. The classroom doors sometimes had bullet holes in them. A little putty and paint hid the damage. As a matter of fact, custodians arrived around six each weekday morning to paint out the graffiti.

As the school year faded, a room change was necessary. My high school classroom faced a busy street. Since I’d moved into that portable four years earlier, there had been two drive by shootings. The only thing between my students and the shooters was a thin plywood wall and a chain link fence.

The windowless, portable classroom also had a bulging floor like a tumor that was tilting student desks as it continued to grow. It was difficult keeping the desks on top of that bulge in one spot as students slid down the slope toward the next row.

The first drive by shooter aimed at a house directly across the street. It happened as school let out at three in the afternoon. I was in the doorway watching the last of my students leave. The street was full of parents waiting in cars. As the shooter’s car sped by, I saw the arm extend holding the revolver. Several shots were fired and that car sped away.

The ‘San Gabriel Valley Tribune’ quoted a school district administrator about the shooting. They printed that the shooting took place several blocks from the campus. The evidence was based on the fact that no shell casings had been found near the school. Anytime violence was linked to the high school, a few parents would take their kids and run. This cost the district money since schools in California are primarily paid based on student numbers and attendance.

Revolvers don’t spit out the shell casings like an automatic weapon does.
The high school where I taught was surrounded by an ugly chain link fence.
In less than a decade during campus beautification, it would be replaced with a taller one constructed of wrought iron. The idea being that a better looking campus that didn’t look like a prison would retain students.

When school started each morning, most of the gates were locked and the one that wasn’t locked had a guard on it. There was a campus police force of six. Two of the officers patrolled the campus on ten speeds. We had been warned to stay out of the neighborhoods around the school since one of our students had been shot dead one weekend when he crossed the street from his house to complain about loud music coming from a neighbor. The neighbor dragged his body to a drainage ditch and stuffed it into a culvert.

No one was going to tell that shooter to turn down his music.

This happened on a Sunday after the boy, a student in good standing, returned from the local Catholic Church with his mother and younger brothers and sisters. There was no father living in the house. The father was in prison. The fifteen year old high school student was the oldest, the man of the house. His mother was determined he would not follow in his father’s gang clad footsteps.

To the west and south were the Asian gangs, the best dressed and the most dangerous. An Asian gang member could be a polite, honor student. One year, several of these kids would break into a house and shoot a rival. They videotaped the execution and were caught watching the video several hours later. A witness to the shooting wrote down the license plate of the new Buick sedan they drove. It was registered to a doctor, the father of one of the gang members.

The Latino gangs had lived north of the campus for generations. The name of the gang that comes to mind most often was Puente Thirteen. At one time the Hell’s Angels had taken up a block in that barrio. I taught a couple of their kids while I was still at the grade school. The Hell’s Angels left one day when the entire clan mounted bikes and rumbled out of town. In the east toward West Covina, the sun came up on the Crypts and Bloods. There were so many gangs killing each other and tagging the neighborhoods with spray paint, it was difficult to keep all the names straight. Some of the better neighborhoods nearby had built block walls across streets to keep the gangs from driving through.

Another reason to move from that portable with the bulging floor was the dead, stray cats under it. They were starting to stink. It was difficult enough to teach as it was. The stench of death made it more challenging. The atmosphere in the room gave me headaches and caused me to wheeze. Students complained. I purchased several HEPA air filters and the charcoal in the filters helped with the stink.

The second shooting took place in the evening. A kid that had already been expelled from the high school took a shortcut home in the dark by climbing the east fence and crossing the campus. As he reached the open gate next to my classroom, he was greeted with a blast from a twelve gauge shotgun.

At the sound of the blast, the editors, one Caucasian and six Asian girls, rushed the door to have a look outside. It was half-past seven. The high school paper’s editorial staff was working late on the last monthly edition of the school year. All of the assigned pieces had already been written and the reporters were finished.

“Don’t touch that door knob,” I said.

The editors stood in a pack by the door. The editor-in-chief’s hand hovered above the knob. The sport’s editor asked why.

“That wasn’t a car backfiring. It was a shotgun. I suggest you get under the desks until the police arrive in case someone out there decides to use this classroom for target practice.”

We left at midnight. The school newspaper had to be out on time. It was a source of pride for the staff that the paper was never late. For five consecutive years between 1994 and 1998 this high school newspaper would win first place International Awards for School News Media from the International Honorary Society for high school journalists. One year, the staff would be nine points away from earning the prestigious George H. Gallup Award.

Since we did not witness the incident but only heard it, we had nothing to report to the police. However, there was a witness. One of the English teachers was leaving late. She was in her car at the gate when the victim walked in front of her at the time the shooters drove up and blew him apart.

That English teacher didn’t return for a week and only after the principal went to her home and talked to her.

The Marine Corps and a tour in Vietnam had trained me to deal with this kind of violence, but my journalism students were not ready for it. Two days later while working another late night with my editors, a pack of gang members climbed the fence and attempted walking into the classroom. I’d heard them rattling the fence, so I was at the door and blocked the entrance with my tall, lanky body. I was six foot four and weighed one hundred eighty pounds, more or less. I had little to no fat on me.

When I told them to leave, they didn’t budge.

They looked at me as if to say, ‘Hey, we know you are all alone here. You can’t stop us.’ The gangster closest to me looked inside the room and saw all the young girls. All college bound. All lovely.

I didn’t like the look in his eyes. There were a dozen of them and one of me. I shoved him back and reached for the door. For a moment I wasn’t sure I was going to win the tug-of-war for that door but with a surge of energy and desperation I managed to close it. For the next fifteen minutes to a half hour they pounded on the walls, yelled threats and rattled the door sometimes kicking it. One of the girls crawled under a desk. The others kept working. There was nothing else we could do. The only phone in the room was an intercom to the front office and no one was there. Cell phones weren’t common at the time. No one had one. We were cut off. For once I was glad the room didn’t have any windows. I hoped they didn’t have any weapons or think of setting fire to the room.

Jia was a junior. She was going to be the editor-in-chief of the school paper her senior year. Her name was Jia Mingmei (I’ve changed her name. Jia Mingmei seemed appropriate since it means ‘lovely’ and ‘good’ and ‘intelligent’. She was all that and more.) “Mr. Lofthouse,” Jia asked, “what should we do next year? Should we start training the cub reporters in July the week before I go to leadership school or the first week in August after I come back?” Her words worked like magic. It was as if she had brought out a chocolate cake and sliced it. The tension in the room dissolved like ice cream melting.

“You’re going to leadership school?” I asked. She hadn’t mentioned it before.

“At the University of Santa Barbara,” she said.

I knew what she was doing while the gangsters banged on the outside walls and threatened us. She didn’t need to go to a leadership school. She already had the skills. This was Jia’s third year in journalism. Years later I would hear that she graduated from a law school.

“Why are you suggesting we do staff training before you go to Santa Barbara?”

“I am in the Academic Decathlon class and we have to study during the summer. Our coach has us work until midnight sometimes.” The Academic Decathlon classroom was deep inside the campus in a much safer location. That was when I decided I was going to ask for a different classroom. After all, I had the two shootings and this campus invasion by the gang. I could threaten to go to the newspapers with the truth. The principal would have no choice. The pounding had stopped, but we could still hear them boasting and laughing. There was a lot of profanity. I figured I would have to be careful how I wrote my threat so it wouldn’t sound like blackmail. That wasn’t going to be easy, since I wanted to shout the truth from the rooftops. The trouble was that no one would probably listen.

“We need some journalism textbooks so we can do the training right,” Jia said.

“Yea,” the feature editor said. Five editors left the layouts they were working on and gathered around my desk. I had been correcting papers from my English classes and recording grades. The noise outside had stopped. “If we had a textbook, we could train the cubs better.”

“Academic Decathlon is studying together in August, aren’t they?” I asked Jia. I was hoping that the gang members had short attention spans and wouldn’t hang around for us to leave.

“Yes.” I looked at the other editors. The girl that had been under a desk earlier was out and working at her page layouts. “How many of you are in Decathlon?” Three of the seven raised hands. “Jia, don’t worry. We will train the cub reporters in August. There are enough editors here to do it. You don’t have to be here. We also have enough money that the staff raised from this year’s advertising left in our account to buy a set of journalism textbooks.”

“Really,” the feature editor said. “That would be great.”

“We might even be able to squeeze in a couple of new computers and a scanner,” I said. “Since you seven are going to be in charge of the school paper, why don’t you find a textbook that you like. You have my phone number. When you’re ready, call me and I’ll fill out the purchase order. The class set should be here before August.” As the advisor for the school paper, I was the one that had to fill out the purchase orders and sign them. Jia had to sign too.

“You want us to pick out the textbook?” the opinion editor asked.
“Why not?” I replied. They all smiled.

“Once we have the textbooks, you don’t mind if I plan the training exercises?” Jia said. “During August, I promise to drop by during breaks. After all, I’ll only be a few buildings away.” Jia was only seventeen.

“Jia, we won’t be in this room in August. We will be in another classroom behind a better wall away from this street and this fence. I’ll be talking to the principal tomorrow. If he wants a school paper, he will move us somewhere safer.”

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