Sooner or later, we're all just going to end up as soccer parents

Every so often, something reminds me rather suddenly and forcefully that I have "been around" for a while.  At my youngest son's soccer practice last season, one of the moms revealed to my wife that she had been a student of mine for one semester, back in 2004 - my first year of teaching.  I certainly had not recognized her and when I went up to her to see if I could figure out who she was, the memories came flooding back, and I actually remembered her name.

Teacher's and his former student's kids on the same team!

Ashley had been in my 5th period class - after lunch is always a tough one - and she remembers that she spent more time outside the class (sent out by me) than in it.  Now it became clear why she approached my wife instead of me!  "You hated me," she said.  Not true.  "And I was a bad person that year."  Also unlikely to be true.  She left after the first semester of 10th grade, went to continuation high school to catch up on her credits, and returned to graduate two years later.  Seeing someone for the first time in a while forces you to think about what you were like back then, too, and I was immediately struck by how much we had both changed.  Ashley was now married, with two children and a third on the way.  She was clearly happy and settled.  She'd gone straight into the workforce and now had a job at a car dealership that paid well and had helped her develop skills I (with my oh so impressive master's degree) knew I didn't have.  She was not the angry young lady who constantly disrupted my class and challenged my (close to non-existent) authority.

I, too, am not the same person I was back then.  Lest I forget, it is worth pointing out that I was a less than stellar teacher in my first year.  I was quick to anger and fairly intolerant of any students who failed to meet my expectations.  Today, I still have a long way to go to become the teacher, father, husband, and man I want to be, but I am - I think - more patient, more willing to listen to my students, and more emotionally and spiritually healthy than I was in 2004.  I tried - rather unsuccessfully, I think - to express the mixture of pride and guilt I felt in seeing her again.  I couldn't help wondering if 2017 Mr. St. John would have given her a better experience than she'd had in 2004, and how that might have changed the trajectory of her life.  But there's the rub.  Her life didn't need a different trajectory.  It worked out just fine.

I think our tendency is to be impressed with or even touched by the stories of people who have found success unconventionally.  We have such a rigid understanding of what children should do in order to become successful adults, and we see it as a setback or worse, a disaster when a child doesn't go to college or somehow messes up his or her education.  I was going to write about Nelson, another student of mine from that debacle of 2004-2005 and one of the chief instigators of the chaos that was my 4th period class, who is now a middle school teacher.  Then there's Sam, a student whose inability to follow basic directions in class exasperated me, and who, having been one of the least academically inclined students I've taught, went back to college in his twenties and now has a double major, speaks excellent French, and studies and climbs in Europe.  All while rocking a seriously cool man bun.

I think my response to these former students "finding their own paths" is more one of relief than pride.  Relief that the system - of which I am a part - didn't crush them.  Relief that they succeeded despite the system.

If we're honest, I think we all have had to find our own path.  I didn't know I wanted to be a teacher until I was 26.  I had a master's degree and I was cleaning school bathrooms and vacuuming classrooms for a living.  But it's not just about the careers we choose and the jobs we have.  It's about the people we become.  And when we stop to think about the paths we've taken as human beings - meandering, direct, potholed, smooth, voluntary, forced, hair-raising, yawn-inducing - the most important lessons along the way have probably not been learned in the classroom.

As I think back to that chilly October evening as I stood next to Ashley and found out about her life while our children tore around the soccer field together, I now realize that our paths, as different as they were, had brought us to the same place.   Being parents.  Raising our children.  Slaves to the dreaded schedule.  Doing our best to make a life for our families.  Worrying about money.  Loving our spouses.

It really is amazing to think that multiple degrees, 14 years of teaching, and approximately 13 more years on earth had merely led me to the same time, the same place, and the same activity as a 20-something former student.   The same activity that hundreds of thousands of regular Southern Californians do every day.  The great social equalizer: sitting in a foldable chair at their kids' soccer practice and hoping that the pizza at the end of season party won't be too greasy.

Luis

We do graduation well at my high school.  Really well.   It is the perfect blend of (slightly cheesy) tradition, spectacle, and celebration.  The students are exuberant but respectful, and by 6 pm, the summer heat has usually died down just enough to make sitting out on the football field bearable, and the Discovery Hills and San Elijo ridgeline form a spectacular backdrop that I never take for granted.

Usually, I know close to 100 of the graduating seniors, but because I'd only had two freshman classes in 2014-2015 and one sophomore class the following year, that number was much lower this year.  Maybe that was why one name kept coming up in my head, the name of a young man noticeable for his absence on the day he should have been graduating from high school.  Luis Canseco.  I couldn't stop thinking about Luis.

When I say I had only two freshman classes four years ago, that's not entirely correct.  The summer beforehand - 2014 - saw two cohorts of incoming freshmen take a Summer Bridge program at Mission Hills High School.  I taught the program with a math teacher, blending personal development and character building with academic content and study skills.  We were essentially equipping these kids - all of whom had been selected for the program due to their "at risk" status - to survive and thrive in high school.

Luis was in one of these classes.  He had a mop of thick, curly dark brown hair and arresting green eyes.  He smiled readily and was a very bright, articulate, and charismatic young man.  We gave him an award for Best Vocabulary.  He clearly had some issues in his personal life - I vividly remember him having a panic attack outside the classroom on one of the last days of class - but he was brimming with that kind of raw, untamed potential that so many 14 year-olds seem to have.

I saw Luis a few times on campus during his freshman year but quickly lost track of him amid the bustle and stress of the school year.  What I later found out was that he struggled academically, and by his junior year, he was attending the district's continuation high school in an effort to make up credits so that he could get back on track to graduate in 2018.

On Tuesday, 24th October 2016, at 8:30 pm, Luis was found dead, lying in a pool of blood in the middle of the road.  He had been shot multiple times.

At the time, when his murder was announced, his name didn't even register with me as being familiar.  That sounds terrible, and it is, for sure, but I have had many Luises over the years, just as many Cansecos, and at least two students with exactly the same name.  Add to that the fact that Luis wasn't even attending my school at the time.  And, just as my reaction foreshadowed, his death was quickly forgotten by the media and much of the community, probably as soon as news outlets reported Luis's murder as "possibly gang-related".

As I pondered the senselessness of Luis's death and how rapidly his story faded from our minds (mine included), I thought of another local high school student who was relatively recently violently killed.  In 2010, when Chelsea King was assaulted and murdered while jogging in Rancho Bernardo, the press coverage was relentless, as it should have been.  Chelsea's name lives on in a high profile yearly fundraiser and a foundation.  A documentary has been made about her.  A law regarding sex offenders now bears her name.  There are pages and pages on the internet devoted to her.  She has not been forgotten.  She will not be forgotten, and rightly so, for a child's murder is an unspeakably horrific event.

But what about Luis?  Why has there been no arrest in his case?  Why has there been no public outcry and high profile police investigation?  Where is his foundation?  Why did the press coverage of his death and the homicide case effectively stop that very same week?  I can find nothing on the internet about Luis published after October 29th.  Five days.  That was all Luis warranted in the public memory.  I live a mile from where he was killed.  I have often run past the very spot where he died.  There is no memorial, no plaque, no visible sign that something so brutal and violent happened on that bare stretch of concrete just beyond the Highway 78 overpass.

On first consideration, the answer seems obvious.  Chelsea was beautiful, athletic, white, and wealthy.  She'd had no run-ins with the law.  She fit the profile of the all-American high school teenager.  Luis fit a different profile.  He was Latino, on the verge of dropping out of school, living in a rough part of town, and mixed up in gang activity.  Call it socio-economics.  Call it lifestyle.  Call it race.  But I think that's too simplistic.

The fact is Luis's death conveniently fits a narrative that we as a society have decided is acceptable.  If people are stupid enough to get involved with gangs, we essentially say, then a violent death is inevitable.  We read the news, shake our heads sadly, but there is no public soul-searching or outpouring of grief.  In fact, based on comments from the White House regarding gangs, I would bet that a good number of people would even say, "Good riddance.  Gang members are animals."

Whatever we may claim or think - consciously or sub-consciously - we have clearly decided that some people's lives are worth more than others.  I'm guilty of it just as much as anyone: just look at my initial response to Luis's death.

It wasn't until I bumped into one of my classroom aides from that Summer Bridge class in July 2017 that I finally realized who had been killed.  Ten months after the fact, and - perhaps to assuage my guilt - I was frantically Googling Luis, obsessively driving down Smilax Road, and trying to glean every last bit of information about my former student with the beautiful green eyes whose body had been broken and ripped by bullets from a gun.

One of the last things students in that Summer Bridge class did was write a reflection on the 3 weeks we'd had together, and it didn't take me long to find Luis's reflection, buried deep in my Google Drive.  Reading through it brought his personality back to me in a rush of reminiscence.  It also provided tragic clues - foreshadowing, even - to the tumult in his life, tumult that a three-week summer class and Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens was not going to remove.

An excerpt from Luis's reflection (and my platitudes) at the end of the Summer Bridge class, July 2014.

"I’ve tried being proactive," he writes, "but I let my troubles get the best of me which is my problem that I need to stop and not let it continue." He goes on, "I learned about myself that you can plan out your entire life but out of everything you plan about half or less of the things you planned will actually go accordingly." "You have to be OK with that," says my comment on the side. He continues, almost prophetically, "I realized that life problems can’t be ignored because everything catches up to you eventually." Luis doesn't sound cynical, but he does seem defeated by his world. How can this already be the case with a 14-year-old? I despaired, when I read back over it. He ends, poignantly in retrospect, with this:

I really hope in high school I can find myself and realize what I need to do or what I’m meant for because now I feel lost like I have no where to go, in highschool I hope to do better. As in become someone, whether I become a known athlete or something I just want to be known for something good or interesting but right now I don’t do anything other than stay at home so what am I supposed to be known for? This is what I hope to find in high school, a new start, an actual beginning to my life.

And along the side of the document, my comments still exist: "Don't worry about how other people perceive you", "Be the best person you can be", "Enjoy the ride". They sound so hollow and meaningless.


I'm a fairly optimistic person, but Luis's story is very hard to spin in a positive light, and it has got me thinking about the dozens of young men I teach every day who, like Luis, already feel defeated. Our society tells young people that education is the key to success, and I think I believe that to a degree, but what happens if you live in a community where there are barriers to your education? The inability to study or do homework because of dynamics at home. Trauma. A perpetual cycle of violence and instability. We can't just point to the fact that many kids overcome all of these obstacles. Too many do not.

A few weeks ago, I met Todd, a police officer who runs a program that mentors young people who are constantly faced with these kinds of situations. I mentioned Luis, and immediately Todd told me that he had spoken to him just days before his death, warning him of issues in his life that he had to address. Todd told me that Luis assured him that everything was fine. "I got this," Luis had said.

I'm not entirely sure how to bring this to a close; it's already too long. But every word that I type is another word written about Luis. It's another small part of a memorial that, guilt-ridden, I feel obliged to compose. Luis died in near anonymity and at least maybe when people Google him, this post will show up. More than anything, though, this is a call to a recognition of our collective humanity, that the young man who was gunned down as he skateboarded home was not just a gangbanger. He was Luis, the charismatic, articulate young man with dreams, talents, friends, and striking green eyes. He mattered. He matters.

Letting it go

One of the reasons I was asked to go on my recent missions trip to Jordan was because of my familiarity with the culture and the fact that I know some Arabic.

Let me qualify that last statement.  In 1999, I graduated from Durham University with a degree in Arabic with Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies.  I spent my second year of that course in Damascus, Syria.  Since then, I have barely used Arabic.  I have rarely needed to speak it, so--although my ADD doodling during meetings at work usually takes on the form of Arabic writing--to say I am rusty would be a huge understatement.

When my team heard that I could speak Arabic, they were very excited.   As much as I tried to warn them that my language skills were likely to be limited and certainly not what they were hoping for or expecting, my sense was that they were looking forward to having a bona fide translator in their ranks.  When I arrived, most of the team had already been there for a week; after less than 12 hours on Jordanian soil, I was pressed into action almost immediately and assigned to the photography class to help translate the instruction, in English, for our refugee students, who spoke Arabic.

It was an unmitigated disaster.

Never mind that I had just stepped off the plane.  Never mind that I knew nothing about photography in English, let alone Arabic.  Never mind that translating into your non-native language is much harder than the other way round.  I hadn't spoken Arabic - properly, when there was no other option - in nineteen years!

Syria, April 1997: What I looked like one of the last times I spoke Arabic properly.

I spent that evening and most of the next day wanting to go home.  I felt like I had let my team down.  I felt like they had had unreasonably high expectations, and I wanted to retort, with savage satisfaction, "See?  I told you!"

My teammates went out of their way to be understanding, placating, and reassuring, but I continued to feel under immense pressure to deliver in all situations--from negotiating donkey rides at Petra to helping translate menus--and with each failed attempt, my confidence and pride shrank while my frustration mounted.  I could remember random words and phrases, but always after the fact; when it was really needed, I found myself unable to recall simple words--verbs, especially!--thus, rendering my attempts impotent while my poor teammates just wanted to know what was going on.

I remember after our bus driver dropped us--the team and the photography class we were teaching--at Um Ajmal, the site of some Roman ruins, and to my intense frustration, I couldn't even figure out how to arrange a pick-up time with him.

While my annoyance and embarrassment ebbed the longer I was in Jordan--we were still able to function just fine as a team--it wasn't until one of my last home visits that I had a breakthrough.

At the end of the home visits, our translator would usually ask the refugee family if it was OK if we prayed for them.  Either our translator would pray (and then translate later after we'd left), or one of our team would pray in English and the translator would translate into Arabic for the family.  One of the things I had desperately wanted to do was to pray in Arabic.  I had asked the pastor of the church we were staying at for some phrases that I hoped I could--maybe--string together into something intelligible.  But such was my lack of confidence and my overall discouragement that I never piped up to volunteer a prayer.

On our second to last home visit, things were going as normal.  We were sitting on blankets and thin mattresses in the living room (which almost certainly also functioned as a bedroom at night), drinking hot, sweet tea, and talking to a family.  One of the women had just come back from the police station, asking for news of her husband, who, it turned out, had been arrested and returned to the refugee camp where the family was supposed to be, and she now faced the desperately difficult choice: to stay put and be separated, along with her children, from her husband, or to return to the hardship and despair in the refugee camp in order to keep her family together.  Despondency was etched into her face as she sat with her sister and mother-in-law.  Yet for all their tragedy and trauma, this family still managed to graciously host us and show genuine interest in us.  As the time to leave came to an end, Mike, our team leader, said, "Jonathan - this is your last chance to pray in Arabic."

For a moment I sat there, paralyzed with indecision: could I do this?  What if I messed up?  What if "heart" came out as "dog" (the words are very similar in Arabic)?  With sudden understanding, I realized that this family needed comfort, and not the kind of comfort that we could provide.  It wasn't going to be about me.

And so I prayed.

I have no idea whether what came out was correct or appropriate, and I can't even remember what I was trying to say or communicate other than an overwhelming desire for the family to know God's peace, but in that moment, I felt that I finally understood that I had to take the attitude of a servant when it came to my language and my proficiency in it.  When I finally let go of my ego and my desire to be "the man", it allowed me to be used.

I had gone to Jordan to serve, but when it came to my language skills, in my arrogance, even knowing how difficult it was going to be, I did not take that same approach.  I allowed my pride and shattered confidence to impact how I served.  In fact, I was trying--pretty hopelessly--to lead, not serve.  And, looking back, it seems like the times when the team and others around me benefited the most from my Arabic was when I struggled the most.

Struggling, as I tell my students on an almost daily basis, is important.  It teaches us valuable lessons.  However, struggling with a proud heart and a fragile ego is not likely to go well for us.  Only when we let those things go and give ourselves completely to the task at hand will we see the unlikely and unexpected fruits of our toil.

Stained by the sand

I recently returned from a missions trip to Jordan, and it's been a difficult transition.

I have felt listless and disquieted as if I am waiting for something but I'm not sure what.  My experiences already feel very far removed and I worry that I will forget the lessons I've learned and people I've met; I fear that their stories, once sharp and focused, will disappear into a jumbled haze of vague recollections.  I miss my teammates, people I didn't really know two weeks ago and with whom I was pressed into a sort of forced intimacy and yet on whom I came to depend for so many things.

One of the most difficult aspects of returning to my "regular schedule" has been answering the question, "How was your trip?"  In fact, the very thought of being asked this question caused me so much anxiety that I had a mild panic attack before I started teaching on Thursday morning.  How could I walk into my classroom and face students, all of whom, in their own sweet ways, would be curious, polite, and maybe even genuinely interested in where I'd been?

On Friday, I was still feeling out of sorts.  It was a beautiful spring day, and I was summoned home early from work by my wife so that we could all go to the beach together.  When we arrived, I laced up my dusty Merrells and headed south along Highway 101 for a much-needed run, my first in at least two weeks.

I usually do a lot of thinking on my runs, but on this particular one, I don't remember thinking about much.  I was mainly enjoying looking at the gastropubs, coffee shops, and boutiques that I ran past.  Honestly, I was trying not to think about Jordan.  My legs felt good, and my lungs were working hard enough to be pleasantly sore but not make my breathing too ragged.  My shoes and socks felt a little weird, though, as did my feet.  I could feel grains of sand between my toes; clearly, I had forgotten to empty out my shoes from the last time I had walked in the sand...

Stained by this sand from Wadi Rum, Jordan.

6 days previously, I had been sitting, hungry, bleary-eyed and sleep-deprived, at the top of a rocky outcrop in the sand of Wadi Rum, a desert valley in southern Jordan.  It was just after 6 a.m., and we were watching the sun rise over the sheer pinnacles and dramatic cliffs of granite and sandstone.  We'd had a couple of days off from our work with refugees, and the long bus ride, late-night arrival, and some decidedly atypical poor hospitality at a decidedly dodgy campsite unfortunately named "Rum Magic" had left us - even with the spectacular sunrise - disgruntled and longing for the relative comfort of our lodgings back in Mafraq, a town 10 km from the Syrian border.  I hadn't even taken my shoes off that night, and 10 hours in the desert - of which only three were spent sleeping - ensured that a good amount of sand had made it both onto and into my socks.

I ended my run where I had started it, at Ponto Beach.  My kids were playing in the water and my wife was watching them.  In the late afternoon sun, the sea was glittering and the breeze was rapidly cooling my sweaty limbs.  I took off my shoes, peeled off my socks, looked down, and gasped.

My toes were a deep rusty orange.  As I stood on a beach in Southern California, it was the sand from Wadi Rum that I could feel and see, mixed with sweat and dust.  I showed my wife and kids, we had a good chuckle, and then I waded a few steps into the ocean to rinse my feet off.  As usual - when it's not August or September - the sea was numbingly cold and I didn't last long.  Walking back up the beach, I looked down once more.  The sand's stain was still there.  Jordan's influence wasn't going to wash away easily!

Even the most frustrating, mundane, and uncomfortable few hours of my time in Jordan has stayed with me.  How much more, then, will the sublime moments, the heart-breaking stories, and the feelings of true fulfillment remain engrained in my mind!

I had been worried that I would leave my memories of Jordan behind me when I came home, but as it turned out, Jordan came home with me.   And I don't think I'm going to be able to just wash it off.