For these kids, success is hard-won and sweet

It is late morning in August, not the hottest day, but hot enough. The trees outside are still, no breeze. In the classroom, four ceiling fans try their best while a small platoon of underpowered floor fans blow the hot air around. The lights in the classroom are turned off so as to eliminate even that one small source of heat.

Twenty-five eighth-graders are reading Ray Bradbury’s short story, "The Drummer Boy of Shiloh."

Me, thought the boy, I got only a drum, two sticks to beat it, and no shield.

There’s something being repaired on campus, and the whine of the electric tools drowns out the teacher’s voice, so she talks louder. There’s no thought of closing the door because it’s just too hot.

On the road just outside the classroom windows, the rail line is being built. When teacher Mary Ann Johnson gets to school at 6 a.m., there’s loud banging from the project on Farrington Highway, but that stops when the first bell rings — an agreement was worked out to save the louder construction noise for before and after school hours.

This is Waipahu Intermediate, a school like many of our schools where learning takes place despite all the distractions and impediments. It is hot. It is noisy. Some mornings, homeless people are sleeping in the bushes just outside the classroom door. Other days, the homeless are gone but their trash and feces remain. It is not the worst classroom, but it is not the best.

Yet the students are intent. The eighth-graders, sweat sliding down behind their ears and maroon school shirts stuck to their backs, are focused on the story. They are quiet kids, the kind who know the answer and whisper it to themselves but have to be encouraged to raise their hands. But they do. They work up the nerve.

"What do we know about a musket?" the teacher asks.

"They put gunpowder and the black ball inside and pack it down. It’s kind of hard to do that when you’re being shot at," a boy offers. He gladly receives the acknowledgement of his thorough answer.

This lesson, a critical analysis of the story of a boy their age facing his fears the night before a Civil War battle, is set thousands of miles and many generations away but is so relevant. Like the boy with a drum and no shield, these kids have to make the best of what they have.

I’m sitting in the back of the class. I’m looking out the window at the fluorescent green shirts of the crew building the rail and the huge crane in the middle of Farrington Highway. I’m the only one gazing out the window. All the students are looking alternately at their books and at their teacher. Every boy’s hair is short, the back and sides buzzed with clippers. Every girl’s hair is long and brunette except for one with half a head of bottle highlights. It is midway through the first quarter and already time for them to start worrying about report cards. Johnson reminds them about turning in assignments.

"I’m not your momma. I’m not going to hold your hand. I’m not going to wipe your nose. I will tell you the truth. Life will not hold your hand, and I know you all want so much to grow up."

Already this year, the eighth-graders have learned the literary analysis known as "the Hero’s Journey" based on the work of Joseph Campbell, something that is taught in graduate school writing programs. The kids are well-versed in the concepts, and can call out plot points in the story:

"Refusal of the call!"

"Meeting the mentor!"

"Crossing the threshold!"

The students had to write short stories using this study of plot structure. A stack of their papers sits on Johnson’s desk. One kid has turned in a double-spaced manuscript that looks to be close to 20 pages. He was inspired and just kept going.

In the story they’re reading, a general comforts the drummer boy by acknowledging the odds stacked against them and admitting his own fear.

"You want to cry some more, go on ahead. I did the same last night."

"You, sir?"

"God’s truth. Thinking of everything ahead. Both sides figuring the other side will just give up, and soon, the war done in weeks and us all home. Well, that’s not how it’s going to be. And maybe that’s why I cried."

This is how learning happens here. This is how the battle is fought, despite distractions and potential excuses — sometimes, in the face of fear and failure and weariness and frustration.

Does success have to be so hard-won? No. It doesn’t. But when it is, it’s pretty sweet.

Still, no one should have to put up with so much for the right to be educated.

Understand that Johnson is just one of many in the army of public school teachers who make magic happen every day. Know that she was hesitant to let me use her name, did not want to be singled out, but said it was OK that I use her class as an an allegory of how hard teachers have to work and how much students want to learn. Maybe not every teacher and maybe not every student, but certainly most.

It is noon now, and the kids are thinking about lunch. The spell the story had cast over the class is starting to wear off and the kids are starting to remember how hot and hungry they are.

But there’s enough time to get to the heart of the piece, and the students sit a little higher at their desks and listen, almost holding their breaths, for the secret the drummer boy is about to learn that will keep him going despite the odds:

If he, Joby, beat slow tomorrow, the heart would beat slow in the men. They would lag by the wayside. They would drowse in the fields on their muskets. They would sleep forever, after that, in those same fields, their hearts slowed by a drummer boy and stopped by enemy lead. But if he beat a sure, steady, ever faster rhythm, then, then their knees would come up in a long line down over that hill, one knee after the other, like a wave on the ocean shore!

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Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.