Teaching Tools

By Mike Rose

I am sitting on a large toolbox, steadying myself with a hard grip on a pole as this old school bus rattles its way around another turn, over another pitted side street. Seventeen-year-old Terry sits across from me with two days' beard, green eyes, slight nose, watching, listening as a boy to my left catalogs for me his history of injury: broken leg, broken hand, a full scar, another scar, a chipped bone. The boy has a cane at his side that he tries not to use. Recent knee surgery. Terry shifts his gaze to me, elbows on knees, not quite matter-of-fact, but not as animated as I would see him once I got to know him. He tells me of a foot torn so badly in a basketball game that he was in a cast for months. Then another broken bone. Then a scar on his hand, which he shows me, spreading his fingers. "How'd you get that?" I ask. "Punched out a headlight," he says. Several rows back, three or four boys are talking about drug testing, trading tales on how to confound the test. "Use garlic," one says. "Nah, cranberry juice," says another. Rumored successes and failures fly back and forth. "Garlic, garlic, garlic," concludes the most insistent of the boys. Terry, it turns out, failed his drug test a month ago.

Terry and most of the others on this bus are in a program for young people who have a history of drug abuse and, therefore, a history with the juvenile justice system. The program enables them, as part of their probation, to finish high school in a curriculum designed to furnish them with entry-level competence in one or more of the skilled trades. Though most of the boys have mediocre to poor school records, a number of them take to the program, seeing it as a way out of a bad situation and, yes, an opportunity. Some of the boys-and Terry is one of them-throw their considerable energy into the work, running back and forth to collect supplies in the rear of the bus, taking stairs two at a time, curling themselves around and under sink cabinets, toilets, the underbellies of old houses, a little crazed at times, adolescent and eager, probably psychochemical at times, at times existential. "You feel that sense of urgency in them," observes Jon Guthier, their teacher. "Because even as things go well, something could fall apart...