I labored over this assignment, avoiding it to a large degree. The search into who I truly am, where I truly reside, and from where I have truly come is a difficult one. It requires that I reflect on myself in some uncomfortable ways. It is difficult to admit this to myself, but I think I don't have a true understanding of my place, either physical or mental. I have spent the last several years exploring new places, so I set about this work as an exploratory venture, hoping to shed some light on the places which define me.
A Transitory Physical Place Physically speaking, I am a Nebraska migrant, traveling about the locales of the state, engaging with diverse towns and people. Now in my third year of teaching, I am in my third district - my third town. Since leaving Omaha in 2002, I have lived in Lincoln, Dodge, Omaha, and Elkhorn. Since graduating college, I have taught in Dodge, Millard, and Ralston. Given this, I have a quite varied sense of place. In Dodge I was a big city teacher struggling against the social politics of the small town. In Millard I sat awkwardly as a former graduate teaching alongside my former teachers. In Ralston I am the new guy in a department of knowledgeable professionals; the young, seemingly inadequate one struggling to catch up to my peers.
A Mental Struggle with Physical PlaceI have to pause here (and did so for quite some time). I have been talking with a student of mine over the last few weeks. In that short time, I have learned that: she immigrated from Mexico with her family, is troubled by the fact that she is not old enough to work and cannot help her family financially, she has a child whom she lovingly calls her polloito hermoso (her handsome chicken), and she comes to my class every day, fighting for her education and the future that lies ahead. This young woman warps my sense of place. I feel that I am physically migratory - yet am I more of a migrant than her? I haven't even left my home state. I feel that I am represented by struggle - yet have I struggled as much as this high school student with a child?
It's difficult for me to try to apply these labels to myself that, in the grand scheme of things, don't seem to fit. Instead of pursuing my previous way of looking at this further, I'm going to describe my place physically, and see if I can launch from there:
Physical Place, more ConcretelyI currently reside in two physical places. I live in Elkhorn, Nebraska, a well-to-do, predominantly white suburb of Omaha. I rent an apartment in Elkhorn with my long-term girlfriend and fellow teacher (Brenna). I look outside and see lots of green grass and Elkhorn High School atop a hill on the horizon. We get little traffic here and people rarely seem to go outside. Many of the other
s in my apartment complex also seem to wear the transitory badge; many are actually former college friends of Brenna's, and have commented they are here until they can afford to move on. Across the hall from us resides a woman with children, who seems more rooted into this apartment. All told, the people here are friendly and feel familiar. During my days off work, I rarely stray south of Pacific St and
rarely east of 144th Street. But neither do I stray to Elkhorn's main street (so much so that I can't even name it). The weekends bring two butts on a run-down couch, and trips down Maple Street to national grocery chains. It feels very private and removed here, yet not quite rural. Evidence of people is everywhere - knocking noises from the ceiling or the neighbor's cigarette smoke wafting in the open windows, but the apartment could easily exist in Dodge or Elkhorn, and if I never stepped outside, I wouldn't know the difference.
The other place I inhabit regularly is Ralston High School in Ralston, Nebraska, where life is much different. When I transition to Ralston each weekday, I am always reminded about how vast Omaha is. 7am traffic jams on the Dodge Expressway and flying past cars on I-80 Eastbound quickly reminds me that just miles east of where I am, seclusion and privacy are valued a little less. From when I leave in the morning to when I return in the evening, I am surrounded by people. In perspective, Omaha is not that large, but I retain the blissfully ignorant part of me who thinks the world isn't all that large, that it can't get much worse than the mass of people on my morning commute. (This ignorance was one of the reasons I hesitated to explore my sense of place - I know that I don't view my place in a practical perspective - but perhaps that's not a bad thing, if I even want to begin to blow up my place like Least Heat-Moon did with Chase County.)
Within Ralston's walls, I am in a far different place than I am accustomed to. In my interview for Ralston, it was made very clear to me that I was entering a special district. Around half of the student body qualifies for free/reduced lunch. There is a significant minority representation in Ralston, with a prominent Mexican community. Many minority students are quite open with their cultures and their struggles, which encourages me that there can be positive discourse among races -- I may sound ignorant again here, but know that I have had relatively little experience conducting any sort of discourse along these lines. And although is it largely unfamiliar to me, Ralston is a special place. Ralston is a place which puts me out of my comfort zone, challenges me to reflect on myself, and battles with socio-economic issues. It has let me listen to the language of Spanish and hinted at a second world which I can't pretend to understand. It is also the first place where I have felt a strong bond with the community of teachers (at least, the English Department) rather than just a few individuals. It is a place of encouragement.
Ralston High School itself sits on 84th St, between Q and Harrison Streets. Growing up, I never went east of 120th, and certainly never to 84th (you see - I had HEARD things about going too far east, and that was a BAD idea, so I was told). Growing up, I couldn't have told you what lay past Q Street, and could barely have made it to Q Street on my own. I now spend hours a day teaching in a community which I knew nothing about 10 years ago.
In reality, I know very little about either place I'm in - Elkhorn or Ralston. But I am close to my old stomping grounds, still passing by my mother's house, my old high school, and areas filled with memories of my not-so-distant past. I've yet to make a value judgment on this fact, but it has caused me to reflect on myself, that while I may not necessarily be afraid of change, I certainly don't seek it out, and often return to that which is comfortable to me.
Mental PlaceI have discussed much of my mental place already, in my descriptions and relations to my physical place. I believe that mentally I am somewhat of a transient. I have journeyed farther mentally than physically, entering realms I never knew about and taking risks beyond that of the physical realm. This transiency, this wandering, is much less focused than my physical wanderings. Little has stayed stable for me in the last several years of my life. I was always the inept one in high school, the begrudging anti-socialite who wanted to be social but repeatedly failed at it. I began to emerge from this in high school and went to college. I worked hard through college, battling through family deaths and the rigors of unrelated double majors.
Near the end of college I had started to figure out the social aspect of things, and added a significant other to my life. She has traveled with me through the last three years of my life, and I might say she was the only stable thing in my life for those years. The rest of my life seemed to be plagued by instability. After graduating, I moved to a small town, which rocked my notions of cultures and people. For the first time, I came face-to-face with individuals who were truly open with who they were. I met the unabashedly racist; I counseled a student who feared her father's alcohol abuse; I reasoned with a student with rock-bottom self-esteem. Before coming here, I had never known people to be so open and trusting so soon, and have never known it since.
I left that small town in favor of Millard, a land of greater privilege. I remembered quickly my own experiences here. I was nontraditional. I was poor among the rich. I liked the fine arts and athletics and could not choose - not until I was forced to choose. (Because as we all surely know by now, we certainly cannot like both arts and sports; there must be a choice between the two, my coach demanded. I guess he thought I would see things from his perspective.)
I never really did understand my peers in those days, and had similar problems trying to understand the privileged children with whom I worked that year in Millard. As much as I tried, I could not know what they knew.
Now at Ralston, I'm trying to wrap my head around new issues. Some of my students have children, some sell drugs, some take drugs. Some of my students have sharp analytical minds and struggle to read aloud or write a coherent sentence. Some students can write beautifully but cannot articulate their thoughts in spoken word. This is a world that is starting to make sense to me, one that I can identify with. A world of imperfection, yet a world of hope. I sense so much hope within many of these students.
All of this movement has taken a toll on me. Trying to wrap my head around this third curriculum is more exhausting than ever before, like I have been traveling for as many years and have yet to stop to rest. I am one who used to thrive on consistency and confidence - I knew what would come next, would anticipate it, and would meet it head-on. Now, that confidence has been replaced by uncertainty and exhaustion. I wonder when I will finally stick, when I will no longer need to learn new building policies, when I can work from a structure I have already established.
I mentioned a level of uncomfortability in my opening paragraph. I think this lack of comfort lies primarily in my mind's place. Uncomfortable. Nervous. And tired. Tired, yet hopeful.
-Tyler
Today I'm looking outside the back door of my apartment and see this place differently than I did last night. This simple landscape reminds me of throwing the football around on the grass, of walks around the apartment complex, of staring up at the soft blue skies and letting the stress of the world fall away. My favorite thing about this area is the one, lone tree in the middle of this clearing. It seems to have come from someone else; it doesn't fit the design scheme of this complex. It looks displaced. All around here, clusters of trees grow together, or in lines of trees equally spaced. But not this one. Alone he sits ruling over his empty kingdom.
