The teacher is up at 5:45 every morning, to school by 6:30. First bell at 7:23. Class begins at 7:30. Lunch at 10:30. Final bell at 2:30. Coaches the in-season sport, tutors, then finally finishes up the next day’s planning. Collapses into bed.
The student jumps from bar to nightclub. Out until 2, 3, maybe even 5 a.m., he grabs a couple hours sleep before dragging into class. Tries to keep his eyes open before heading back out to play another night of smoke-filled jazz.
The two converge in a middle-school classroom in the Mississippi Delta. The bar hopper is Shawn, an exhausted 14-year-old, a brilliant jazz musician who can make any instrument he touches sing. The teacher is Alex Moseman ’11, just weeks after the political science major and hammer thrower for the 2011 NCAC Champ-ion track team earned his sheepskin from Wabash and stepped into a classroom as a Teach For America teacher-in-training.
“You have to wake him up,” Moseman recalls his TFA advisor telling him. “This is how Shawn’s not going to have to do that anymore. You have got to wake him up.”
TFA proved to be a wake-up for Mose-man, too. He learned that for Shawn, bar hopping meant survival, though not his own. The money he earned playing music was supporting his two-year-old daughter. The boy had been kicked out of his home—for fighting with his mother’s boyfriend—and was forced to live with his uncle, who took his money.
“I’m going to try and keep some of my money this weekend and buy Five-Hour Energy to stay awake in school,” Shawn once promised Moseman.
“That’s just wrong,” Moseman says. “No kid should need energy drinks to stay awake in middle school.”
It was just the beginning of the wrongs Moseman would see during two years with TFA. But that first summer in Mississippi, he caught a glimpse in himself of the most powerful gift a teacher can give.
“I got to see Shawn play at The Pickled Okra after my training was over,” Mose-man recalls. “It felt kind of awkward at first —here’s this kid I’ve been teaching all summer now up on-stage jamming away. I met his mom—basically had a parent/teacher conference in a bar! I told her Shawn had met his growth goal—far exceeded it. I was upfront about how he had a lot of work to do, but if he kept working, he’d be fine.
“It was really cool to be able to interact with him and his family—not necessarily as his teacher, but someone who cared about him.”
Caring for students, Moseman discovered, takes on many forms.
In the fall of 2011 he started a full-time assignment at John Marshall Community High School on the east side of Indiana-polis.
“I actually didn’t interview at all, which was the first big red flag.” Moseman laughs. “I just got an e-mail one day from IPS that said, ‘Congratulations, you’re the Title One reading teacher at John Marshall.’”
The school was on the brink of state take-over due to continuous underachievement. Moseman’s students were at least three grade levels behind in reading. In his first year he switched curricula six times.
“They threatened to fire me at least once a month my first semester,” he recalls. “My students were the lowest-level middle-school students in the lowest performing school in Indiana.”
The pressure was mounting.
During fall break he returned to Wabash for a football game to clear his head and, Moseman hoped, get a pep talk from track Coach Clyde Morgan.
“I told Morgan I couldn’t sleep. I’d lost 20 pounds. I was stressed out, couldn’t eat. I had no idea what I was doing.
“Morgan shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘Quit then.’”
Moseman was stunned.
“For three years I ran for him. Every-thing was about how you can’t quit. You can’t let it beat you. ‘Nothing Breaks Us.’ He’s supposed to tell me to gut it out—tell me to keep going.”
Morgan laughs thinking back on the conversation.
“Alex would come into my office for track practice [as a volunteer track coach] with his shoulders all slumped down. But when he started talking about those kids, he would get excited. He’d start to sit up a little straighter. I knew he wouldn’t give up on them. He just needed a little ‘guidance’ to see that.”
Moseman returned to John Marshall and started taking cues from fellow teachers like Juli Wakeman, with whom he co-taught for half a semester.
“She was only three years older than me, but she had an incredible presence and intensity in the classroom that showed me I needed to step up my game.”
There was Allison Kaufman, “who invested so much of her time, emotion, and energy in her students.”
Her dedication brought to his mind words Moseman had heard once during his TFA training: Your students don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.
“Those words informed my teaching for the next year and a half. Even on days where the students acted terrible, I was exhausted, or an administrator yelled at me, I could always fall back on that. No matter how many times they told me they hated me, they knew I cared about them. There were days when that’s what got me out of bed.”
And there were days staying in bed would have been easier. Like the day he was punched after trying to break up a fight between two girls—about the time one of them pulled the phone in his classroom out of the wall.
He had an eighth-grader on maternity leave and another girl who was taken from her mother because she was being molested by her mom’s boyfriend.
He once broke up a boyfriend/girlfriend argument and continued to teach his class while keeping them at arms length as he waited on the school officer to arrive.
“I was literally holding the two of them apart. When there was this moment of quiet, I said, ‘So, back to page 27.’”
MOSEMAN WAS SURPRISED by how tough the young teenagers in his class were.
“It was how they learned to survive. They didn’t seem to trust anyone. Obvi-ously things bothered them and they were afraid of things, but they would never openly show that. That was so telling of the environment that they live in. They can’t be afraid of things.
“When you go to school at Wabash there is so much focus on making you the best person you can possibly be. Many of these kids, though, they honestly don’t have people in their lives who want them to be successful or who know how to help them be successful. As their teacher, it was my responsibility to find a way to make them successful. I was 23, 24 years old. I didn’t even really know what that meant for myself yet.”
In his first month of teaching at John Marshall, he met Keandre, a seventh-grader who was reading at second-grade level.
“I hated his guts. I thought he was lazy. He didn’t care about anything. He was loud, and he was obnoxious.”
But early on Moseman opted to coach, hoping to see a different side of his students, and on the basketball court, he got to know Keandre better.
“One-on-one he’ll admit that’s why he doesn’t do his work—because he doesn’t want people to know he can’t do it. He’d rather not be made fun of for that. He’s one of those kids I just can’t help but care about. He’s in trouble a lot, but he has this smile and this way in which he relates to people.
“People always ask me, ‘Are there any good kids at your school?’ They’re all good kids. They’re just kids. It’s tough to say how accountable you’re going to make a 12- or 13-year-old for what they do and the way they live when it’s all they’ve ever known. No one has shown them differently. I’m not apologizing for the things that they do. Obviously, somebody has to be accountable. But it’s tough to say where that line is.”
Standing on that line are teachers at schools like John Marshall. Moseman still talks with those he worked with there.
“They amaze and inspire me to this day. They can flip the switch almost the moment they walk in a classroom. They’re not being demanding, they just know that’s what their kids need. They have to do it for their kids.
“Caring can be dangerous sometimes. When you invest yourself in something, you’re putting yourself on the line. Teachers are not just hanging out with two or three kids. It’s 25 or more in each class. That’s a lot of people to care about all day.
“I can’t say that teaching taught me how to care, but it taught me how to care a lot. I learned how to really fail. And, I thought I knew how to work hard, but teaching taught me how to work harder, taught me the difference between being tired and being exhausted.
Most important, Moseman says, “Teaching taught me how to be vulnerable. If I hadn’t learned to feel safe and okay even while I was feeling hurt and tired and not so good about myself, I wouldn’t have been able to open up in the way that made me successful in the end.”
MOSEMAN NEVER INTENDED to continue teaching after his commitment to TFA ended last spring. He is back at Wabash this fall as an admissions counselor, although he still recruits for Teach For America. He also hopes to get involved with a local chapter of Students First, a grass-roots organization seeking educational reform.
“Now that I’m not in the classroom, I can’t influence my students. It’s tough because I want to, but the only thing I can do is to care about them, talk about them, and try to motivate people to be involved in some way in their lives.
“And now I have people like Keandre or Shawn, not statistics, to talk about. I can point to any of the kids I taught and have a face to put with the issues.”
Moseman and the young jazz player have kept in touch since that summer in Mississippi. Now 16 years old, Shawn is working hard and “doing just fine,” as his teacher believed he could.
“He is very genuine about wanting to get better. He moved to Atlanta, and I believe he’s in a magnet school for the arts. He’s planning on going to college, to keep playing and studying music.”
That convergence of student and teacher two summers ago continues to shape the futures of both.
“I think schools are the best place to start attacking a lot of problems or challenges that people face,” Moseman says. “In a country that claims to offer freedom to everyone, if you’re not educated, you can’t really ever be free.”