Margarita Soda and Candygrams

Hi! This is Scholastic Alchemy, a twice-weekly blog where I write about education and related topics. Mondays usually see me posting a selection of education links and some commentary about each and Wednesday posts are typically a deep dive into an education topic of my choosing. If Scholastic Alchemy had a thesis, I suppose it would go a little like this: We keep trying to induce educational gold from lead and it keeps not working but we keep on trying. My goal here is to talk about curriculum, instruction, policy, public opinion, and other topics in order to explain why I think we keep failing to produce this magical educational gold. If you find that at all interesting, please consider a paid subscription here, or at the parallel publishing spot on Beehiiv. (Some folks hate the ‘stack, I get it.) That said, all posts are going to remain free for the foreseeable future. Thanks for reading!

Author’s Note: Today’s post is a revised republishing of a story from early in my teaching career and some reflection on that story. I tell this story regularly and have written it up twice. It’s a series of events I think about regularly, even today more than fifteen years removed. The kids’ names are altered to protect them, although I don’t know how necessary that is anymore. They’re in their early thirties now. The reason I’m sharing it is because I think it explains why I embrace the idea of Scholastic Alchemy. While I am usually talking about school policy, curriculum, economics, or some other big-picture education topic, the principle of Scholastic Alchemy applies even in the minutiae of day-to-day teaching. We might have a plan, an idea about how things will work out, but often times the underlying reality is more complex and our well-intentioned efforts have unexpected results.

1.

Christian was suddenly standing right behind me with a question that came across just a little too urgent for the normally sleepy 9th grader. “Mister,” they never used my last name, “can I go to the bathroom?” It was early in the day for a bathroom break and we’d only just started the class. I asked if he’d finished his warm-up activity, already knowing the answer. He replied in the way every kid believes will gain acquiescence, “please, I have to pee. Mister, please!”

It worked, “Ok, go. Write a pass.”

He didn’t write a pass.

He also didn’t think I saw it, but I did. As Christian turned to go out the door, he tried to shift the open Coke can from being hidden behind his body to being hidden in front of his body. Why would he need to take a Coke to the bathroom?

God damn it, I thought.

Christian was a nice enough kid. He mostly did his work for me and appeared, on most days, to give a shit so long as I could rouse him from his sleepy affect. Not that I hadn’t been warned about him. His discipline record came in one of those expandable accordion folders instead of the normal manilla variety and was pretty much filled to capacity. He’d never been much of a problem for me though. Back then, I liked to think that I understood kids like him: what mattered more than anything else was respect. Show him respect and he would show you respect. Show him disrespect and he would show you disrespect.

Respect and loyalty are the two principal behaviors which every Sureño must abide by. Sureños means southerners and can sometimes generally refer to people from Mexico, southern Mexico, or anyone from any country south of Mexico. The Sureños are also a loosely related group of Hispanic gangs which span the entire US. Think of it like a franchising operation and you’re going in the right direction. Some people open a Burger King; others start a Sureños gang. Christian, being a member of one of the local Sureños gangs, understood the special kind of reciprocity I sought to earn better than most.

Sureños gangs, like many Mexican gangs, identify themselves by utilizing the number 13 which Christian had recently tattooed on his shoulders. 1 and 3. M is the 13th letter in the alphabet and, with Sureños gangs, represents the Mexican Mafia. Gangs, like cigarette companies, social media, and fast-food chains, know that the key to their longevity is to get ‘em while they’re young. According to the accordion folder, Christian had been involved with the Sureños since he was 13 - another symbolic use of the number is that 13 is the age of recruitment.

As the youngsters age, they are put through trials and must prove their loyalty and respect. Usually these have the added element of distancing the kids from their families and their community so that they come to rely on the gang more. They’ll have the kids steal or start fights. They’ll try to have the kids get kicked out of school, not an easy feat these days. Christian was no different. He’d followed his orders and ended up in the county alternative school to repeat 8th grade but did well there and returned to the neighborhood public high school for 9th grade, where I had him as a student in my ELA class.

Christian came back into class after taking a bit longer than I was comfortable with. The Coke can was not visible.

He greeted me with a “’Sup mister?”

I tried to imply he’d been lacking in respect with a stern response, “You have work to do. Get to it.”

He walked immediately to his seat but I saw the Coke can appear again a few minutes later. Behind Christian sits Joseph, another Hispanic student and easily my favorite kid in that class. They are sharing the Coke. They are also whispering in Spanish and generally acting weird. As I approached, the can disappeared but my finely tuned alcoholism detected the unmistakable tinge of liqueur. Unsure of how to proceed, I simply said “throw it away” and pointed to the trash.

I retrieved the empty can after class and passed it along to the right people. He’d shown me disrespect so consequences had to follow. The contents of the can smelled like a margarita. Margarita soda? Not a manly drink for a hardened gang member. I chuckled about it as I walked the hall to the nearest administrator’s office and resolved to make fun of Christian for it if he ever came back and if we ever talked about it.

If things ran their course, Christian would only get a few days of suspension. Typical of our school system, it would be out-of-school suspension and Christian would spend all of that time in the care of his Sureños brothers. They’d drink and cruse around and commit minor crimes and other mischief. However, he decided to flip out on the administrator who pulled him from the next class. Christian drank the whole bottle of margarita-mix he’d had in his pants right in front of an assistant principal, cussed him out, and then ran out of the building. At the time it was unclear what would happen to next but I never saw Christian again.

Joseph also received a few days of suspension for participating in the drinking. Joseph really wasn’t the kind of kid to do something like this but he had expressed the desire to ‘help’ Christian in the past. He was not part of the gang as far as I knew. Perhaps by playing along Joseph was hoping to keep Christian’s friendship so that he could help him some other time. There’s no way to know for sure. This was the first disciplinary action against Joseph ever, so he now had his own manilla folder.

2.

The next day was Valentine’s day and the girls in my 4th period were standing in a gaggle just outside my door. They talked quickly and quietly and ignored the bell for class: clearly an important conversation. All were dressed in what someone somewhere convinced them was their nicest clothing. Valentine’s day was, apparently, a big fucking deal.

And the bags. Each girl carried an assortment of bags. Probably three each. All were brightly colored in shades of red, pink, and white. Some had flowers and teddy bears and boxes of chocolate. One had three balloons in the shape of hearts. After a minute or so they finally heeded my request and paraded into the classroom. Of these only Palma looked out of place. She wore jeans and a sweatshirt. Her hair was unkept. There were circles under her eyes. The girls crowded around her like bodyguards and escorted her to her seat: a protective detail resplendent with hearts and bears and boxes and hormone-addled teen fashion mistakes.

“My mom says, ‘no boyfriend, no problem,’ that’s why I don’t date,” Olivia said as they walked by. A murmur of agreement from the others.

A few minutes later a knock at the door interrupted class.

“Candygram!” announced the kids at the door.

That year, candygrams were a fundraiser for the Latino Club. How the Latino Club was able to do this I do not know. Each year there was a flurry of activity in the first week of January to get fundraisers approved. It was against district policy to have two fundraisers on the same day which led to fierce competition for the obvious fundraising occasions, Valentine’s Day chief among them. Usually only the major clubs get the top slots - Beta Club, NHS, various athletic boosters. That Latino Club had one of the prime fundraising events was a bit of a coup.

These candygrams were a simple affair: construction paper hearts in ubiquitous red and pink with a foil wrapped chocolate heart scotch-tapped to it. Obviously designed to maximize profit margins. Unlike many of our clubs which have dues in the hundreds of dollars, Latino Club asked only $15 to join. The middle of each card had a message printed on it. There were so many purchased that it took the club’s members two class periods to complete all the deliveries. Some of this was logistical problems because, I later learned, they didn’t take the time to get the schedules for each student receiving a delivery.

Still, it ended up being a successful fundraiser for the club and raised their status in a school where the demographics were shifting in a decidedly Latino direction. They spent their funds supplying jerseys for the school’s soccer team, which had only a modicum of fundraising support, especially compared to football and baseball. Solidarity, perhaps.

I welcomed the delivery crew into the room where they began to call out recipients’ names, “Cellia, Rebecca, Anthony, Palma...” He was cut off when Palma burst into tears, ran past the delivery kids, and out the door followed shortly by Olivia and two other girls. Not knowing what just happened, I grabbed the candy grams for my class and sent the delivery crew on their way.

One card I held was inked:

Later, I gave the remaining cards to each girl save Palma’s which I gave to Olivia with a meek, “sorry.”

“It’s okay. She just broke up with Joseph last night,” Olivia explained.

I restarted class again by reminding them of the plan for that day, “let’s get out our research packets and outlines. Once you’re finished with your outline, show it to me and then you can have a laptop from the cart so you can begin typing.”

All I was thinking, though, was God damn it.

3.

I never talked with Joseph or Palma about the incident with the margarita soda or about the candygram. I don’t know, or can’t remember, if they got back together or not. Looking back, I guess that is a sign that I didn’t develop a deep relationship with my students. All those years ago, when I first penned this story, I wrote that Joseph was my favorite, but I’d be hard pressed to tell you anything about how he ultimately did in my class or what the rest of his high school experience was like.

Likewise, in my quest to be liked, to give and get respect from kids like Christian, I never asked whether respect was what he really needed. I had a theory about how the relationship was supposed to work and I followed it, convinced that I’d cracked some kind of code. After all, Christian was generally better behaved in my class and completed more work for me than his other teachers. What more should I have cared about? It only occurred to me years later that one reason Christian was often sleepy in my class is that he could have been drunk. What I took as typical teen behavior may have actually been a problem that I failed to notice until February, seven months into teaching Christian. Even then, that noticing and the disciplinary referral resulted in a kid dropping out and focusing on his… extracurriculars.

I’m not writing this in the sense that it’s my fault — I didn’t recruit Christian into a gang and by the time he got to me, I doubt I could have gotten him out of gang life. I didn’t make him drink and I didn’t make him lash out at the assistant principal. Those decisions are still ultimately on him but he was also a child. Even a drunk, gangbanging 16-year-old is a kid and kids need help making decisions. They need to feel like people care about them and are interested in their wellbeing. At that point in my teaching, I wasn’t there. I wanted the kids to do their work and to get along with me and with each other. It looked like success but it was missing any real attention to their non-academic needs.

I was a Scholastic Alchemist. I expected my pedagogy and practice as an educator to yield one result but often got another. Over the years, I began feeling more attuned to a style of teaching that cared more directly about students’ wellbeing and saw their wellbeing as a prerequisite for other kinds of success. Even then, I was often humbled by the need to shift focus back to academics as I fell behind the expected pace or didn’t sufficient cover an important topic or skill because the class had been in their feels. What I am convinced of now is how complex schooling is from top to bottom. That complexity necessitates nuanced and often bespoke solutions to problems that may be systemic, local, or even individual. The simpler and easier something appears, the more I have learned to look again, and question that simplicity. What relationships am I missing? What hidden contexts are informing the problem in front of me? What assumptions form my expected outcomes?

Thanks for reading!