Success - at last

Success Story
Algebra two, spring semester. C was one of seven seniors in that class. She was also one of the four pregnant girls. She is the only student I have known in Mississippi to have gotten an abortion. C graduated. She is my success story.
In February, C wrote me a note. "I will stay after school and do anything", she said "math is my downfall and I plan to march in May." C was so far behind in math that I would have been shocked before I got to the delta. No sense of how to deal with negative numbers or fractions and no sense of what it meant to solve even the simplest linear equations. I am still not sure how much she knows about logarithms and quadratic equations, but she knows an awful lot about persistence.
When she wrote me that note, she was failing with a low sixty. She slept through class and did not pay attention, but rarely talked and was never rude. I never could completely blame her for not paying attention, even though it frustrated me enormously. The material, as presented in class, was so far over her head that asking her to pay attention was be like asking me to pay attention to a presentation on the intricacies of Chinese grammar. But she got better. When I'd write something on the board and ask her what it is, her stock answer was always "A hot mess." But when she came after school, I realized that she had started to at least take notes on the hot mess, even if she didn't understand it, and she began to come ready with questions.
C came to see me after school almost every day. We worked and worked, going over imaginary numbers for what seemed like forever. These sessions were usually as frustrating for me as they were for her, because things just never seemed to click. By eighteen, if some basic things haven't clicked already, there is nothing that I can do in a few months to make them click. Just keep on plodding away at them until they become habit. We often lost the why of the math, which hurt to give up, but we eventually got the how, enough so that she had moved herself within touching distance of passing as the end of the year rolled around.
That was when I started Senior Saturdays. We met at McDonald's, every Saturday that I did not have to go up to Oxford, from nine until the last of them left. I never left before noon, and often later. C came every Saturday. It seemed like she stayed after school and made it on Saturdays not because of her parents but rather in spite of them. Her mother was always calling her, telling her she had to come home for this or that or that she had to pick her up at a certain time, and no other. C, however, thought that her mother and I would get along just fine. "You two should go out" she told me one day, "she real cute." I told her, of course, that I wasn't interested, but she continued "Why not? She real young. Aw, you must not like black girls." Eventually, however, I was able to assure C that my lack of interest had nothing to do with race, and that I was sure her momma was very nice, but that the demands of teaching left little time for a relationship.
C passed. She also passed Advanced Algebra and Trig, which she was taking simultaneously and which we worked on sometimes. She even passed Econ, and so in May, she marched. She probably won't remember anything about the quadratic formula or imaginary numbers, but she will remember that she worked really hard, and that she was successful. If I had not helped her, she would have failed. I guess there is a measure of success in that.