George's hands

George is never going to graduate from high school.

Well, never say never. Someday he may see some value or a need and come back for a G.E.D., perhaps encouraged by one of the seven kids he says he intends to father, but I would be shocked. He sees his future more clearly than most anyone, more clearly than I see my own, and it's hard to argue with that kind of certainty.

Another family is preparing to move from that community back to Mexico--given the current climate, I wonder if that will become a trend--and yesterday I found myself nearly pleading with a friend of the boy--the-soon-to-be-emigrant is not my student, though I know him-- to help persuade Luis to finish up his classes and his finals before he hits the road.

"You just don't know what life will bring! Someday he may wish he had those credits here! He might come back! He just doesn't know!" and I realize I'm all up in arms because I know that boy, so smart, with such potential, probably won't go to school at all once he crosses the border because no one will make him. He should get what he can, just in case.

I think George is smart too, but I'd never have that talk with him, at least not in that same way. His gravity is too powerful, it always pulls me in, and when he says, "I'm just going to work construction," I always end up saying, "I know you are," though I don't mean it unkindly. It's not as if he doesn't have the skills, the callouses on his hands, the clear-eyed view about how a person in his unofficial position can make the best money. It's not as if he's not 18, a ninth grader on credits who will be a ninth grader until they drop him either for attendance or LOI, "lack of interest." That's truly the official term.

But George is not uninterested; George just does not play the game. He is an artist who is failing Art, and that's the indictment of us all, from school to teacher to student. One of the Art I assignments is to draw hands, though to me that always seemed an advanced project. George's hands, from last year, his first pass through ninth grade, are hanging on my classroom wall. They are pencil sketches, framed in red and black paint, that show enough talent for the brittle white women who staff our art department to take this tough Mexican teenager under their wings and show him another path, or they would, if life were more like a hokey inspirational movie and less like, well, life.

George impressed me with those hands, but better yet, he impressed himself. He knows who he is, that he is more than certain credentialed people see, though I wonder if he's been hanging around high school for his chance for a part in the real-life version of one of those sappy movies. He was excited for a while about a chance to create a scoreboard in another hands-on class, but then it didn't work out, just like soccer and then football eventually required credits he didn't have.

Though occasionally he gets diligent in algebra or science--more for the personal challenge, I suspect--he'll pass neither class. On the other hand, he's done everything I've asked him this year, writing while asking me how to spell every third word. In that room, the one with the hands on the wall, pride--finally--does not interfere. I take no credit, display no magic wand. If anything, it's the fact that I don't have 150 students, and thus the time to talk to him--for years now-- like the grown-up that he nearly is. If only I taught art or something mechanical, something to keep him coming back or to open a door.

When the news made its way through the ESL student network that George was working days again because he needed the money, I wasn't too surprised; I think I was more offended that I had to hear it third-hand. But, I'll see him again. One day he'll show up, ask what we're doing, and, until the school cuts him loose, we'll just start fresh, or at least, again. In the meantime, though, and forever after, I've got his drawings centered in my back-corner student gallery: the low-riders, the roses, and of course, the hands.

Those hands on my wall are so realistic, so powerful, so strong. But, they're just hands, helpless on their own to go or to do or to learn anything new. They are just so George.