Have you ever had a grand realization, one that knocks your metaphysical socks off and clears the air inside your mind and to which you answer, yes (?). Gus Garcia Middle School, 2007-2009, second and third years of my teaching career. As my friend and I texted about a few weeks ago, Gus Garcia Middle School will always be depressing.
Gus Garcia Middle School is also where and when I started to run, away, toward, maybe both? Like him, I chose to run rather than to face the music. No, I didn’t leave two children behind, but I, so like my dad, chose to run away and toward something else. It all is becoming so much clearer now.
Looking back is hard, as this time period was now almost twenty years ago, and that is hard to believe. I was an adult then, I was married to my first husband, and I owned my first house. I was trying to remember how it all started, but I must go further back.
It all started at Porter Middle School, during the fall of 2006, when I was hired as a long term sub in a science classroom with a wall of windows and deep sinks and a scary science closet that was filled with treasures. It was the beginning of my adulthood, that year. It was the year I bought the first house, for $106,000 from my friend Lyndsy. It had no central air conditioning or heating. The dishwasher didn’t quite fit in the kitchen and always shimmied. One of the counters’ edges was cut at an insanely sharp triangular angle. In the summer, it was hot, and in the winter, it was cold. It was a long house on a long lot, it had a shaded, covered rear porch that was lovely despite having a leaky roof caused by branches poking through the corrugated (cardboard?) material that made it up. The backyard also sharpened to a point in the back. There was Austin city property on one side of it; an easement for power lines that went in between two fences. It had a carport and a nice tree in the yard. It was the house in which I started gardening in earnest, growing all kinds of things in a big veggie patch in the back and native plantings in the front. I made paths of a sort, and a symbolic gate in the front which I modeled after a Torii gate and was very happy when it actually worked and fit together. In later years, when looking at the house on the internet, I found the gate to be gone. That was ok. Most everything else remained.
At Porter Middle School I ended up becoming a real teacher after several grueling months of terrible classes that had little bearing on real life as a teacher. I learned how to be with kids and how to ask them to learn science. They made me laugh a lot and I realized I liked that and this alot. At the end of that year, the school would close and become a new school: Ann Richards School for Young Women Leaders. I remember watching the staff of the new school walk the halls of the old one and wondering who they were. Little did I know that I would work with and for them many years later. At some point during that year, we were all informed that if we wanted to move to Gus Garcia Middle School, the newest school in Austin ISD, we could. Most of us did, although a few stayed in south Austin or retired. I remember touring that new building when it was a shell: such hopefulness. I remember touring it when it was painted and I wondered about blue, yellow, and orange, but did agree they were bright. The campus looked like a community college. They had pods for each grade level, color coded, with work rooms for the team of teachers in that pod. They all had copiers and computers! These were the days before laptops. They put flat screen TVs in each classroom, but forgot to order chairs for the science classrooms.
This was the beginning, and what follows is important, I think. When I came back to Austin ISD in 2015, the man from HR that I spoke with said, “oh, you were at Garcia.” I said, “I opened Garcia”. He said, “those years were hard.” I said, “yes”.
Let’s dive in.
Paciencia, Paciencia 