Community Essay : Students’ Sorrows Teach a Teacher : A college instructor seeks ways to deal with the inequities, the sense of powerlessness and loss, in his urban classroom.

Teaching students of any age how to write is a challenge that goes way beyond the classroom. During the fall semester the racial composition of two of my courses, consisting of 75 students, was 85% and 75% black and Latino, respectively. The challenges were severe.

In another course, Ayesha Erin and Loretta Butler were sitting next to each other on the first night of class. They had both taken courses from me before, but at different times. I wondered if they would get to know each other’s stories. During a previous semester, I’d received a memo informing me that Ayesha wouldn’t be in class that week; the rest of the messages said, “Personal, please call.”

I called her. In a distant, quiet tone, Ayesha began describing how her son, Johnny, had been gunned down the night before, mistaken for a member of a Crips faction with which some young gangsters were at war. He had just moved to L.A. the month before. “They got Johnny in the back. His lung filled with blood. He didn’t suffer long. I’ve been at the morgue all day, crying like a crazy woman,” she said.

I went to the funeral for Ayesha’s son at the Angelus Funeral Home on Crenshaw Boulevard. A series of testimonials were given about Johnny Blunt; people recalled his smile, friendliness, generosity and artistic potential. Eloquent black ministers called for an end to the violence. Ayesha sat sobbing in the front row, family and friends on both sides holding and hugging her. I sat in the back, and, as the 50 or so people at the service began to file past the coffin, I joined the line. After I paid my respects, I reached through the people hovering around Ayesha and gave her a poem I’d written about the shooting.

Her eyes seemed to barely perceive me from beneath her hat and sorrow. She gave me a warm smile and a nod, but she was elsewhere, a long way away.

Loretta’s story starts with her essay about her grandfather, who killed a British soldier because some of them had killed his father. Her grandfather felt so guilty afterward that he became a pacifist for life. Loretta wove this story together with a succinct history of the Irish Republican Army and its struggle for independence. Then she wrote a paper about a car accident that left her unconscious for three days, after which she was a partial amnesiac, not even able to recognize her mother.

During and after class, Loretta would relate other aspects of her life. She comes from a big family with a lot of Irish cops, and when she married a black cop, the family had serious reservations. Only after the divorce did they lighten up on her, though they always loved the couple’s two daughters.

At our first class meeting after the riots and rebellions of last April, we had a stormy discussion of the events. Many of the white students didn’t understand what prompted people to burn and loot in their communities. I tried to explain how many of the participants were propelled by a rage that impeded the making of rational judgments. Afterward, Loretta and I were walking toward the parking lot. She told me that she knew what I meant by rage. “Sometimes, when I’m on the playground watching my daughters, a woman will say something like, ‘I wonder who those jungle bunnies belong to.’ It makes me so mad I want to grab those people by their throats and squeeze.”

Then Loretta said she was having trouble figuring out a good subject for her final paper. I suggested police-community relations. She smiled and said that was a natural for her since her dad had been a lieutenant with the 104th Division of the LAPD. “Maybe you could interview him,” I said. “No,” she said. “A 13-year-old gang kid gunned him down a couple of years ago. No particular reason, except he was there, and had a lot of medals. I still miss him a lot.”

Loretta and Ayesha became friends, and we have stayed in touch. I feel like we’re part of an extended family. In some ways, we represent a microcosm of Los Angeles, all of us looking for ways to get along better. I’ve had many students of Mexican and Korean origin, too, and their stories have frequently been compelling. In fact, I’ve had students from El Salvador, Guatemala, Iran, Iraq, South Africa and Vietnam.

At the beginning of the fall semester, a young African-American woman, in an exchange of jokes outside class, said that I should be careful, or she’d “riot on me.” The concept of rioting as an activity that can be initiated or resumed at any time as an individual response is challenging. It should help bring us to the realization that we, as educators and writers, have a set of responsibilities that extends far beyond the Three Rs; we need to figure out how best to help our students address those root problems of isolation, inequity, disparity and perceived powerlessness. We must also encourage other professionals to help us in taking on these tasks. Without support from the larger community, including the families of our students, the voice of the teacher may all too often be drowned out by the angry roar of the ghosts of our collective past.