Dear Ninth Graders: Vulnerability Needed

October 2, 2026
Dear 6th period LA 9,
Yesterday was hard. I started class with multiple urgent requests to switch seats, despite inviting you to tell me anything I should know before setting a new seating map, contended with a student’s resistance to silent reading, then ended class acting as policeman as I guarded the phones from a crowd of you until the final two minutes when I let you get them, and cleaned up once you left abandoned teabags and borrowed silent reading books boys left on desks, while Leo returned Mango Streets and stray chairs and trash. But the hardest part of sixth period was trying to gather suitable gravity and attention for what I warned were difficult vignettes about physical abuse and controlling partners.
All this took energy, and there’s an emotional toll towards shepherding a class through a careful and caring conversation about self-esteem, abuse, and the complexities of love and independence in a family. 
The class emptied. So did I. 
To be fair, other things made me tired, too: My sister had a double mastectomy on Monday, meaning she had both of her breasts removed as a response to cancer. It’s something our mother did too—but our mom died when I was 18. My sister was your age. My sister will have a much better prognosis, it seems. You couldn’t have known I was carrying such a weight this week.
But here’s something else you also don’t know: You don’t know if people in our classroom have experienced something like Sally and her father in Mango Street, or if your classmates live with people like Minerva and Rafaela's controlling husbands. You don’t know if there are people in the room who might feel extra exposed as we read these vignettes aloud, and yet you treated these stories lightly, and the subjects too, you treated lightly.
When we came to the end of our reading, I said that fifth period needed to journal about what we’d just read because it was so intense; but for us, I just said we didn’t reach that intensity so you might as well get started on the homework. I was a husk and just stood there blankly for three minutes. A student approached me and said they saw what I was trying to do: they saw me, and I was a good teacher.
Seeing each other is the point of this whole letter. As Esperanza reads more and more, and writes more and more, she also sees more and more. Esperanza imagines Geraldo and his family. She considers the lives of those distant from her, like Ruthie, and those close to her, like Aunt Lupe. This is why novels are so important, as they help us step into the lives of other characters, which allows us to imagine and compassionate more, and to see more in ourselves and more for ourselves.
Novels expand our minds and our hearts. And when we read them with a class, we witness and honor the experiences together, the fictional experiences and the lived experiences in the room.
One of my big goals and hopes for students in my English classes is that you address issues with honesty and vulnerability and grow as neighbors and citizens, and grow in your confidence and acceptance of self, too.
Some say that, developmentally, ninth graders just can’t handle seeing past themselves, and that I shouldn’t expect you to. But I’ve taught ninth graders for over thirty years, and I know you can see beyond your own needs and desires, know that you can see to the hungering, tender world around you, and I believe you should, and I think that right now is very much the time you’re exploring what it means to be you and to be a person around other people.
Some of you may be too young to be aware of the emotions of others and your impacts on them, or some of you may be too young to understand that something small like laughing or goofing might impact a classroom environment or people around the room. But if that’s you, I hope you grow up soon, because this world needs your good, big hearts, and this class needs sensitive generosity to learn what these books have to teach and to get what I am willing to give: My honesty, my vulnerability, and my joy.
Start by taking care of the room, including returning things you borrow and throwing out trash. Next, you might offer to make me tea when you crowd around the kettle, and you might replace the water when you clean your mugs. And then, the harder stuff, but not so hard: be attentive and kind to each other, and attentive and curious to the characters in our books.
Today, the vignettes are harder. Be there for Esperanza, for each other, and for me.
David Grosskopf

 

Are You a Writer or Author?

             Last summer around the lower fjords of Norway, I asked too many questions of a friend engaged in a program mentoring novelists. Without asking questions of her own, Laurel simply told me I needed an accountability buddy. When I returned to Seattle, I began sending Laurel my weekly writing goals.

              My first weekly goal was a low bar easily reached: average half an hour of writing a day. Four months later, the goal was the same. But by then, by Thanksgiving, while teaching high school, I had written over 110,000 words and completed the first draft of a novel I called “Evening’s Gratitude.”
              I started in August with one-off diary entries and observational essays. But I also had a dream about a coach telling his players to “stand there and go to sleep”—about trusting not intervening, I understood—and the dream was so weird and funny and the theme so resonant with my teaching that I started to make an exercise of it. I devised a sport, imagined a family, and considered small-bore conflicts to test trust-versus-intervention.
              Along with my stated thirty-minute daily average, which I always exceeded, I had a couple other personal goals: One, allow the story’s marriage to be good and stick to the drama of the ordinary. Two, reach 100,000 words. A writing exercise.
              But by the time I hit my word count, character arcs were strong, themes were clear, and an ending, an enemies’ banquet, seemed a satisfying way to close. I had completed the exercise, yes, but somehow, I had also written a proud, coherent novel: A tender boy confronting bullies shows the grip of violence in masculine rites of passage. A philosophically-minded girl meets escalating dares to demonstrate the perilous vitality of moral development. And parents’ conflicting approaches to these crises, to protect or to trust (to “sleep”) in the face of danger, ring clearly through every storyline.
              I came to the end energized, and I revised over and over with equal joy. I loved my story, I loved the process, escaped job and political turmoil, and I was liberated to discover after years of excuses that I could teach high school and write a novel at the same time.
              Then I started pitching to agents.
              I met a literary agent in New York who claimed social media algorithms changed reading and readers so much that writers were either hitmakers or hobbyists. I learned agents earn through commission and publishers sell on consignment and risk tolerance is low. For your first novel, you get one risk. For your pitch, assert This famous story meets That.
              I returned with a book pitch so trade and breezy that Stephanie said, But this doesn’t sound like your book. Or you.
              In New York, I learned the difference between writers and authors is writers write; authors market themselves as writers. As someone who had a door-to-door sales job for two days and ended up hiding for hours in a random woman’s house until I could be picked up again, over three decades later I can still say my whole being resists. I don’t want to call novels properties. I don’t want my engagement with world to be called a platform. I don’t want a third job.
              I’m ready to be a writer. I have a way to go to be an author.

Townships: The Past is Not Past

               On our last day in Cape Town, we traveled to the memorial of Amy Biehl, the young white Fulbright student who in 1993 was killed by an angry mob as she was dropping off friends in Gugulethu the day before she was headed back to California. The violence occurred in the turbulent moment when apartheid was just ending.
              As we were gathered and reviewing what we knew from our research and the book we read, Mother to Mother by Sindiwe Magona, two men were watching us from an idling car. I went over to talk to them. Would it be okay if we took a picture with your group, they asked when I approached. I said, Probably—but first you have to tell why you want this, and I want you to be honest about it.
              In the four years since they had moved from the Eastern Cape, in all that time, they had never seen white people in Gugulethu before. They wanted a picture to mark the occasion, but perhaps the picture was a pretext to talk with us and find out what we were up to.
              We took the picture and launched an exchange of welcome and gratitude and questions.
              Amy Biehl was killed more than three decades ago. Apartheid ended more than three decades ago. But these men taught us so clearly the past is not past.

               The night before, the mamas held a braai for their guests and the Isilimela and Roosevelt teachers. Our students gathered all the adults in the yard and sang for us—“Lean on Me,” “Stimela,” and “Yahkalipi koko”; they were leaping and jumping in excitement while the Isilimela teachers were shouting at each other in surprise and joy, look at what the Americans are doing, our music, in IsiXhosa, singing with the students, all of us joined together.

Guilt as Pathway to Humbling

              We spent our first day at Hoërskool Bellville today. So many elements converged in our students to ramp up nerves and preconceptions. This includes how tightly and how quickly they bonded with Isilimela students and Langa mamas and a culture of song and dance and sharing, openness not replicated as unreservedly elsewhere. It also includes a progressive Seattleite’s suspicion of privilege while extending our curiosity and trust to the marginalized—commendable when so much voice and power is going the other way. Students also had a whole week to grow close with Langa, coming to these comfortable beds and warm showers with both an emptiness and sharp guilt.
              During the testing period this morning, we gathered to check in, and there were so many fears. During the retreat, HFB friends from Bellville pumped them full of negative expectation. Then some families made off-hand comments about township life that disturbed their guests. Some of our students missed the warmth and swapping of stories with their Langa mamas and found conversation with host families in Bellville superficial in comparison. And there was that guilt around the welcome comforts surrounding them.
              After school, Bellville HFB student Anzél explained that people didn’t bring up race because they wanted everyone to be comfortable and didn’t want anyone to be offended. She also said teaching about apartheid was very limited here: it’s taught by grade nine (after which, no history is taught at all in Bellville while it’s elective in Isilimela), but what happened after apartheid is not taught at all—nothing about what it took to get past apartheid and what it now takes for the nation to heal. But, Anzél says—and I would love our students to hear this—if someone has a real curiosity, then we know it’s okay to talk.
              When students compare communities in binary ways, I want them to consider what a privilege it is to travel to a place where as outsiders we can see history and all of its legacies so nakedly. It’s hard to do when you’re in it. And if you’re living in a place of vast income inequality, what kind of blinders and fear must one wear if you have so much and others have so little. In Seattle, this is also the case, yet you’re not likely to see it clearly: how often do you think and really feel with the full of your soul the way you do here about what it is to live on appropriated land, about the untended poverty, mental illness, addiction, sexual abuse, and other compounding violences in Seattle’s unhoused and walk between those who have and those who don’t until you feel so wrenchingly the wrongness and strangeness of so much culture aloof to it?
              The stinging guilt many of our students feel about enjoying their Bellville comforts is a good sign: it’s a pathway to humbling—to becoming more considerate and grateful, to being mindful, to actively organize to improve our world and the plants and animals that inhabit it. But honest seeing and big-hearted feeling is the tool, not the guilt that is that first stop on the way. You have to get on the other side of that guilt—to honesty and humility, the catalysts through which the world can be both heard and transformed.

Poverty Tour or Progress Tour

               I have now taken Langa’s cultural center Guga S'Thebe’s neighborhood tour four times. It always leaves a mark. It is always uncomfortable. It always incites guilt, sorrow, and anger.

              We began at the Dompas museum, housed in an old courthouse used to process neighborhood violations. In the nineteenth century, Langa was a place to house migrant labor; but later, after the Group Relocations Act, Langa was designated a township for Blacks only, and people were brought to the courthouse and jailed if they failed to have the Dompas, which you couldn’t get if you weren’t registered with a company in Langa, and you couldn’t be registered with a company in Langa if you were a woman. If you were from another township, you would need a special pass to come into Langa. Otherwise, jail.
              Our guide wanted us to see the continued hardship following the many violences done to Black South Africans after a colonial project which continually dispossessed the native peoples, and then, with a government spread thin, which gave them far too many opportunities to stay and wait in limbo. The guide in the back of our tour had both given us historical context for Langa but also whispered that our forward guide was giving us the poverty tour rather than the progress tour we should have had instead.
              We reflected in Guga S'Thebe, a beautifully built campus for the arts—ceramics, music, painting, and more—with studios for creating and teaching artists learning to make a living turning discarded plastics and wax cartons into saleable art.
              Our student Gabby said going from the childcare centers in one of the blocks and having the best fifteen minutes of her life with the children to then walking out and seeing where those children lived was not something she had words for.
              I told students I know they came out of that neighborhood tour with many feelings, the weight of what they saw, their voyeuristic implication in what might have felt like viewing exhibits in a zoo. But they have reasons for inviting you into their homes and showing you how they live, I said. They want you to witness and speak what you saw. That doesn’t make it easier.
              But I want you to think of all the things that are true—Gabby’s joy and hard witness, the progress tour we might as easily have taken, this place of vitality and art all around us. This is true also.     You need to look with honest eyes, not polite eyes—don’t be so polite you don’t notice the trash everywhere, but ask why. Notice honestly; and deeply ask why. Yes, have all the feelings. But then, open your hearts; observe with honest eyes; ask why; and use it to see to next possible steps; and where and when you can, organize, stand each other up, and act.

Slave Lodge and Sites of Remembrance

 

              The Slave Lodge is a sturdy building raised by the Dutch East India Company in 1660 that housed slaves especially during the British occupation. The active and proud voice accompanying the exhibits throughout was striking. I don’t remember what was written. But this is what I remembered about what was felt: In this space, there is no excuse for ignorance or forgetting. In this space, we honor the pain, the trauma, the complex stories. In this space, we share the voices preserved from grandparent to grandchild and on down because no one wrote them into the historical record, and because stories bring to life the abstracted and the silenced.
              Everywhere alongside horrific stories was a towering dignity—in pictures and in the words of descendants proud of their names however awful their provenance, proud, because their families wore them and passed them on, turned them to love, and strong, because their surnames remind them why they might still be struggling now, still waking up at three in the morning for a job. Knowing the past taught them and teaches us how to organize and resist and build for the future. The trauma and brutality was there in that museum, but with no trace of defeat or despair.
              A couple months ago I read How the Word is Passed, by Clint Smith, a powerful, wise book about how history is actively remembered or forgotten. He discussed places like the Slave Lodge through the Door of No Return on Gorée Island in Senegal and the importance of such “sites of remembrance”: here we can gather history around us, in stone, plaster, lintels, and the very air and ground beneath our feet, and we can invoke a past with both horror and reverence: it was here, it was here, I can’t imagine, and I can’t imagine because I am finally imagining.
              We can read a book and scan a Wikipedia article, or we can go and make ourselves ache to really understand something in the very moment we have started to understand.
              We returned to Isilimela to drum together in quaking, electric unison, every face a light.

First night, first school day in Langa

   

              By now, in our second day at Isilimela Comprehensive School, during the lunch period, you would find our students in a loud hive of energy in Ms. Mimi’s art room, eating with Isilimela Hands for a Bridge and the many others who congregate regularly in that space midday—talking, eating, shouting, standing, and then, a group of Isilimela learners teaching Roosevelt students or the other way round a dance, a shake, an elaborate set of moves.
              Roosevelt students met up in the small park by Mama Viola’s to play soccer and fall in love with the curious, unflappable children who came to them there. One student said it was the best time of her life in that little park. Perhaps all gatherings in that park were deliriously joyous.
              Before they would go home yesterday, students were already feeling the highs of their start here: today, moods were still high though experiencing the jagged demands of their jetlagged bodies in the South African heat. And students getting their hair touched was a shared, curious experience.
              They performed in the hall before Isilimela classes, drawing repeated cheers. The Q&A afterwards was a window to life and schooling here in Langa and as well as what our students chose to represent in answers. The first assembly was followed by a series of historical questions about America in various eras. Someone wondered if we trusted our president. How is our infrastructure in America. How many languages do you speak. Tell us about religion where you’re from. What sports do you play. Two questions evoked audible gasps and a tumult of reaction from the audience: a) do you wear school uniforms, and b) what time is it in Seattle right now.
              Someone wanted to know whether or not it was safe in America. One of our students said Seattle is mostly safe as long as one knows to avoid certain areas. Some Bellville homestay families in the past have expressed a shocked curiosity about our students staying in Langa. Were such shock to be expressed again, I’m sure our students will think back to the delirious joy of a neighborhood park.

Arriving in Langa township, Cape Town

  

              I returned to Cape Town, South Africa, with the Hands for a Bridge program for the first time since 2019. We received a welcome so warm our very world view began to tip.
              We arrived in Langa with our bags and gathered in Mama Dozi‘s cozy living room around two couches and platters of fruit and our sixteen students enclosed body to body in a safety and warmth of neighborhood matriarchs. The next morning, we arrived in the Isilimela Comprehensive School’s parking lot to a parade of Hands for a Bridge learners singing and holding a banner of welcome, Ms. Mimi bringing us together in a circle for more song and step, all of us together in a circle, her hand-mic encouraging volume and forming the spotlight. And then Monday assembly was moved to Tuesday, just for us, speakers filling the capacious hall with song as early-arriving learners welcomed American guests to a morning dance party until the hall was full with standing bodies, stepping, clapping, singing, harmony with the teacher on stage with her mic and full voice as she led us in prayer and song, words sometimes in English, sometimes in IsiXhosa, and all of it, such a tidal wash for us visitors: the joy, the song, so many collectively happy to sing and step together in school.
              Already we see a different way of being and being together in learning community. We see what community can be.
              All around us was a buzz of nervous excitement and shy looks and whispers, so when we could join in music and movement, we could say thank you; we could say, There is nowhere on Earth we would rather be.
              The Isilimela principal welcomed us in the assembly with the promise that they would strive to make us want to stay. They succeeded.

Talking to Students about a Teacher's Suicide

 

              By now many of you have heard that our orchestra director killed herself last night. It’s not clear if I’m supposed to say that yet, but we shouldn’t dance around mental health or suicide when people who most need help are embarrassed to name it and seek it.

              This is not easy for me to stand before you and talk about now, because Ms. G— was an important colleague to me, an important person for my daughters, and above all, a friend, and there are other reasons, too.

              Caring and community was especially important to Ms. G—. She was very transparent about what we need from each other. This became a real mission for her when we were in COVID school and our colleague Anne killed herself. Ms. G— started the Sunshine Club, where colleagues met on Zoom to enjoy each other, get to know each other, fill each other up, because Christine was clear: We had failed Anne. We failed her. We were not enough community: we did not see each other and care and play enough together. Anne was lonely and we made little room, and then we went into Zoom school, and she died. Ms. G— was fierce about community after that. You’d hear it in her concerts, in how she’d present before crowds, in books she read and podcasts she recommended, in what she told students, and in what she demanded from friends like me. If you went to a G— party, at some point, she’d make every single individual in the room speak an appreciation. At her 50^th birthday, she spoke about every single one of us in the house, and then we each spoke, no slipping out without speaking our appreciation of her. Because she was a big personality and hilarious and flying Italian hands and she was pushy like that: we were going to be inside the circle, loving, loved.

              And then she killed herself, leaving a seven-year-old son.

              And I am really fucking pissed at her. Because it was a supremely selfish thing to do.

              I told her. I told her. After Anne died, I cried in front of every one of my Zoom classes, and all these kids, in these tiny  broken little boxes on a screen, I yelled at them, because I wanted them to know, and so I’m telling you now, because it’s still true, that none of you, none of you gets to do what Ms. G— did. You are not allowed. You do not have my blessing. You are not permitted. Because I know that every one of you, each of you, has people who care about you, your friends, whoever you call your family, you are loved; and I know, I know, people who kill themselves just want the pain to end, and I understand that, it’s legitimate, it’s real, but you are loved. You are loved. You talk to someone. If you get low like that, you talk to someone, you reach out. You are not allowed to be alone. You are loved.

              And you are not allowed to do what she did.

              When Anne died, Christine organized a memorial a year later when we were back to sharing a building together, and five or six of us went with her to Magnuson, and I don’t remember what she said, but I know we talked about this.

              And I know Christine knew people cared about her. I know how caring she was. Almost any time I’d run into her in the halls, she’d gather a hug from me. She knew people cared about her, and we talked about this and what it does, and she just went did it, didn’t reach out to any of us whom she said she loved and who definitely loved her.

              I’m angry. It was selfish. It’s rent a hole in all of us who cared for her and were cared for by her.

              I adore this woman. She is a big, joyous, funny, bright personality, and she was always transparent that she was going through a lot and hurting, and even then, she worked to tie communities tight together in joy and appreciation and fierce caring. I loved going out with her, hearing her stories, being a part of the passion she’d wrap around everything she touched.

              I thank you for being so present together right now. It means a lot to our room, and to me. And I’m also grateful that we were able to discuss the book chapter and all its hard issues, because it’s allowed me to engage with my heart and mind and with you all in ways that are not this right now. But we are all carrying a lot today, whether you knew Ms. G— or not, and any way that you might be feeling or responding is the right way to feel or respond. The library is available all day for people who want to talk, in any way they want to talk.

Streams and Mountains without End

Streams and Mountains without End, handscroll on silk, 1100-1150, late Song-Jin dynasty Cleveland Art Museum. Inscription translation: “The creator has no intentions. Making mountains and streams from pure air.” Added, 1205.

Elizabeth Woody in Seven Hands, Seven Hearts describes her teacher Margaret guiding Woody past her anxieties weaving root bags. Woody is sure she is doing it wrong and disrespecting the traditions of her elders, disrespecting the tule reeds and cedar strands that have been gathered for these inexpert and uneven folds. She is grateful and feels her grandmothers through her hands but also, she’s doing it wrong. Margaret says, “Don’t worry—weave!” The strips pulled from marshes and tree bark stain her palms with a tang of the earth itself, and, she writes, she weaves in herself new pathways to thought.

In 1949 when the Communists drove the Kuomintang Party from power and out of China, the destabilized economy led to a fire sale of art and antiquities; private and temple collections became suddenly available. This was how Richard Hochstadter was able to acquire the twelfth century masterpiece watercolor Streams and Mountains without End, the scroll that now stretches across a wall of the Cleveland Art Museum. Hochstadter himself was in China when his homeland looted its own homes and seized precious art from Jews like Hochstadter, hanging bloodred banners from their museums. During the Cultural Revolution a couple decades later, Shanghai shielded art from Party purges of decadence. The CCP had their own banners to hang.

A former ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, is now the head of The Kennedy Center for the Arts. In his theater box hangs an enormous portrait of himself with the President. Shows are no longer woke, no more drag, the President bragged. The man in charge of programming staff was overheard praising a musical recently staged at the Center: so good “they could be on a cruise ship.” While ticket sales have sagged, the new head of the communications is correct to attribute the drop in revenues to “liberal intolerance.” Meanwhile, Grenell insists on being called The Ambassador. This is the current embassy of American culture.

I hiked this summer to Vesper Peak off the Mountain Loop Highway. The day was moist and fogged, and the mountains towered over me through a thick mist, every sharp crag, rigid and bleak but softened into folds of a weighty cotton. It was a gray monochrome, and I was similarly enfolded against a dry-brush Chinese watercolor, Vesper Peak, watercolored, my own existence against the towering ridge breaks folded in a mystery artists in China beheld in quiet awe a millennium before.