Alliance for Catholic Education
In the chapter titled, “Halloween,” in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, the three characters known by fans around the world now as “The Golden Trio” were not yet friends. They were at that time in the story first years at their new school, not knowing anyone too well yet, and therefore not really being able yet to call anyone “friend,” much less part of a nicknamed group. But something happens at the end of that chapter: they fight a troll together. In the middle of a bathroom, all three of them, inexperienced and without a clue of how to even begin to grapple with such a creature, defeat that ugly, menacing and powerful troll together. This is sort of what community in ACE is like.
You arrive as a first-year in a new setting with new, unchosen housemates to do a job most of you have never done and one that appears to require much more power than you have. You begin the year knowing very little about your new housemates — what their interests are, what their middle name is, what their living habits are like — you learn that last one rather quickly. But it isn’t through conversation and fun-fact learning that you grow closer to your community members in ACE. Much like Harry, Ron, and Hermione, you grow closer through struggle.
The first year of teaching is like fighting a troll. Looking at a classroom of 25 students expecting you to have complete control and confidence of the next hour, looking at your empty lesson plan folder and knowing that you need to have something planned to teach tomorrow and the next day and the day after that, looking at your almost empty gradebook the day before report cards are due — all of these feel quite like looking up at a giant, looming troll in the Hogwarts basement bathroom. But the thing about ACE is you aren’t alone in that bathroom. There might be burst pipes, crushed stalls, and broken mirrors all around you — all damaged by that troll’s club — but in that room, or in that house, are also people fighting that same troll, and that makes the impossible task — what could have been a frightening, disastrous episode - a little bit sweet.
The troll isn’t always school-related. In ACE, on top of learning together for the first time how to teach, you are also learning for the first time how to be a functionally independent young adult. On September 16th of this year, at about 9pm, my housemate Alex texted the group chat with the following messages, “Okay I may need some help…My car got towed…And I don’t have my ID or credit card.” The group chat instantly became quite active after those messages, and though sweet housemate Uku lay fast asleep in his room, my housemate Mary and I hopped in my car with Alex’s ID and emergency cash, and we headed towards the Lower Wacker car pound in the heart of downtown Chicago.
September 16th, for those who do not know, is Mexican Independence Day, and Chicago, just behind Los Angeles, has the second largest Mexican population out of all US metropolitan areas. A celebratory tradition of this holiday in this city is something called flagging, where droves of cars in celebration of the holiday parade through the streets of Chicago, waving flags, hanging out windows, and really just having one big city-wide party. It’s vibrant. It’s inspiring. It’s beautiful…unless you are trying to drive to Lower Wacker to retrieve a stranded community member’s towed car. In that case, it makes things a little bit difficult.
Mary and I sat in my car at the intersection of Wacker and Michigan Avenue feeling like we were in a real-life game of “Frogger.” The endless flaggers drove down Michigan Avenue and would have kept on coming forever, but at one point I screwed my courage to the sticking place, and I put my foot on the gas. The line broke, I drove forward, heard a bit of a crunch as we passed through the intersection, and then we were through. A breath of relief, we were on our way. After driving around for about 5 minutes around Lower Wacker, we finally found the car impound. We gave Alex her things and waited in the parking lot as she retrieved her car. After about half an hour, she came out with her car, and we were all ready to go home when SCREEECH. As I tried to pull my car out, an awful sound came to our ears. And then I remembered another sound from earlier that I hadn’t blinked twice at — the crunch from when we crossed over Michigan Avenue — I had driven over a jagged half of a shattered beer bottle.
I got out of the car and my front left tire was as deflated as my mood upon seeing it. I turned to my community members in fearful hesitation. No, none of us had ever changed a tire before. I pulled out my phone, which was at 5% battery, and called my dad. I told him the situation, that I had about 10 minutes before my phone died, and I needed a crash course in changing tires. He delivered the last instruction just as my phone died, and we got to work. We all got down on the dirty pavement, Mary in the dress she had taught in that day, and started jacking the car and unscrewing bolts. It took…a long time for us to get it right, and we gave up all hope about a hundred times, but eventually I had a new, functional tire, and we made it home with dead phones and without google maps. It was not a fun experience, it was not an easy one, but from that moment on, my community members became my friends. “There are some things you can’t share without ending up liking each other, and knocking out a twelve-foot mountain troll, [being a first year teacher, and changing a tire at the Lower Wacker care impound are some] of them.”*
*J.K Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone