by Joshua Davis
ALLAN CAMERON was a mischievous kid. In the fifties, when his parents refused to let him have sleepovers with neighborhood friends, he ran wires between their houses in San Francisco and connected telephones so they could talk into the wee hours on their own private network. Now, as an adult living in Chandler, he’d erected a thirty-foot-tall radio antenna in his backyard so that he could talk to ham-radio operators around the world. (He liked to call the antenna the “communication center of the Western Hemisphere”; his wife, Debbie, calls it “a great big pole outside my bedroom window.”) To his colleagues at Carl Hayden, where he was a computer science teacher, he sometimes seemed like a big kid.
Because he had never lost touch with his youth, Allan understood how his students felt. When he was a kid, he hated homework, viewed it as a waste of time, and never did it. So, as a teacher, he rarely assigned homework. It was more important to have real experiences of the world. In the nineties, when the Internet was still in its infancy, he carted in his ham equipment and taught kids how to connect with people in Russia and Japan and astronauts in orbit.
At fifty-five, Allan’s bushy beard had already gone gray, but his hair was still brown and usually tousled. He had the shaggy appearance of a hippie, a look he cultivated after serving in the Navy during the Vietnam War. At the time, he decided he no longer wanted to be part of what he viewed as the military-industrial complex and instead started working as an assistant for a philosophy professor at Mesa Community College in Arizona. When the professor suggested that he become a teacher, Allan was doubtful he’d get hired. With his beard and long hair, he looked like Sasquatch. He was also worried that his legal record might disqualify him. In the early seventies, while camping with friends on the Salt River east of Phoenix, two park rangers appeared. They searched his van, found marijuana, and charged him with possession of an illicit substance. Allan thought the arrest might pop up on a background check.
“If a perfect record were a prerequisite, there’d only be about two teachers in all of the state of Arizona,” his professor said.
Allan decided to give it a try. He finished a degree in elementary education and happily landed a job at Vista del Camino in South Scottsdale. It was not a plum assignment. Despite being on the East Side of Phoenix, South Scottsdale was a pocket of poverty in the midst of an otherwise wealthy area. The school had a large population of Yaqui Indians and Hispanic kids. Allan was excited to get started, but an administrator warned him that it wouldn’t be easy. “It’s not the Scottsdale you think of,” he said. He acted as if Allan were meat being thrown to the wolves.
The fifth graders he was meant to teach had run off their original teacher. They were unruly and disrespectful. At the beginning of the year, the class had about thirty students, but now only the twelve worst were left. Any parent who was paying attention had pulled their child out of the class. The remaining students had no expectation of learning. Everybody, it seemed, had given up on them.
Allan started with threats. He didn’t really know much about teaching, so he was winging it. A kid threw a chair—Allan yelled and sent him to the principal. The next day, the kid paid even less attention and continued to act out. Allan yelled more and tried calling parents, who seemed disengaged. The class got rowdier. Clearly, intimidation didn’t work. In fact, it seemed to have the opposite effect.
Allan pulled one of the most unruly kids aside and tried a different tactic. He explained the importance of education and how it would help the kid throughout his life. The kid was unimpressed. “We’re the worst kids in the school,” he said with a touch of pride. “We don’t care.”
For Allan, it was a moment that would affect him and the students he taught for years to come. He realized that the kids were acting out to maintain their bad reputation. It might have been a pejorative label, but it was all they had. “At least they’re the best at something,” he thought.
The next day, Allan came into class with a challenge: “Okay, look, everyone thinks you guys are a bunch of jerks. Let’s change it around. Let’s absolutely make you guys the best in the school.”
That got their attention, but not much more. Allan explained that he was in the Navy during Vietnam, and he offered to teach them what he knew about war. He had no intention of teaching them to fight, but he knew it would appeal to them.
“What do we gotta do?” one of the kids asked suspiciously.
“We’re gonna start marching.”
Allan managed to get them lined up, then designated a couple of kids as “sergeants” tasked with keeping the others in line. After teaching them the basic steps, Allan deliberately stayed back, giving the kids room to assert themselves. The class got into it and began marching around the school in perfect lockstep during lunch and recess. Their discipline established a new reputation for them at the school: the kids now wanted to prove that they could be more disciplined than anyone else. They were still tough, but now in a more focused, driven way. Allan boiled it down to a straightforward observation: “Everybody’s got to be a hero somehow with something.”
In 1982, Allan started a Ph.D. in elementary education, but did about half his course work in the computer science department. He was four years into the program when he heard about Carl Hayden. It was 1986 and the high school had just been designated a computer science magnet school in the district’s effort to attract white students. The school was desperate for computer science teachers willing to work “across valley.” Allan had been flirting with the idea of teaching at the college level but drove over to West Phoenix to take a look.
Allan rarely went to West Phoenix. Sometimes, when he was driving down the 10 freeway and needed gas, he’d pull off on Thirty-Fifth or Forty-Third. But, beyond that, he’d had little exposure to the neighborhood. At first, he balked at the idea of working in the ghetto. His Ph.D. would open up new possibilities: he could find lucrative work as an educational consultant, land a prestigious professorship, or publish books. Teaching computer science to impoverished students in West Phoenix wasn’t going to make him rich—far from it—nor would it bring him much acclaim.
But after teaching some classes at Carl Hayden as a substitute, Allan couldn’t stop thinking about the school. He worried that collegiate academia would be filled with meaningless bureaucracy and annoying oversight. He’d be pressured to publish incessantly to get tenure. At Carl Hayden, he’d be teaching programming, a subject no one else knew anything about, so he somewhat naively assumed that it would be hard for anybody to boss him around. He also figured that he’d be free to create his own curriculum. And fundamentally, he was pretty sure the kids in West Phoenix needed his help more than students already in college.
In 1987, he accepted a full-time teaching job at Carl Hayden, and by the time he completed his Ph.D. in 1990, he had no intention of leaving. He was having too much fun. He started programming and ham-radio clubs in the nineties, then signed on to start a robotics team with Fredi in 2000. He didn’t regret the decision not to teach at the college level. He didn’t speak Spanish or know much about Mexico or Central America. But most of the kids he met at Carl Hayden were hungry to learn and willing to work hard. After a couple of years, he couldn’t imagine leaving them.
THE CARL HAYDEN robotics team got off to a slow start. In 2001 and 2002, only a handful of kids signed up. In 2003, they entered the Arizona regionals and placed thirty-first out of thirty-seven. The poor showing wasn’t surprising. They were a brand-new team and didn’t know what they were doing. Plus, Fredi had had to scale back his commitment to stay home with Pam and the kids. Not many students knew about the group, and Fredi didn’t have a lot of time to talk it up.
But the kids who did show up were thrilled to be a part of the team. Michael Hanck, a video-game-obsessed freshman, had taken one of Fredi’s marine science classes and joined the team that same year. Hanck had gone to middle school with Cristian and knew that the diminutive Mexican kid loved machines. He suggested Cristian talk to Fredi.
During a fr
ee period, Cristian loped up the stairs of the 200 building and stepped into Fredi’s classroom. Partially assembled robots were lying around: a chassis here, a circuit board there. It was May—school was almost over—and the team had already competed in that year’s FIRST competition. But Fredi had a video of the event and played it for Cristian. It looked amazing, but it was all over now. The robot had already been disassembled. There didn’t seem to be anything to do. He’d have to wait another year. Plus, Fredi seemed tired and was ready to go home.
Fredi was in fact exhausted. Raising an autistic son had turned his life upside down, emotionally and financially. Pam never went back to work, so they had to make do with one income. It was hard to summon the energy to engage with students all day, let alone get through his nearly hour-long commute. But he didn’t want to disappoint the quiet, thoughtful kid standing in front of him.
“We’re gonna build a trebuchet next,” Fredi pointed out. “You could help us out.”
“What’s a treb-ooo-shay?”
“It’s a medieval, gravity-operated catapult,” Fredi said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “We’re going to fire pumpkins out of it at Halloween.”
“That sounds awesome.” It was the first time Cristian had encountered something at school that sounded exciting. But he was also cautious. He was accustomed to being let down, so he tried not to get too excited.
It was hard to restrain himself. Cristian started using his free time to hang around the marine science lab. Fredi showed him a video of former students converting a Pontiac Fiero into an electric car. The students challenged the local police to a race at a training track and beat the cop car. They had also built an electric vehicle that looked like a Formula 1 race car. “This is cool,” Cristian thought to himself.
Fredi was impressed by Cristian’s smarts. The kid had the second-highest GPA in his grade, and when Fredi needed to install a batch of new computers, Cristian volunteered to set up a LAN—a local area network—so that the computers could work together. Book smarts were good, but Fredi appreciated Cristian’s ability to assemble something up on the fly.
Cristian started to see another kid hanging around the lab. Lorenzo had been assigned to take Introduction to Marine Science and cycled through the room four times a week for class. To Cristian, he was just another loudmouth—the type of guy who cracked jokes in class and caused useless distractions. Cristian was quick to refer to people like that as “idiots.”
But Fredi saw something else in Lorenzo. He saw an unusual kid who was lost and looking for a way to define himself. After the xylophone debacle in band, Lorenzo was adrift. His cousins had started a gang called WBP—for Wet Back Pride. They taught Lorenzo their hand signs and let him hang out with them. It was a way of belonging to something, but he didn’t want to get in trouble. He wasn’t that tough.
Fredi noticed that Lorenzo lingered after class. The mullet-haired kid would noodle around the fish tanks and listen to Fredi talk about building things. What seemed to really capture his attention were all the tools in the closet across the hallway. There were more tools in there than Hugo had, and students were allowed to use them. But Lorenzo was accustomed to hanging back, so he just watched as Fredi fed the fish and scrubbed the tanks over lunch.
One day, Fredi offered him the scrubber, motioning toward the tanks. “You want to learn how to do this?”
Lorenzo laughed nervously. “Uh, sure.” He’d never had much responsibility. Lorenzo felt his father didn’t have any respect for him, Hugo wouldn’t let him use the tools in the driveway, and the kids around school mocked him for his strange looks. Now a teacher was entrusting him with the lives of a handful of fish. To most people, it might not seem like a lot, but to Lorenzo it was unprecedented.
Fredi explained how much food to put in each tank and how to clean algae off the aquarium walls. Looking after the tanks quickly became part of Lorenzo’s routine. When it was time to do a thorough cleaning, he came in on a Saturday to help Fredi partially drain the tanks. It was smelly work; some kids complained. But Lorenzo had dealt with worse. He sometimes fished for tilapia in concrete canals that reeked of sewage. (It made for an inexpensive meal.) So, when Fredi asked for his help, he enthusiastically said yes. He was honored to be asked.
After the tanks had been scrubbed, Fredi invited Lorenzo to McDonald’s. Lorenzo didn’t know exactly what to say. Nobody had taken him to a restaurant before, not even for fast food. His family ate beans most days; there was no extra money to spend on luxuries such as a meal out. Fredi didn’t know any of this. He just hustled Lorenzo into his Chevy Silverado truck and drove them over to Thirty-Fifth and Van Buren.
At the McDonald’s, Lorenzo stood nervously in line beside Fredi. He didn’t know what to order and was worried that he’d get something that was too expensive.
“What do you want?” Fredi asked.
“You go first.”
Fredi ordered a Big Mac with fries.
“I’ll have that too,” Lorenzo chimed in.
When they sat down, Fredi started telling Lorenzo about robotics. He explained that students on the team got to use all the tools in the robotics closet, from the hacksaws to the drills. It was a chance to learn computer programming and mechanical engineering, both of which were skills that could help get him into college. It was also fun. The trebuchet was a great example: their goal was to build a catapult that could hurl a pumpkin more than a hundred feet.
Fredi didn’t need to say all that: he had Lorenzo at hacksaws and drills.
ONE BEAUTIFUL SUNDAY during the summer of 2002, a group of Phoenix high school students from Wilson Charter High School went to visit Niagara Falls. Wilson was a small school of 370 kids that was focused on giving low-income and minority students expanded opportunities. Teachers—including Julia Reaney—had organized this trip to Buffalo, New York, for the students to compete in a solar-powered boat race, and they were using their spare time to do some sightseeing. It was seventy-five degrees and clear—a perfect day to watch 757,500 gallons of water a second drop off a cliff. For kids from the desert, it was an astonishing sight.
Over the school year, the kids from Wilson High had worked hard to convert a small rowboat into a solar-powered dinghy. Their little boat had won a regional competition, earning them a place at Solar Splash, the “World Championship of Intercollegiate Solar Boating.” The event was sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the Wilson kids were thrilled to be there. It was a chance to learn a lot and see new places. One boy described it as a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
The falls were top on the list of places to see. They had Sunday off, so they drove to the visitors’ center and looked out over the roar and tumble of water. It was impressive, but they were right beside the falls. To get a view of the whole thing, they’d have to cross the Rainbow Bridge to the Canadian side. Reaney knew that some of her students were from Mexico—roughly 95 percent of the student population was Hispanic—and many likely lived in the United States illegally. She didn’t want to take any undue risks, so she walked across the large parking lot that separated the visitors’ center from the Port of Entry building.
Inside, she found an immigration agent and asked if kids with U.S. school IDs would be allowed to cross. She assumed that if it wasn’t allowed, she’d simply stroll back to the visitors’ center, tell the kids to pack up, and drive back to the competition. But the immigration agent’s interest was piqued. He wanted to know where the kids were from and what their backgrounds were.
When the agent heard that the kids were waiting at the visitors’ center, he marched across the parking lot and began quizzing them. He asked where they were born and wanted proof of U.S. citizenship. Four of the kids had been brought across the U.S.-Mexican border as children, and though they’d grown up in Phoenix, they were living in the country illegally. It didn’t matter that they were some of the top students at their high school, nor that they had come here to participate in
an engineering competition. The agent decided to detain them. They were led to a holding area inside one of the immigration buildings, and over a nine-hour stretch, a series of agents interrogated them. When one kid admitted that he was born in Mexico, an agent demanded to know where he had crossed the border.
“Man, I was like two,” the teen said. “I have no idea.”
“What are you guys doing coming to Niagara Falls?” another agent said. “You really stick out here.”
Immigration agents phoned Jane Juliano, the principal of Wilson Charter High School, and asked her to fax birth certificates for the four detained students. According to Juliano, the agents wanted to make a point.
“Don’t send your illegals to New York,” one agent told her over the phone.
The agents began proceedings to deport the four students to Mexico. The legal wrangling dragged on in federal court for three years before a judge ruled that the students had unfairly been targeted based on their Hispanic appearance. The Justice Department appealed, but a federal immigration appeals board threw the case out and the four were allowed to stay in the United States.
Nonetheless, the threat was clear: students who were living in the country illegally could be sought out and detained. A Border Patrol agent could find these kids anywhere and send them to a country they barely knew. Attempts to excel might be met with harsh punishment. Even a seemingly harmless summer science competition bore life-altering risks.
WHEN THE 2003–2004 school year started, Lorenzo and Cristian both signed up for the 7:00 a.m. robotics club class. Together with Michael Hanck, the newly minted sophomores began constructing a massive catapult. The teenage boys were given free access to power tools for the first time in their lives. So rather than design a modest device that could easily be transported, Hanck drew up a schematic for a five-hundred-pound giant that stood fifteen feet tall and rolled on four-foot-diameter wooden wheels. Cristian and Lorenzo agreed it was awesome. If it was a catapult, it needed to look appropriately medieval. Hanck dubbed it the MOAT, aka the Mother of All Trebuchets. As the boys enthusiastically began to assemble their enormous hurling contraption, Fredi worried that the project might take a detour into a fantasy world. The boys needed some leadership.