Amy’s Thoughts

While trapped within an endless in-service meeting (we get two and a half hours a week to meet and be bored to death), I wrote these rambling observations:

I sit here and wander my eyes:

Bored.  OREOS.  munching.  headaches.  writing.  no smiles.  blah-blah-blah-blah.  more OREOS.

Norms.  rolling eyes. restless bodies.  bored faces.  unspoken words screaming through the room.  no eye contact.  OREOS, OREOS, OREOS, OREOS.

Eyes down.  glares focused.  table.  paper.  exploding heads.  expectations boiling through the room.  unrealistic.  demanding.  lost in the mire of NCLB.

I once wrote an essay I called “The Nameless”.  I wrote this essay as a senior attending The American University in Washington, D.C.  It was my answer to what I saw as a loss of my own humanity when facing the homeless on a daily basis.

In my essay, I wrote about some children I had seen on the streets panhandling with their mother in Washington, D.C.  I also wrote about a child I saw in Lisbon, Portugal, who was also homeless.  In my mind at the time, homelessness was a characteristic owned by adults.  These children I had seen were certainly extremely rare, particularly within the United States.

Today I know this is only a fantasy, one shared by most of the complacent population.  In fact, the fastest growing segment of homeless individuals in the United States today is that of families with children.  Approximately 1.3 million children are homeless today, and of those, approximately 500,000 are under the age of 5.   How is this possible?  How could we not know of such a severe problem?

Because we are lulled into believing that those who are homeless are the men and woman we see wandering the streets without a home.  We console ourselves with the thought that they are adults, in charge of their own fate and future.  If they wanted a home, surely they could manage it, we tell ourselves.  Most of them are probably alcoholics and drug addicts, we whisper in our mind, without ever admitting the darkness of our thoughts.

Is someone only considered homeless in our eyes when they are visibly living on the streets?  What of the millions in temporary shelters, sleeping on a neighbor’s or family member’s couch, rotating from home to home every few days to keep from becoming a burden to those they rely upon for a temporary roof over their head?

Imagine being a child and having so little stability that every night you are sleeping in a new bed, in a new home.  Imagine that every night, you are not certain whether there will be dinner at the table of whatever home you will be staying in that evening.  And imagine attempting to attend school with that chaos in your home life.  Imagine trying to meet the expectations of your teachers, your principals, your school district, your government that now looks over every school’s shoulder demanding that no child ever fall behind.  Would you survive the stress?  Would you make it from year to year, all the way to graduation?  Or would you become a part of the ongoing problem that is today’s dropout rate?

This issue is extremely important to me, as I have been working with the homeless children in my school district for the past year.  On Tuesday and Thursday evenings, from 5:00 to 7:30, we meet at a local elementary school and do all that we can to provide a small amount of stability in the most unstable of lives.  Our main focus is to provide academic support in the hopes that these children will stay in school, that they will be among the few who actually make it to graduation day.

Each and every one of the children I have met through this program breaks my heart; from the victims of domestic abuse to the African refugees who have memories of escaping into the brush to avoid guerilla warfare; from the victims of severe poverty to those of circumstance like fire or loss of a job.

These are the heroes in my world:  these children who somehow manage to bring me hope and joy, merely through their presence in my life and the demonstration of their will to survive.

Every Friday afternoon, my students write a letter to a specific student in our class.  As far as my students are concerned, this special child of the week is chosen based on behavior and academic success.  Little do they know that every child on my list will eventually be chosen.

In any case, every Monday morning, before school begins, I collect these letters and staple them into a book for the child.  While arranging these letters, I often find myself amused by the things my students feel are especially important to share with their classmates.  Usually they are utterly random comments (”I like baseball.”) or questions (”Do you like macaroni and cheese?”)  Occasionally however, they are nothing short of unique.

This morning was a prime example.  I happened to notice one letter had not been signed.  As this letter was written in extremely precise handwriting that meandered down the page in an increasingly narrow triangle, it was not difficult to ascertain the author.   Shaking my head, I set it aside to remind the student to sign the letter, realizing I would have to wait until this had happened before stapling the pages together.  It was at this moment, as I was setting aside the letter, that a word upon this unsigned page caught my eye.  It was the word “squize.”

What on earth was a squize?  So of course I had to read what followed.  What followed was “your balls”.  Squize your balls?  This could not be good.

My eyes immediately jumped backward to the beginning of the sentence where I read:  “Be nice to me or I will squize your balls.”  Further down the page, the author continued to write “If you are nice to me, I will not squize your balls.”  I am sensing a theme here.

Did I happen to mention these were second graders?

Of course, at that point, I had to read the entire letter, which began with an eloquent statement of the recipient’s cuteness (”so cute, so cute”) and then a denial of being liked by that person (”I no you don like me, but I like you, so I don kare”) followed by the infamous “squizing”.

All I can say is THANK GOD I caught this BEFORE stapling the letter into a book and sending it home with my student to share with his parents and siblings and heaven knows who else.

God save me.  Is it Christmas break yet?

It is inevitable I suppose that when teaching the young ones, unwashed hands that recently touched a toilet seat, boogers and snot wiped upon every available surface, and an often seemingly endless supply of vomit become familiar trademarks of the profession.

Even so, gross.

Today was Friday.  Friday should always be a happy day, one filled with joy for the coming weekend.  Instead, it was exhausting from start to finish, as frankly, many Fridays are for teachers and their students.

What made today particularly difficult however, was the vomit spewed in giant bucketsfull upon my floor.  I swear to god that a child of that size simply should not have been able to contain the sheer amount of vileness that spewed forth.

And I also happen to think this particular child’s digestive system is on the blink, because in the hour’s time that passed between his consumption of our school lunch meat surprise, and its regurgitation upon my classroom carpet, not one single chunk of hot dog had been digested in the slightest amount.   I feel sick just envisioning it.

The worst part was that I was too busy trying to comfort my poor distraught student to realize I should instead be diving for the trash can and shoving it in front of his face.   Give me a few more years with the spewage and I’m sure I’ll get it right.

In any case, this happened around 2:00 this afternoon, and sadly our custodian was off campus at the time.  Being that our school has a 4:00 dismissal time, the rest of my class and I had to suffer through the smell of regurgitated school lunch meat surprise for a full hour and a half.  We were able to crowd into the classroom next door to my own, thus giving us a little relief, but given that Jill (the neighboring teacher) and I share a accordian wall, the smell was not far enough away to save us.

Thank god it’s Friday.  I can only hope if the rest of my class is also contaminated, they will get the puking all out of their system over their weekend and come to school on Monday all chipper and ready to learn.  Yes, I know it’s not kind to wish that upon their parents, but hey, at the very least, the parents probably feed their kids something a bit more appetizing than dead road kill, so maybe there’s a chance the vomit won’t be quite so… memorable.

Teaching is always fraught with disturbing images, endless fears and boundless hope.  You cannot teach without some sense of eternal faith that humanity is worth something, that we are each of us capable of infinite greatness, that we will accomplish much more than we ever dreamed possible.  You cannot teach, at least not effectively, without this true and utterly sincere belief that the children you teach will change the world in infinitely positive ways.  You simply hope that the future will bear out this truth in all its simplicity.

Which is why the bug was so very disturbing.  A tiny image, seared upon my brain forever.  I do not know how it came to end its life in our hallways, but I do know that its passing had such grave importance I shudder even now to remember.

To help you see this image, I must place you within my school setting.  I teach inside a three-floor elementary school building, with open doorways, a product of the open concept classroom of the 70s and 80s.  My classroom is on the second floor, and immediately across the hall from my doorway are two restrooms.  When my class takes a restroom break, we line up along the wall between the doors to the girls’ and the boys’ restrooms, girls on one side, boys on the other.  As the students exit the restroom, they line up on the opposite wall, right outside my classroom’s doorway.  These restrooms are used by three second grade classes and three kindergarten classes, each class made up of some 22-25 students.  Therefore, on any given morning, a full 150 tiny bodies may line up along those walls, waiting for their opportunity to pee.

I suppose if you are a member of the 5-7 age set, the moments spent waiting while 22 of your classmates attend to their bodily functions can be extremely boring.  It is hardly any wonder, therefore, that these children seek ways of entertaining themselves.  They know of course that talking and running and generally acting like its recess time can result in the swift fall of that consequence anvil teachers love to spout about.  Therefore, I suppose other opportunities must be sought, opportunities that are less obvious and as such, undoubtedly of greater value intrinsically.  After all, who can resist the danger of sneaking some revelry in right under a watchful teacher’s evil eye?

Despite knowing this, I will never forget the moment a child squealed “Ms. Culey!” and held out a tiny staple.  Staples in this hallway are a dime a dozen.  The hallway is lined with bulletin boards which we are required to keep filled with student work.  Sadly, bulletin boards do not belong on the walls of a hallway that is frequently also lined with 5-7 year old bodies, bouncing up and down, waiting for their moment in the restroom.  During any given restroom break, I will generally be offered anywhere from 1 to 6 items that have fallen from a bulletin board due to excessive movement on the part of my students.  And of course, as these items fall, so too fall the staples with which they were pinned to the bulletin board.

What made this staple so unusual was the tiny bug speared upon one of its spikes, looking much like some form of terrible scientific experiment, as if at any moment, the bug might begin to squirm in its death throws while its fascinated audience watched in glee.

I would like to believe that this staple simply fell to the floor at exactly the right velocity and angle, allowing it to spear this tiny bug in a moment of terrible timing and circumstance.  Sadly, the staple was found on the opposite side of the hallway from where the bulletin boards were.  In addition, the bug was so small that the spike of the staple had managed to move completely through its body, so that the bug appeared a permanent feature of the staple — or perhaps more accurately, the staple appeared a permanent feature of the bug’s body, with one side protruding from its belly, the other side from its back.

Perhaps the bug was already dead when a fascinated child decided to spear it so deliberately?  But even if this were true, would that make this any better?  Whether it represents a complete disregard for the sanctity of life or simply that of death, how can this not be a sign of a very disturbed mind?  Which child was it?  A child in my room or in someone else’s?  Is this child’s darkness even known?  Will he or she receive the care so desperately needed?  Will someone heed this child’s cry?  Or has that cry already been silenced by an uncaring system that ignores the plight of its children?

Where is the hope in this profession now?