Amy’s Thoughts

Today, for the first time this school year, I had the opportunity to play with my students.  Yes, that’s right.  I actually stopped teaching and we just had fun.  It was even sanctioned fun, so I couldn’t get in trouble for it!

 The thing is, we’re an inner-city school, and more than that, we’re a Reading First inner-city school, which means that we got a big grant that requires a lot of hoop-jumping in an attempt to meet the combined requirements of the grant, the government and our school district.  The result this year has been an overscheduled nightmare of a day. 

I can honestly say that the only time I see every single one of the 23 students who were assigned to my classroom is during the first 15 minutes of every school day.  From that moment on, small numbers of my students are being pulled from my classroom for reading interventions.  

Despite their absence, I am expected to somehow manage to teach every child in my classroom the skills they need to arrive at grade-level outcomes by the end of the school year.  In order to accomplish this, every single moment spent in my classroom is accounted for.  There are no spare moments anywhere for frivolous activities that are not in some fashion attached to the achievement of a specific benchmark skill.

Remember those long-ago school days when a student came to school with cupcakes because it was their birthday?  Remember the building excitement as long-anticipated holiday celebrations approached?  Remember wearing costumes on Halloween? 

Maybe celebrations still happen in more affluent neighborhoods.  I don’t know.  What I do know is that any children planning to bring a special birthday treat to my classroom had better plan on passing it out exactly one minute before the bells rings signaling the end of the day, because that’s the only minute I can give them. 

We have standards to meet, people, benchmarks to teach, and children who must not be left behind. 

YOUR CHILD’S CUPCAKE COULD RESULT IN AN ENTIRE GENERATION’S FAILURE TO LEARN TO READ!!!! 

Oh yeah, and remember those days when we had a morning recess and an afternoon recess?  My god, we had no idea how lucky we were.  TWO recesses in ONE day?  UNHEARD OF! 

In my world, students get 15 minutes to eat, during which time, they are encouraged NOT to talk.  They then get their one recess of the day.  It’s an awesome opportunity for them to relax and talk and run and play (unless it’s bad weather of course, then they have to sit still and watch a cartoon in a tiny resource room, but let’s not talk about that).

Anyway, they get this recess every single day (aren’t they lucky) and it’s lasts an ENTIRE fifteen minutes.  (In case you’re wondering, they really are lucky because last year they only got ten minutes.) 

During these fifteen minutes, my students get their only real opportunity to play, to relax, to take a desperately needed brain break.  I should add they do get “special” time each day — 50 minutes of art, library, music, P.E. or technology.  I suppose these times might be considered a break, but I have serious doubts, given there are benchmarks to meet in each of these areas as well.

In any case, I was asked to cover recess duty today, and as a result, had the opportunity to play and interact with my students in a completely stress-free and relaxing fashion for the first time since school began back in August. 

As I watched the children running and playing and laughing, I had to wonder:  by the time these first and second graders reach middle school, will they even remember how to do any of this, how to play, how to kick balls, how to chase and play tag and jump rope and laugh with abandon? 

Or instead, by that time, will we have smothered the laughter right out of them in our crazed obsession with benchmarks and indicators?  Will we have leeched their joy away in our reckless zeal to achieve the desired outcomes within an acceptable time frame, no matter the child’s background, learning style or life circumstances that brought him or her to our classroom’s doorstep?

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.