lou reed

there is a boy who used to be in my class. he is now in another teacher's class. there was a time in his life when he made a series of decisions that created and awful world around him and some of the fallout of that time and world is that he is a bit older than the other children who sit next to him in class. he is also calmer and gentler. he has had to learn to be these things to get himself back to this world and to the class he is in that is not mine.

i am not sure why but from time to time the boy stops by my class. generally, children who stop by my class want something. they need. they are like vampires. "miss, you have to help me..." miss, i need you to..." "miss, i'm too angry to..." "miss, pay attention to me now..." ninth graders, especially those with disabilities (learning or otherwise), often have very limited ability to see a situation from any position other than their own. their problems ("i need a band-aid, pen, pencil, book, sheet of paper, someone to listen to me") trump any other problem i might be dealing with at the time. if you drag yourself into a room bleeding profusely from the eyes asking for someone to call an ambulance, a child needing to sharpen the pink glitter pencil she's using to "decorate" her story will fly into a rage if you try to get what you need before she does.

back to the boy. he has a class on the same floor as my classroom and sometimes stops by between bells. he is quiet and never competes with other children for my attention. if there is time he says hello. if i am surrounded by a seething mass of 9th grade, he smiles and waves and heads out to his class. he did well in my class after an initial series of mysterious absences and unexplained naps. he is an insightful child, curious and thoughtful. it is a nice gift occasionally, not being required to do, say, find or give something.

the point of this is that today the child came in wearing a lou reed t-shirt. he is not a lou reed fan. he is a teenager from brooklyn. he said he worked security at a show last summer and someone with the show gave him the shirt. it is a nice shirt. i tried to convey that velvet underground's loaded is possibly my favorite album ever. that i listen to it on my old turntable and will flip it over and over, even though it is on my ipod and computer and i could listen to it there without so much effort. i try to explain the sound of an album, the breathing of the needle. i don't think there is any way to get this kid to love an album like loaded or to have patience with the format of a big disc that needs to be flipped halfway through every set of songs. it is a cheesy, poppy album, maybe, but smarter than anything my 9th graders have on whatever it is they plug into their ears. it holds up for me, but it came onto the scene only two years after i did. we grew up together.

what would a song like "oh! sweet nuthin'" sound like for the first time if that time is now? what would happen to a child whose whole experience of music has been that of sound delivered entirely through headphones and ringtones if he heard an album on a turntable? i think it would make a person sick, like drinking a gallon of cream. it would be too much. i told him to download the album and he smiled. he is a sweet child and doesn't want to hurt my feelings but he's not going to listen to it. i wear cardigans and cat eye glasses. someone who makes decisions like those shouldn't influence his musical taste. but he'll still wear that shirt.