angry ninth grade boy

angry ninth grade boy strikes again! actually, he has struck pretty much daily since he showed up a few posts ago, insisting on stupidity where i was pretty sure i could see some distant light suggesting intelligence. our communications the last few days generally follow a pretty predictable path. i tell him to stop talking because he is, in fact, talking, usually fairly loudly. he snaps back with the accusation that i am boring. i am a forty one year old woman from the middle of the country standing in a roomful of children born in more than a dozen places you can't get to by car in the largest, fastest city we've made in this country. the children arrive armed with soda and candy and very expensive cellphones and ipods and such. and then there's the fact that they're fourteen. or fifteen. or sixteen. of course i am boring. how can any human being compete with all that for a whole hour- for two hours? but for angry ninth grade boy, boring is the word he uses when he's tired, confused or just plain not getting what's going on. it is what he uses when he is mad at me.

because he has spent the last two weeks mad at me (read: struggling to figure out what is going on) i have been particularly boring and he has deemed it necessary to let me know several times a day in case, in my life-obliterating boringness, i might have forgotten. today we have just an hour together and when the children pile into the room i am expecting ugliness. the room settles down quickly, ninth grade bodies, half of them still strapped into bookbags and giant coats, lean over open books. quietquietquiet. except him. he is talking. in all the quiet his voice is like a rasp on metal, splintery, rough. i have been using my angry teacher glare since before he was born and i consider it, but i know it won't work on him. he doesn't care. he hates reading, hates me, hates school. so i put on my best teacher smile, the one that makes the hearts of children hesitate before beating again, sends them into fits of silent terror because they don't know quite what is happening. i scribble absences on my attendance sheet and say, in the most offhand manner i can scrounge up, "when i'm done here we'll go out and call your dad. i just want to see if it's okay with him if we switch you to a less boring class." smilesmile. he nods. "that sounds great!" he yells back, a little too loud in the quiet. and then mysteriously he finds the book he's been unable to find the last few days. he starts to read.

we finish reading and the kids are writing a small bit of memoir. some tiny memory from their life that's only crammed up in their brains because of the wonderful person the memory sits around. we have not stepped out to make the phone call because we have been too busy. he has been too busy. he writes about a girl. he writes about cold weather and the warmth of knowing someone wants to be right next to you. he calls me over- raises his hand and calls me over- several times. he writes the better part of two very sweet and passionate pages. he smiles when he talks about this girl, smiles when he writes. it is a good story but i have made claims that if you can't come up with two full pages about an event it wasn't very memorable and if you can't say more than two pages about someone you love, you don't love them nearly as much as you've been thinking. he hands me the story and says he'll finish it after school. i do not expect to see him.

when the bell rings at the end of the day and my tenth graders trudge out into the hallway, a stream of ninth graders flows in. they settle into the luxury of sitting in any seat, of having a whole table to themselves. he is right there with them, in the middle of the little swarm, holding out a hand for his paper. he sits quietly in his own regular seat, scrunches himself around the paper and writes. he turns in the story, hands it over with a flourish, smiles, insists i read it. it is good. it is not at all what it should be but it is so far from where he was a month ago i want to cry. i tell him it's good, ask him if he knows why. "sure," he says, chin jutting out, head thrown back. "i'm cool like that." and he is a child the other children want to be like. he is cool like that. but i tell him no. "it's because you're smart like that," i insist, knowing full well what will come next. and it does. hands fly up into the air and a terrifying crumpling of face and body. "STOP SAYING THAT! I AM NOT SMART!" other children are gathered around my desk. it feels strange since my desk is in the back of the room and i almost never sit there, am only sitting there now to get a folder out of a drawer. and this is not like it was a few weeks ago in the hallway when he was screaming at me, red-faced, nearly suffocating himself with rage. he knows what i'm getting ready to say back and he wants this audience to hear it. "you are smart and there's nothing you can do about it. nothing! ha! just deal with it. just be smart." when i look at him he is wearing that new face, the one he wore earlier in the day when he talked about a girl who smelled good and walked down the street with him. it is a horrible secret and i will not tell. but from time to time i will remind him i know. he is in love. madly in love. the writing, the power of storytelling, the audience, the drama, he loves it all. he is a writer.