brooklyn

once again i realize i do not deserve the gifts these children bring every day but i take them anyway and keep them because i am selfish. and because i know a good story when i hear it.

it is one week since the storm and it is the first day the students are back at school. we are not sure what will happen, how they will be or what they will need. we are not even sure where some of our children are. i am, to be honest, a little nervous. i do not handle dramatic displays of unhappiness well and i am not a great comfort, especially to teenagers. i suppose that, in general, nobody is a great comfort to teenagers. they are inconsolable for years.

but because we are english teachers and because writing is how we believe the world works things out, my co-teachers and i start things off by having the kids open their journals. they write. they put down their stories. i tell them that is the easy part. they've been telling their stories all week without thinking about them. now is the time to record them for real. to save what they know. and they do.

but the second part is tougher. we ask them to think about their city, a city everyone in the world knows. they are not living in the city they were living in a week ago. it is a whole new place, for bad and for good. and we ask them how it is new, what they see for their city down the road. we ask how things have changed and what that means.

they write silently for a while. fifteen minutes. twenty. some of them finish and sit still. i look at them, see not quite a page written and say, very plainly, more than that happened. you have more to say. and they know it. they pick up their pens and keep writing.

we ask them, maybe twenty five minutes in, if they want to talk. they have written so they can organize their thoughts and we have found that this helps them speak more clearly. they are more confident when they have their own words and ideas sitting there in front of them.

they are ninth and tenth and eleventh graders. children who want to believe that they are adults. they speak in low voices, not shy, just softer than usual. they all want to talk at once but we remind them that they are more generous than that, that everyone's story will be heard.

one boy describes cars floating away. he watched them from his window. this is new for them. they are children of the city and have seen, at fifteen or so, more than many adults will ever see but this is the first time any of them have ever seen cars floating down the street. the way they speak is beautiful. they describe what they have seen so simply, with muted emotion. they are not in love with the violence of the storm or the chaos of what has come after. they are not what you think teenagers are.

a child explains that he's staying with family a while. there's not electricity, no heat, no water in his own home. he has been there five days now and it is difficult being in a place that is not his own, even if it is with family. he says it will be three weeks before he is back where he belongs and although i suspect it will be longer, i know enough to keep my mouth shut. he is honest. it is hard, he says. he doesn't want to spend three weeks this way. it is what he says next, though, that makes the room quiet. he has been thinking, he says. he keeps thinking there are people in the world who live like this all the time. it's a few weeks for me, but for some people, it's their whole lives, it's how they live. he knows where he is in the world and although it's not where he would like to be, he knows how much he has.


one girl describes her apartment, where all the bedrooms were underwater. her family has lost everything in those rooms. i don't know if you know about teenagers, but losing the contents of a teenager's bedroom is akin to losing one's soul. the bedroom of a teenager, terrifying to any outsider, is a holy place to them, a sanctuary. she describes the situation with a worn out voice, explaining that she, too, is staying with family. it's okay, she says. they're just things. they don't matter. she does not say this because she is a child of wealthy parents who will simply replace everything. she says it because it is something she knows to be true.

the eleventh graders do not want to talk so much about what they have seen. they want to talk about what comes next. they talk about the gas lines, the looting, the fires. they talk about the opportunities for local hardware stores and construction workers. they ask more questions. they want to know why the cyclone didn't blow down. it is so old and rickety and wooden, they say, but it is clear they are proud of their ancient roller coaster for not plunging into the sea the way roller coasters in other states seem to have done. they want to know about sharks in basements. they want to know how long. i tell them about my own town, how they are still rebuilding more than a year later. i tell them things will not be fixed quickly but they should work to fix things anyway. they do not flinch.

they do not understand why adults might rebuild where the ocean came up and destroyed but they do understand that this ugliness they have been through will give them new choices. rebuilding is not just about structures. it is about how they decide to look at what is before them. tomorrow they will be home again. it is election day and they will be, many of them, staring out of someone else's windows, watching someone else's t.v., sleeping on floors. with each class, i do not want to let them go out the door and back into whatever they will go to. i want to keep them where they are, safe for a few hours, thinking about how to move forward. but the bell rings, no matter what i want. so i tell them what i can. be safe tomorrow, i say. go out and do something useful. a week ago i wouldn't have been sure, but today i am. they will do exactly what i have asked. not because i have asked them. they will do it because they have seen, firsthand, that they are needed.

revolution

this week we started reading ray bradbury. last week was midwinter break. the week before, we wrote a little:

fifteen years ago mr. gil scott heron broke my heart and shook my hand all in one evening. he promised me the revolution would not be televised. he was right about that. 


but that may be partly because there's not a working television in any public school in brooklyn. the revolution will put you in the driver's seat, he said. the revolution, he insisted, will be live. and it was. it will be. it is. i had the good fortune to see the first glittering sparks of revolution today and can tell you all you've heard and all you've thought about the shiftlessness of teenagers, all you've heard about how they don't know how to work together or think or act is probably about as far from what i saw today as possible.


it turns out when you give kids some time to think and ask them a tough question or give them a deep statement, they'll ask you what it means first, but when you tell them you don't know,  they'll try pretty hard to figure it out for themselves. and even if they're not sure, even if they don't get it quite right, they'll get pretty riled up if they think someone is listening. and i will tell you, right here and right now, that if you are a grown up person and you say to them i am listening they will say something. and even if it isn't what you want to hear, even if it sounds silly to your own grown up ears and even if it isn't as articulate as you think your fancy self could be in the same situation, you will hear something impressive if you listen.

we give the kids a slice of a poet's brain: if they give you ruled paper, write the other way. the poet is a man named juan and we ask what they think he means. we ask the tenth grade. the whole tenth grade. five classes of thirty. and we say it like this: what do you think? they do not like this because they think it is disingenuous. they believe that when someone asks them, tenth graders, teenagers, what they think, what those people really mean is what do i want you to say? and i suppose most of the time that is true. but we press on. no, really. what do you think? and they think maybe it means a person should be a little more rebellious. they think it means a person probably doesn't have to let other people determine his or her limits. they think. it is a struggle, but they do it.

and we talk some more. about the occupy wall street protests, which they see as a colossal flop. why, they want to know, with all the world watching, didn't those people say something? as people who are adept at being ignored and discounted and dismissed by those in power, they know a missed opportunity. they know exactly what they would do with an audience. they know what they would do if someone shoved microphones in front of their faces.

and we figure, a handful of teachers who are always looking around for a way to get a kid to read or write or think, we don't exactly have a microphone but we know they know how to get attention. so we scheme. and each class schemes a little differently but everyone has the same message. we're going to write the other way. and they write it down. on post-its and posters. it should not be missed here that every time they write their message they write it the right way. every time. they arm themselves with paper, with words. they are ready to go out into the world with a message. but we've got more than paper in mind. we know how they communicate.

in each class, all five, we ask them to take out those precious phones. it is against the rules. it is so against the rules. they begin to glow, the children. one child says he is confused. a girl giggles nervously. slowly, agonizingly slowly, they type the quote about the paper into their little phones. and then, in each class, thirty kids and two teachers, more or less, send out a text to at least five, and in many cases all, of the people they have listed in their phones. if they give you lined paper, write the other way. hundreds of texts like electronic confetti flying through the air. they cheer. they change their facebook statuses. i do not even know what this looks like, but they do it. status: writing the other way. status: disturbing the universe. status: participating in the revolution. they step out into the halls with their fists full of words, their stomachs fluttering wild butterflies. we could get in trouble for this. all of us. this is real. this is the revolution. they stick the words onto doors and walls. they put them on the time clock in the office. they fold words and cram them into grates and wrap them around door handles. they cover the school with their demand. if they give you lined paper, write the other way. do it, the little papers insist. look at things differently. do not let anyone ever limit you.

and nobody is really sure what to do. students are whispering in the halls. some teachers glare out doors as swarms of thirty tenth graders blankets the halls with a call to action they are still not quite sure they understand. but some teachers open their doors, stand there in the doorway with smiles that reach way back into their eyes. some teachers encourage their students to look at us. one teacher has tears in her eyes, good tears, she says. she is proud of what she sees.

late in the day, the very last period before the bell rings and the doors open and the wildness pours into the streets, the last class of the day steps out into the hall, walking three or four abreast, carrying the words on big slabs of poster paper. they chant, they say the words loud, all together, insistent. their voices echo through four floors of the old building and just like with each class before, with every step they take, a little of the fear and nervousness dissipates. they are surrounded by each other and they feel the strength of their numbers. i see them on the last leg of their journey. they are marching toward an administrator who steps out into the hall at the corner where they will turn. he watches them. he is a good man and he understands what they are doing but it is his job to keep the peace. he stares at them. they do not waver. they march right up to him, chanting, and turn the corner. he nods at them. they understand what he has done. they understand the impression they have made. they are down the stairs and gone.

it is not clear, however, that all of them understand what they are doing. it is not clear that all of them will be able to explain what has happened. but it has happened. it is happening. and they are planning what to say next. because they know something. they know people hear their voices. they know people in this school know they have something to say. they are starting to believe it, too.

baby daddy

the first time i saw him he was putting his fist through one of those glass panels embedded with chicken wire, the kind school stairwells had in the fifties. he shattered the glass pretty impressively but the chickenwire kept it from spilling all over the place. he cut his hand and bruised it a bit. he was mad, i heard later, at his girlfriend. i saw her in class a day or so after, tiny, eyes cast down, and she told me he has an anger problem. she smiled when she said it, shyly, like she was in awe of such power, like she was glad he'd expressed his feelings for her so well. high school girls like boys who will hit things for them.

so when i see him a few days later in the same stairwell he starts yelling at me, saying i ratted him out. evidently he got himself suspended for this impressive bit of drama in the stairwell. i tell him i don't even know his name and he continues to yell a little more, maybe to prove to me he has this anger problem i've been hearing more and more about over the weeks. but i was raised by wolves, or at least by people with a stubborn streak, so i let him yell himself out and tell him maybe he ought to go to class instead of wasting so much time standing in a stairwell that smells like broccoli farts. it really does, by the way. he is mad that he thinks this is even the tiniest bit funny and he stomps off so i will not see him smiling.  i see him.

i hear the tiny girl who smiles when she thinks about him is pregnant. she sits in one of the classes i share with another teacher. she never raises her hand. she never talks. she sits quietly and hands in papers and reads short stories and might be focused enough to get into a college if she didn't have any other challenges staring at her. she stares down at her belly a lot lately.

when i walk through the halls and stairwells between classes i sometimes encounter clumps of children, most often boys, huddled together. usually they are doing nothing more than cutting class and when i walk up, especially in the stairwells, they look sheepish and scatter. there are seven in the group i see today, sitting all together in a stairwell, reeking of something that smells like cherry cough syrup. there is much shuffling and muttering and then a few of them shoot up the stairs. one or two just stand there, smiling the sort of dumb-faced grin i hope nobody ever has to see outside a school. and then there is mr. anger management. he stands up and starts to walk away.

i motion for him to stop and mention i hear he's going to be a dad. he looks at me funny because he doesn't have the skills with inferencing to know where i might be going with this. he nods, glares. tries very hard with his glaring to remind me he has anger problems. this is what you're doing? i ask him. this is what you're doing to get ready to be a father? i can see the confusion. i'm not fighting fair. the other boys are gone and i say softly your baby deserves a good dad. this is mean. every baby deserves a good dad and not many get one and it hardly seems fair of me to expect something from a fifteen year old boy most people don't expect of thirty year old men. but it's his baby. his choice. he yells back that he's going to be a good dad. i shake my head, tell him that if the best he can do is sit in a stairwell with a bunch of losers while he ought to be learning something, he will not be a good dad. your baby deserves a better dad than this, i say.

he looks less angry, more tired. he doesn't have even a tiny idea what is happening inside this small girl he might love. he has no way to know what a baby is all about or what it will need from him. he does not know he will need to teach it things. he does not know he can easily kill a baby when he is mad and not even see it happen. but i am not really worried about that. i know his anger is an excuse. it's a way to turn his back on responsibility for things. but it won't work here. he shoves open the stairwell door and stomps through, yelling over his shoulder that he will be a good dad. he will. he knows it.

i think about what i can tell him. what he might listen to. i have to plan ahead because i only see him times like this, when i am on my way somewhere else and he is where he isn't supposed to be. he must be a little scared, even if he doesn't really know how scared to be yet. he isn't the monster he pretends to be, but he tries so hard. maybe i should be asking instead of telling. is the baby a boy or a girl? what will you name it? what color sweater do you want me to knit?

wasting time

in 8th grade he walked up to a group of older boys in the street and said something very bad in spanish. he waited for the fight to start but the boys, who were not the gang members he'd hoped they were, simply looked at him the way you'd look at a yappy puppy behind a fence. this frustrated him, as you can imagine, so he threw rocks at them. handfuls of gravel, really. they walked on down the street, talking and laughing. he was not pleased. one of the older boys came to me the next day and asked me to do something about him. they didn't want to hit the child, he said, but eventually they would have to try to teach him what nobody else had been able to. 

he was not in my class in ninth grade but i would see him regularly roaming the halls in the colors of a latino gang that had no idea he existed. he was, in ninth grade, the sort of child whose name would bring shudders of boredom from teachers. he was bad but he was not very good at it.

so this year when i see his name on my class list i feel tired. i see him more often on the back sides of empty stairwells than in his desk. he is always wearing pegged jeans three sizes too small for his stubby self. he has no idea how unpleasant this is for those who have to walk behind him up stairs. his jacket is still always that same color, the way middle aged guys will sometimes wear the colors of a sports team that never considered them.

he smiles when he sees me lately, a slow smile that tells me he won't hold a grudge if i drag him to whatever class class he should be in. i have chased him up three flights of stairs, through silent hallways and back down again. i am quick for a fortysomething knitter and he is wearing his too-tight pants belted at the knees so i smile always when i drop him of at class and he smiles right back.

but when he is in my class some days i am fed up watching him trudge into the room fifteen or twenty minutes late, hat perched cockeyed on his head, earphones blasting something awful and so loud i can hear it. he drags his hand across desks. and i am through watching him slam three or four desks aside to settle himself into his own. it is to much to watch him take ten more minutes to root around in his backpack so loudly i have to raise my voice to be heard over his rustling. because inevitably after he has done all this he will say, loudly, i don't have a pen-paper-book-handout or i need to go to the bathroom. his smile is only getting him so far.

this time of year we have the conferences, the ones where parents come around scared or angry and wait in lines for us to tell them what is wrong with their children. that's the fear, that there is something genuinely wrong, that it is their fault. it is in the evening, after the parents are home from work. they dress up, speak in overly formal, tortured sentences. i try to make myself seem less scary but it never works. the boy is here, sitting at one of the desks outside my classroom. he is here, he tells me, to help. i try not to look overly shocked in front of the parents. i do not want to seem mean. he moves from door to door, this child, checking to see if anyone needs a translator. he helps parents find the right rooms and sign in with the right teachers. he chats with them a little and puts them at ease. he is here to help.

i do not recognize this behavior, do not recognize him. when he saunters into my classroom about five minutes before it is time to go home, i ask if he's here for a conference. i am joking. he does not quite get the joke. he motions the girl standing next to him toward one of the chairs and the three of us sit down. and we have a meeting. a real one. he says he didn't realize how much of his time he'd wasted. he looks shyly over at the girl and says he can't afford to keep wasting time. the girl thinks he is magnificent sitting there in those ridiculous pants and that tedious jacket. he is serious. i tell him what i've known for a while, that he's pretty smart, that i suspect he can read a little and when he says things in class they actually make sense. he shocks me by nodding, by saying he knows. he says he likes thinking about what we read. i turn to the girl, tell her she better keep an eye on him, say she ought to expect him to be smart if she's going to be seen with him. she nods very solemnly. she smiles over at him. he failed every class he took this marking period. every single one. but he has been in every single class for a week. he's never done that before.

lightsaber, rock cycle, seventh grade

i do not know the whole story behind why there are lightsabers in the desk, but there are two. they belong to the teacher who is in this classroom most of the day and we sometimes use them as swords when we are acting out macbeth. we have been acting out macbeth the last week or so.

our floor, the english floor, is a quiet haven in the midst of wildness. except for the seventh graders. they come up once a day, on a schedule skewed 30 minutes from our own, so that they barrel through the stairwell door and come howling into the hall en masse. because they are seventh graders they have been taught to wait outside a room until their teacher arrives. there is no telling what mayhem they might accidentally get themselves into if they enter a room without supervision. so every day, midway through macbeth, this slithering mass of chaos swirls around outside the space between their door and our door. and every day i try to think of a new way to scare them into quietness without completely ruining them. annoying as they are, they're more fragile than eleventh graders. they take everything to heart. they believe me when i say things.

a few days back we are in class and the lightsabers are leaned against a wall. the seventh grade horde comes up, giggling and shoving and howling. the other teacher is in the middle of macbeth so i do what i can. i leap out into the hallway brandishing a lightsaber. this is not what i have planned. it is just what happens. there is a great squealing among the children, not enough of it from fear. mostly they think it is fantastic that a teacher is threatening to destroy them with a lightsaber. they love it enough to find it in their still-beating hearts to be quieter so that i do not have to slay them. as though this is a gift to me. although one little boy comes dangerously close to begging to be slain. begging, i tell you.

so today when i show up at a seventh grade science class to read a test about rocks for a group of students, there is some buzz and chatter. i have forgotten my adventures on the english floor, forgotten my attempts to slay an entire class of seventh graders. but they have not. in particular, one little boy has not.

oh, no! he howls, his grin crawling to the edges of his round face. are you going to chase me with a lightsaber? i look over at him, confused a little, as we walk down the hall, ten or so of them and me, headed for the library. it takes me a second to remember waving the blue lightsaber around wildly while he stood in the door to the stairwell, laughing. his eyes are the same now as then, bright puppy eyes, sparkling with hope of a lightsaber appearing during a test on rocks.

i tell them i love rocks, love tests about rocks. i tell them i absolutely love to read tests about rocks more than most things. some of these things are true and some are not. it does not always matter with seventh graders whether everything you say is true. all that matters is that you say it passionately. so i read the test passionately, questions about sedimentary, ingeous, metamorphic rocks. questions about luster, about fracturing. they do not work all at the same rate and as they finish, they head, one by one, back to their science class. but the child who recognized me earlier sits, test situated neatly under his folded hands. he is finished. i'm waiting, he says, in case something happens. and he is serious. he knows very little about me but that i'm unpredictable and my unpredictability runs to what is, to him, a magnificent scale. i have weapons from the future and i have spared his life at least once when i didn't have to. i might do it again.

diagram from the kern river courier, because it's pretty

we turn to a page with a diagram of the rock cycle on it. i think of the shower curtains we've had, the sweetie and me. the frog life cycle. the new york city transit map. the water cycle. i think of how right now i'm dying for a periodic table shower curtain, how i'd like to have a shower curtain with this rock cycle on it. but i know better than to say so. i am not stupid. what i say instead is, man, i think i'm going to have to get me a tattoo of this rock cycle. it's soooooo cool. because a tattoo is far more fierce than a shower curtain. and there are giggles. wide eyes. one girl shakes her head. the waiting child's eyes get so big i worry they will leap out of his skull. the grown up in me worries he may go home and try to make his own rock cycle tattoo with a sharpie. the teacher in me realizes this would demonstrate clear knowledge of the rock cycle, not to mention impressive spatial organization.

when it is time to go back, he says it again. you're not going to chase me with a lightsaber, are you? he says it the way little kids you've just tossed into the swimming pool ask if you're going to toss them in again as they run up to you, panting and reeking of chlorine, arms outstretched for easy throwing. maybe, i say, smiling. because who can tell with seventh graders?

silence

for information on how you can help stop bullying of gay youth (or anyone else you love), go to: http://www.glsen.org/cgi-bin/iowa/all/antibullying/index.html

today is the national day of silence. because i am the sponsor, more or less, of the gay and non-homophobic children at our school, i decide to try to be silent. remember, i am a teacher. now, i share each class with a second adult but today one of those adults is home and we share two sets of children. i will be teaching two classes entirely alone without saying a word. a first period eleventh grade class of 31 and a fourth period tenth grade class of 32. did i mention today is friday? did i mention it's the friday before a nine day spring break? no get out your book. no sit down. no stop throwing that.

i write on the board why i'm silent, how i'm standing in solidarity with a community often silenced in schools, how i'm remembering with my actions the people who have gone before and who have been forced to be silent, forced to deny who they are because it makes someone else feel uneasy. i put the name of a support group at the bottom of the message. i draw a line. under it i write my suggestion for how to stop bullying against gay folks. "tell kobe bryant if he didn't mean it that way, he shouldn't have said it that way". i sign my name to that one. a boy near the front of the class passes me a sheet of folded paper. it says i feel like i'm in a charlie chaplin movie.

i put instructions on the board. we are to read the first part of class and then reflect in journals on how the characters in our novels have suffered and why. i put their homework on the board and directions for how to approach it. when reading time is over, i rap on the desk and gesture to the board. while they're writing, i gesture and point and communicate in plenty of ways that don't involve words. the kids are amused and uncomfortable. some take my behavior as a challenge and try to get me to talk. i am steadfast. i can't shut up for my own self but i know plenty of folks who have been isolated and shunned for being different. they don't get to choose to walk in and out of their isolation. i write on the board, bang my fist against words to get the attention of these bewildered kids. a few of them are choosing silence, too, but a handful begin to try to translate my gestures and pointing for the rest of the class. they prompt each other to share ideas or read aloud or stop talking. they become my voice. they seem to think i am winning something by being silent and they want to help. we work like this until the bell rings.

i eat my lunch in a room full of adults talking all around me. i spill pesto on my skirt and stare down at the oil seeping in. i am so quiet nobody sees me. i do not exist. for five hours i do not speak in a place where my most effective tool has always been my voice. i have nothing except the voice the children give me but i am never silent. there are symbols always, communication endlessly. i send out and they gather up. we share back and forth. i am a pale shadow of what i'm imitating, children for whom the silence is so large it is able to shove them out of windows and off bridges, so deep it swallows them in murky water, so oppressive they will try to claw it out of themselves with shards of glass or knives they don't know how to use.

i am not sure this is working. i do not feel like anything i've done today has made gay teens any safer or happier. but we have a little pizza party afterward. when i walk in there are plenty of kids clumped in little groups chatting easily around slices of pizza and gulps of pop. a mix of boys and girls, middle school through seniors, representative of several languages and cultures in our school. many of them are not gay and that's maybe part of the gift. straight folks and gay folks together in a room eating pizza and drinking pop and talking about nothing, nobody feeling ashamed or ugly inside. just laughing after all that silence and feeling how good it feels to be able to step out of it, all of us together like that.

drug dealers

they are boys i have known a long time. three years which is, to them, an eternity. i think of them, these children, as mine. this is how we all see wild and ephemeral things. the bird outside our window every morning. the rabbits hopping across the front lawn at evening. deer in the woods off the road one over. we have to maintain a special balance to be able to see them without driving them away. i constantly misjudge this line. that's fine. if you have ever touched a real wild animal, had a bird perch, even for a moment, on your hand, you know it's worth however still you had to be for whatever measureless stretch of time.

1. i see the first child walking away from me down the hall just after the first bell. he strolls past the front desk security guard proudly displaying beads, colors, hat. these things say drug dealer. they say gang member. these are the things he is but he is also only a few minutes late for class. he is a student. i say his name and he turns and smiles. his eyes are a mess. his whole face is bloodshot. i motion to the hat and he takes it off. he turns back down the hall but when i say "the flag, too" he tucks the bandanna into his left pocket, out of sight. i am taller and am not practicing to be nonchalant so i catch up to him as he turns the corner. "why'd you come to school high?" i ask, although i already know. this is not our first visit about this subject. he looks up at me and his smile slides around all over his face. this is conversation, not confrontation. "i'm o.g., miss." the words ooze out of the smile. they are not true. there is nothing original about him. he is a walking stereotype of a drug dealer. as for the gangsta aspect, i know he has committed a string of felonies, has used weapons against others, but here in this place i know if i hauled off and smacked him hard across the side of his head he would not hit me back. he would apologize for whatever he thinks i might know that is worth slapping him over. this is not because i'm particularly fierce. this is because i am one of a number of women in the building who share the work of being his mother. so i don't slap him. my tired look says the same thing a slap would. i walk him to the stairwell and tell him to get to class. his face, his smile are less addled. "i'll be here every day," he says, swinging open the door to the stairs. "business is business."

2. the next child arrives to class late and we have the hat/phone/late conversation as he scoots into his seat. he is more impish than most sixteen year old boys and when i walk over to him, tired, glaring, and toss our current story on his desk, he pushes it back toward me gently and looks up with the face of an angel. "i read it already." he pulls out a folded copy of the story. i do not believe he read the assigned seven pages and i am right. he started and could not stop reading. he read the entire story all at once. he waits while i digest this information. he knows me well enough to look right at me, watch my eyes for a sign he's managed to make me cry. the other teacher in the room is asking questions and he raises his hand several times. and then after he does this, he answers those questions the teacher is asking. and he answers them brilliantly. i am leaning against the wall near his desk and watch him reach into a pocket for his phone. he glances at it, then quickly texts back. ordinarily this is when he would ask to go to the bathroom. he would be gone about five minutes and would hand someone in the bathroom something small in a plastic bag in exchange for some cash. instead he looks back toward the front of the room, turns his face to the discussion. i motion to him more than once about the phone. he smiles, nods toward the discussion, raises his hand. the child manages to text these little junkies back while raising his hand and answering questions.

i imagine his texts. why yes, i would like very much to sell you some drugs. however, i am currently very deep in the middle of an exhilarating discussion about a short story by the brilliant author mr. james baldwin and am not in a position to leave my literary companions. we are discussing the limited choices these two young men face and the ways they've attempted to escape the past and forge a new future. we are talking about harlem and heroin and jazz. i am sure you will understand if we postpone our scheduled meeting until after lunch. perhaps you'd like me to bring you a copy of the story. i think you'll agree it's far more brutal and lovely than heroin.

ghost

i don't know how old he is but he has a ninth grade english class so maybe he's fifteen. maybe seventeen. he's only shown up three or four times to my first period class, each of those times solemn, at least an hour late. he is always quiet and i tell him i'm glad to see him, though really i don't know him well enough to say, i suppose. i cram books onto his desk like i expect him to do something with them but there is no pressure. he takes the books, looks through them, promises to come back the next day and read one but he never does.

this is why i am surprised to see him when i look up during my last period class. the four eleventh graders who have managed to hang on until now are working independently, quietly. he stands in the doorway, leaned back against the doorjamb, a babyish, baggypants version of the marlboro man. he's watching the hallway, which is short and pretty much empty. a few of my other ninth graders wander in, mill about. i am not sure why they aren't in class but they mumble something about a sub and how it's too noisy and they seem content to read quietly so i am happy to have them here. the boy standing in the doorway seems a little unsure and i yell over to him to come in and sit down. he shuffles into the room and sprawls out in one of the chairs near the board.

i offer him books. maybe he can read and maybe he can't. i don't recall seeing any proof either way and when i have asked him he just shrugs. probably not, then. i pull a table up in front of him and slap down a book full of images. i get paper and a pen and ask him to write, tell the story of the image. he looks at me a long time and bends over the paper. he carefully puts his name up in the right corner but the squished letters fall all over each other in rebellion. i go back to working with other students.

he sits at the table, flipping through the book. i tell him he can write about any picture he likes and he nods. he goes back to the book. he spends maybe ten minutes staring at one picture, then the other. he tells me he's chosen one that isn't one of the ones i first showed him. i nod. when it is almost time to go he closes the book and puts it on the shelf. he walks back over to the door and looks out into the hallway again. he leaves his paper on the table with the pen lying across it. in the upper right corner there is his angry name. and then all across the rest of the page there is nothing.

birthday, or how to make butter for real

it started the thursday just before, i guess, with one class of ninth graders who managed to show an interest in cat's cradle, a game mentioned in our book. not just interest, i have to explain, but fascination. and so all those pieces of yarn lying on windowsills and in defunct sink and in lockers all around the classroom suddenly tied these children up in little bundles, all crowded around a single child in each group whose fingers supported, or more often were caught up in, the web of yarn. and they were asking to get a chance to try it, then asking someone with skill to explain to them what to do. they were willing to learn something that sounded endlessly boring on paper. this is the single most important thing we've been trying to teach them all year.

they are calm and kind and gracious to one another there in class all wrapped in yarn and the other teacher in the room and i figure this is the sign we've been looking for, the sign that they can be in a room together while shaking small glass jars and probably nobody will get hurt. these are the things you need to consider when you spend your days with ninth graders. and so on friday she brings in bread and cups and napkins and i bring in butter colored roses and jams and fat cream. they are unable to get past the roses. they are suspicious of my reasoning: people should have flowers on the table when they sit down to eat. they know about the bread and roses strike. they know give us bread but give us roses, too. they know we cannot survive on bread alone. while they work on the beginnings of their stories i put the roses into the small vases i keep in the metal cabinet for just these sorts of things. floral emergencies.

when they have all done work and it is time, they put the tables together and crowd around in four groups because i can only find four empty jars. i explain to them them what we'll do while other adults in the room fill the small jars with heavy cream. the children screw lids onto the jars and begin shaking. it is more work than they expected to shake these jars. five or ten minutes is a much longer time than they were thinking it was and so they all take turns, careful not to stop shaking as they transfer the jars from one child to another.

i am vague about what will happen, just promising them butter and insisting on the constant shaking of the jars. one child calls out that their group has butter. i ask if they are sure and they nod solemnly. they are absolutely sure. we hand out plastic knives and slices of fresh bread from the neighborhood bakery and jam from the same store where the bacon chocolate waits. this is my second year making butter in class and i am surprised, just as i was last year, that they're so eager to participate. like with the cat's cradle. they sit together around the tables and pass things gently to one another. not like when they throw notebooks and pens and paperbacks across the room. more like would you like to try some of this delicious ginger peach jam? they like the butter and devour the bread with everything on it. they do not shy away from the lemon curd or the blueberry preserves.

when it is time to go they clean up and put the tables back. i tell them to take the roses and they are shocked to find them thorny and brambly when they try to pull them from the vases. real roses, not those naked longstemmed sawdust smelling things. still, they manage to separate the stems and nobody who wants roses leaves roseless. they stand around, waiting for the bell, their noses buried in the yellow petals. they are oldlady roses, small and irregularly shaped, but smelling like what rose really means. several clutch the butter-filled jars to their chests. for later. for evidence.

this is what i asked for. they wanted to know what i hoped i'd get for my birthday and i said i want to make butter. i said it because at the time i'd wanted them to shut up and do some work. and for some reason home made butter is exotic to these children, exotic enough they'll shut up and do some work if they think they'll get butter. so what i get is more than the small jars of sweet, pale butter i'd asked for. when one girl, generally loud, the kind who slaps boys hard to let them know she likes them, writes on the board thank you and then slips quietly back to her seat, i want to shout to them to look around, see themselves. i want them to know they decided to learn something new and then they paid attention and worked together and accomplished something. i want them to know the butter is the reward for how they worked and what they did. i want them to know they are okay with having butter - butter- as a reward. i want this to be one of those teachable moments where everyone gets it. i want this the way they wanted butter. so i keep my mouth shut. i don't ruin it.

the bell rings and they walk out in twos and threes, on to the last class of their friday. their voices rise up out of the stairwell, trailing behind them words about butter and roses.

window

today the eleventh graders came into the room in twos and threes, sat down quietly at their desks and began spreading out their work. this is day two of an exam, written by me to mimic and prepare them for and english exam our state requires that they do not seem to be interested in passing. their desks disappear under photocopies of two or three of the short stories we've read in class, some annotated, some marked up with highlighters, most stark white and blank except for the actual words of the stories. they are expected to identify themes in the works and then write an essay comparing two works with similar themes using literary terms and techniques. as per the state exam. dulldulldull. the word theme is explained in substantial detail at the top of the exam. they will not be able to use any such notes or stories on the actual exam but i want them to just get a feel for what it takes to pass the thing.

but this is not where i should start with this story. so let's start with yesterday. day one of the exam. the first two children in the room began shrieking about how they did not know there would be a test. since the other teacher in the room and i have been talking up this test for over a month and have been talking about how we would begin it this particular day, it seems odd they would both be taken by surprise. they are unable to stop exclaiming about their shock. they suddenly have a lot in common with victorian women. three girls who show up together, but only once every two weeks or so, arrive and do not seem to understand that they need to be awake in order to participate in testing festivities. at some point about fifteen minutes into class seven children are sitting something like quietly and a dean arrives with two more little bits of sunlight. neither child (and by child i mean seventeen year old boy) is interested in taking this particular exam or any other exam. there is pouting. there is fit throwing. the first of the two gets up and leaves before the dean is down the stairs. but before he is out the door he works very hard to rile up the other child, the child who arrived with him. that child spends about ten minutes in the middle of the room whining, saying random things out loud, rustling papers.

he catches the eye of one of the two swooning shriekers from the beginning of class and there are catcalls across the room. this is odd because the shriekers are sitting next to each other (to cut down on suffering among other students) and the whiner is sitting not two feet away. their proximity does not at all necessitate the volume they feel compelled to use. the whining boy finally stands up and declares, "i can't think in here!" and stomps out with his test and all his work. i get a call from the dean's office. whining child has gone there, says i sent him. i explain that i did not, that he stomped out on his own. the dean's office says he can't take the test there and i explain, again, that i never intended him to take it there. he does not return.

i sit between the swooners, hoping to curb some of their ridiculousness. we are now nearly forty minutes into class. neither one has written down anything beyond his own name. neither name is legible. child one begins yelling an ugly word out into the room. at no one in particular. it is a word the children use when they mean "stupid" or "annyoying". it is not a word i allow in my class. technically, it is a term our district clearly defines as hate speech. i glare at child one. nobody else looks up. he says it again. just out there into the empty middle of the room. child two, on my other side, yells it out into the room as well. i look at him like he has lost his mind. truth be told, he has been carrying his mind in a bucket full of holes and i see bits of it falling out all over the place. and so the children continue until the other children are looking up with eyes like new parents at five am.

and i say, "get up." the two boys look at me and wait. "get up now." they take forever to get up because they are both children with organizational issues and they need to pack up their bookbags, ragged and miserable things holding small ugly tornadoes inside them. they wander down the hall behind me and usually i would use this time to snarl at them about how they shouldn't act like they are completely incapable of anything unless they are, about how it gets harder and harder for me to defend them when people say they are idiots because so much of their time is spent mimicking that sort of behavior. but i am too mad and too tired and my skull feels like it will crack open any second and allow my brain to float free. so when they lag behind i turn quickly and hiss, "hurry up!" and continue stomping down two flights of stairs and through two hallways.

when we get to the dean's office she looks up at me and i can tell she feels just as tired as i do. four of my students are now in her office and none of them has accomplished a single thing. she asks them what they are thinking and child two, a child i have worked with now three years, says brightly and cheerfully, "well, i couldn't let him get in the last word." i do not even try to explain that the first child was not talking to him. because i don't think i have the energy to care. i am beginning to worry that my parents and teachers have been wrong all these years. i worry that there may actually be stupid questions and stupid people and that i am staring at them.

so let us get back to today. today is day two. the two boys who left in hissyfits do not show up. the two i dragged to the dean's room do. along with seven or eight other children. the three girls. two girls work quietly, swirl themselves up in stories and ask questions- smart questions- that the other teacher and i try to answer in a helpful way. one girl texts. that's right. has her phone out on top of her bag, which rests comfortably on top of her test. and she spends the entire hour texting. which i would comment on during any other class but she is a nasty human being and to bring it up now would destroy the calm and quiet these other children are finally able to use. so now the only fragile part of this opportunity is the first swooning child from yesterday. a child who speaks, more often than not, in some sort of peter frampton/donald duck voice. when he's not chirping. or whistling poorly. or banging some object on another object. i put him at my desk. a big desk in an alcove at the back of the room. i sit beside him. he needs to read a section of the story but cannot. his brain is squirming, fighting him and he has no way to control its slipperiness. if i walk away for more than a few seconds to answer a question for another child he begins to short circuit, clicking and tapping and creaking. whatever child i might be working with glares at him. he fidgets under the glare but does not want to be alone with all those words on all those pages and his own brain.

and i recall reading years ago about a treatment for dyslexia using colored lenses. now i don't recall that i was in any way impressed with why folks doing this thought it worked but i do recall thinking kids with scattered brains might be calmed a bit by it. so i've had a big sheet of amber gel sitting on my desk for a month or two, waiting. i tried to use it a while ago on the other tornado in the room with less than impressive results. but today i try again when that scattered brain is skittering all over my desk, kicking up dust and paper. i tear the back off a black moleskine notebook, snip a window into it with my sewing scissors and slap a square of amber into it. the child watches, hands me glue when i ask for it, watches me fold down the edges. and then i hand him what looks a little like one of those magnifying windows for books. but with this honey colored film in it. and i explain to him that it might help him hold the words on the page. i hope. i tell him it doesn't work for everyone but that it could work for him, that i expected it would help some little bit, at least.

he holds the window over the words on the page and sits, silent. for the first time ever in our class. ever. he reads a while and then tells me what he read. it is nice to hear. no frampton voice. no chaos. just a child saying what he read. "did it work?" i ask him. he looks up and nods. he is not sure how he feels about something working. his finger moves over the black edge the reading window. "you can take it home if you want to," i say. he nods again. he knows what i was thinking in the dean's office yesterday about stupid people. we are both glad for a little verification that he is capable of something. he holds window for a minute, then puts it carefully in his folder. then the bell rings and he is gone.

step right up

the morning started out with fat rain crashing down all over everything and me trying to get my rainbooted self to the train station by the park without getting anything drenched. student papers. my packet of oatmeal. four boxes of mealworms and four boxes of crickets in flavors usually reserved for potato chips. i wasn't so worried about the two cricket lollipops, one blueberry and one raspberry, crammed somewhere in my bag. by the time i came up out of underground the rain had turned to snow, even fatter than the rain, too wet to stick and be real on the ground but extra fancy in the sky because it took up all the space up there. i had promised one of my girls she could do her extra credit garden project this morning and when i hauled my wet-wool covered self up to the fourth floor, she was sprawled out in front of the door with a few other girls, waiting. i was two minutes late.

while she got to work making a pot out of newspaper and trying to decide whether to plant a cactus or some lemon cucumber or maybe some fractal-y romanesco broccoli, i spread out plates and napkins on the table. the other girls swirled around, smelling the potting soil, which they insisted smelled horrible, then smelling it again just for the scariness, i guess. i put a packet of bugs on each plate, mexican spice mealworms, pink cricket lollipop, bacon cheddar crickets, blue cricket lollipop, cheese mealworms. other kids arrived.

when the bell rang we worked on regular business- reading, arguing, threatening, more reading and then some writing. we discussed grades and while i answered questions i reached down to the cricket plate and picked one up the way you do popcorn from a bowl, without really thinking about it. crunch. and so we started.

every year we ease into nonfiction with a few essays on bugs because teenagers think bugs are disgusting and if they're going to read, they want to read about horrible suffering or something disgusting. we read about cockroaches. then we read about edible bugs, about how folks in most other countries cook and eat a variety of insects because they are plentiful, tasty and healthy. and every year, with the help of a very elaborate and carefully worded permission slip, a few brave souls stand up in front of their peers and eat bugs. before we eat, i ask them to get out paper and a pen. i explain that when we're finished, they'll be expected to reflect. to write what they see and how they feel about it. and they did. so i'll let you hear what they had to say in their own unusual words.

from the audience:
this is just the worst experience i will never ever have it.

my insane teacher just ate bugs not 1 bug not 2 bugs alot of bugs.

i thought that maybe the crickets and bugs still had there blood so i thought they were drinking the blood to.

one boy only ate them without saying a word.

to me i think it was grose and bad because i was hering the bugs crack on peoples mouth.

i was thinking i should have stayed home.

i just discovered the most discusting thing ever!

i felt as if i was dreaming or in a other world, where eating bugs is an everyday thing. at first i was kind of grossed out i could not belive my eye but soon after i saw some of my class mates eating them i thought to myself maybe is not that bad and at one point i even thought of trying it. next time if she brings bug i promised myself that i would try it and also try to like it.

i have experinize hell. it was so nasty to see that boy stuffing 5 worms in his mouth... the crunching sound was so nasty i thought i was going to die... i am so grossed out i am going to have dreams about people stuffing those worms right into there mouth. i couldn't stand it when that boy was holding it right above his mouth and it slide right into his teeth.

just the thought of eating bugs freaked me out because it's something out of the ordinary.

i saw my classmates eat bugs that were dead. it was very disturbing... it was crazy that nobody threw up.

today i watched six pieople eat a bunch of crickets and meal worms it was very nasty but interesting. as they were eating it you heard it chrunch in there mouth.

that is horroring of fear.

i seen that the kids were scared to eat the bugs and then after they ate it, they really loved it.

what i did was sit in the audience. we sat there and watched six kids eat bugs. they sounded very crunchy.

when the students was eating it i thought i was dreaming and i thought these students were crazy in the brain. i was about to take my phone out and call 911 to check if these students had something wrong with their brain.

from those who ate:
i ate as many bugs as i can like there's no tomorrow. i didn't fear at all since they're dead.

well, i know not to eat anymore worms or anything with legs, but i had a good time doing it in front of my friend and having good laughs.

i was scared because i never ate a cricks before till today. it was okay. i mean it was not bad... i thought i was going to throw up. but i didn't. so i was happy about that. the legs got stuck on my teeth so i had to drink something.

my mind was so crazy and out of control. when she called my name a whole bunch of questions was going through my head...then she told us to pick up a mealworm i was like oh no. but i pick it up... so shackey (in my head). pop the mealworum in my mouth it taste ok but i was gross out... all i have to say is it was an exprience.

when i was first up there i was so nervous. but when i ate the worm it was like chips. i was not afraid of eating them anymore. they started to taste good. the crikets were the ones that i was afraid to eat because they were very creepy looking and looked like they were alive. but i ate it anyway... everyone else that was eating the bugs was about to go crazy. but after a while every one started to calm down and wasn't creeped out about us eating bugs.

i'm shocked i even ate a bug...i'm never gonna do it again, but at least i had the guts to do it. everyone looked at us like we were nasty but, they couldn't even do it... this was a good experience to have with people you are cool with.

when i went for the critit i was just like ooo-myyy-goood! the looked realy big and yellow. i was realy nerviors. but when i tast the crits they were realy good. the only thing was i felt the feet and there anteners.

i came back from the bathroom and they were all around the table getting ready to eat it. i must say i really didn't think i would eat that stuff. then i hear them start telling me to do it and i'm like shit. so when i get here i say the bugs holy shit i wanted to throw up. i felt sick to my stomach. i wanted other people to do it before me so i can see there reactions and tell me how it taste. at this point of time i didn't care if it taste good i didn't want to be the guy who ate bugs in our class room. then i said i didn't care what people think what won't kill me will make me stronger. so i ate the meal worms and to be really honest they weren't that bad beside the feet. there bugs. if it was up to me i would never do that crap again.

allthough my parnets are discuted from it but they agreed at last and i got my chance to taste them in class it was a really great but disgusting thing to do.

what i seen when i was up there getting ready to eat the bugs i seen people getting nervous and shaking when they were shaking the table was moving and the bugs were shaking. it got me even more nervous and scared, but when i final said to myself just go for it and eat it i did. when i tryed the meal worm it wasent that bad. just like she said it taste like patato chips. then after that i had about five more. i would recomend any one to try it, unless you are alergic. i wanted to try the cricket but i didn't like the legs and wings on it. i am really glad that i tried it, because it was a fun experience and now i can tell all of my friends and family that i tryed a bug. when i get the picture i want to show my family and friends that i did it.

and this, of course, is when i love them most. when they are discombobulated. not because i want them to be afraid, but because that's when they think most elegantly. when they are off balance. and not just thinking about themselves but about each other. because when they are edgy like this, nervous and unsure, they have to reach out. that little group of six children standing up there at the front of the room was able to do something scary because they looked around and saw not brave faces, but five faces just like theirs staring back at them, unsure, fearful. and i guess that's what lets us sometimes be brave, probably, just knowing that whatever terror you face, you walk toward it with someone else's trembling hand clutched in your own.

love letters

the ninth graders are still working on memoirs. their stories have been unusual, far more emotionally focused than in other years. they know a good story when they see one and even though most of them are not quite able to write a good story, they're able to write something that tells you a good story is crammed in there somewhere. so i have been throwing out random memoir topics and having them write. the uproar is impressive. they fling themselves facedown onto desks, make sounds like small animals witnessing atrocities. they take seven minutes to tear off the spiral edges from their pages. they stare blankly at blank sheets of paper. laboriously write names on top corners. ask me again what the topic is (a time you were kind to someone. the meanest thing you've ever done. a time you knew someone loved you. etc.) write down the date. ask loudly about what day it is. erase date. write down new date with extreme care.

but then, in spite of themselves, they end up, almost every one of them, writing these lovely descriptive snapshots of tiny moments. they struggle to show the story because they know if they tell it instead i will not read it. they describe and describe until they don't have any words left. they stand up. throw out gum. slap someone on the head as they walk back. cough. get up to get a tissue off my desk. kick someone's backpack as they walk to their own desk. sit down. rearrange the single page on the desk. look at it. shake out the last few words they know. hold it up and yell across the room to me, "is this long enough?" i always say no. huffing. stomping. slamming of paper onto desk. i'm always surprised how loud they can slam paper. "you didn't even read it!" the truth is i dont' even have to look at it to know i want more than what's there. glareglareglare. one more slam of paper onto desk. rearrange paper. sharpen pencil. sharpen some more. accidentally break off pointy sharp lead while walking back to desk. return to sharpener for a very successful third time. hunch over paper. glare around the room. write. writewritewritewrite.

but today is the last day of school before an eleven day holiday. most of the tenth, eleventh and twelfth grade kids didn't bother showing up. but ninth grade is different. at least twenty kids showed up to each class, all asking questions about movies and games and parties. these are not things i do. i have mentioned before that this is not so much about being a good teacher as it is about not knowing how to handle chaos or downtime. it unsettles me in my personal life and unsettles me even more when i'm in a room with twenty or thirty shrieking teenagers. and although they ask if we're seeing a movie, it's clear they know we're not. the grumbling when i point to the assignment on the board is minimal. at this point, they're just hoping i don't give them homework. they are fully expecting homework. i worry for a small but loud second if maybe i'm a horrible person. the moment passes and i point to the board again.

they know it will be another of those horrible memoir stories. they read quietly the instructions.

1. think about something small a family member taught you when you were little. how to tie your shoes. how to ride a bike. how to make toast. that's the obvious thing.

2. now think about the subtle things you learned from that same event. that your dad really thinks you can do something brave. that your grandma loves you. that your mom wants you to be proud of yourself.

3. write a letter to that person. describe your memory of the event in detail. thank them for what they gave you. thank them for the obvious stuff and the more subtle stuff.

4. roll it up like a scroll and tie it with pretty yarn.

5. for homework, deliver the letter.

and they write. about the sorts of things ninth graders always write. about grandpas and moms and brothers who gave them small but magnificent gifts. faith in themselves. a desire to succeed. they cannot believe i am serious about the homework. one girl shoves a page in my face and insists i read it. she watches me to see if i will cry. i do not, but this is because i have had years of practice not crying when kids write stuff so honest it makes time stop. but she is happy enough watching my face tense up as i read. another girl yells, "it will make him cry if he reads this!" she is talking about her dad and she is right. i tell them they don't have to present them publicly, that they can give them in secret. those who celebrate christmas are already thinking about where under the tree to put these scrolls. they do not want private weeping and love. they want it big and in front of everyone. it may be unfair that i'm helping them learn to manipulate others, but come on, isn't that what writing is about?

but one clever boy says, "how will you know if we do it? how will you know what grade to give?" and i go with what has always worked before. "i just will. i'm like that. magic. i'm like santa." from the back of the room someone yells, "santa isn't real!" now, teenagers are faithless and you just can't argue them into sense so instead i say with a smile, "i'm like santa only real!" and some part of their brains is absolutely sure i am lying. they know they can walk out and toss those scrolls in the garbage. but i look at them packing up to go, carefully wrapping yarn around small tubes of paper, gently tucking those letters into backpacks. because although they know i am lying, they just can't be sure.

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.

mad

the ninth graders fascinate me. i like to tell their stories because they are so strange and usually humbling for me and mostly funny. and when i write about the group they’re all there, the whole pile, but i’ve noticed a bit lately that when i write about a single child or maybe a small group i focus on the boys in my class. there are a few reasons for that and i figure it might help you to know why before we visit about this next child. maybe it won’t help at all. it’s here if you’d like.

1. i did not really understand girls when i was in high school and i haven’t made much progress in the last 25 years. high school girls are a bit of a mystery to me.
2. the girls who do connect with me tend to be girls whose stories i simply wouldn’t share with others in specific detail. they tend to be of two types. i am somehow a magnet for broken little girls, especially those whose fathers or uncles or neighbors have done unspeakable things to scar them for life. they communicate with me through notes scribbled in pencil on irregularly folded wads of paper. they speak to me in private. they feel adrift in their own bodies. and because i am vocal in class about civil rights, including those for the gay community, i am often a confidante for girls who are struggling to find a way to say out loud that they like other girls. i will not tell them there is something wrong with them, nor will i tell them god will hate them.
3. boys in ninth grade are, very simply, the funniest things i have ever seen.

so we will get on now to the story, to the child, a ninth grade boy. he has wandered through at least another story or two and will likely leap into things i write in the future. he is my nemesis. he is my favorite for now. he talks in class and fidgets and touches others and is generally one of those children who takes on the same role in life as allergies or a cough that never quite goes away. never acute, never completely overwhelming, but always exasperating. and when i ask him (three or four or nine times a day) to stop talking, he is always indignant, must always respond with some long-winded explanation of how i misunderstood the fact that he was turned entirely around in his seat emitting a sound that was strikingly like his own voice but clearly wasn’t because he himself was certainly not talking when i accused him of it. and when i tire of this particular conversation and invite him to “step into my office”- the hall outside our classroom- he slams his books, shoves his chair back with all the dramatic flair he can muster and stomps toward the door muttering about how i am always accusing him of things he doesn’t do because i am not at all fair. he sprinkles this monologue with all the bad words he knows in two different languages.

because there is another teacher in the room, i am able to spend quality time in my office with struggling students. i should be charging this child rent, he’s there so often. today i move his seat after four suggestions that he control his situation so i won’t have to. he does not like his new seat and determines that acting like he’s lost his mind in that new seat just might get him rearranged to another, more desirable, seat. this does not work out quite as he plans and he finds himself in the hallway, glaring at the wall above my head, arms crossed. i say plenty. i say all the words i usually say in these situations. i say the honest things about how he needs to work all the time because he’s reading several years behind his peers, how it’s not because he’s stupid, how trying just a little might surprise him with impressive results. because i think those things are true. while i roll out this string of words he zips his coat up to the neck and shoves his face down inside. spiky hair. glasses. coat. and as those words float by him he gets madder and madder and madder until he whips his head up, pulls his coat down and yells I DON’T WANT TO BE SMART. STOP SAYING THAT! and the part of me that will someday get me punched square in the face yells right back that what he wants is of no interest to me, that he’s smart whether he likes it or not and that there’s nothing at all he can do about it. children do not like being told there’s nothing they can do about something. he wants me to feel helpless now too, so he tells me when he finishes high school he wants to “hang out”. he likes watching my face when he says it because he knows i want him to say something about college and what lies beyond college. “i hate school!” he growls. “i don’t want to be smart and i hate all my classes. i hate this class.” he pauses for effect. i am thinking about how he must know he’s smart if he’s saying he doesn’t want to be smart and he delivers what he intends to be the final blow. he says it through clenched teeth in this low voice that is somehow yelling while being horrifyingly quiet. “i hate you!”

but i heard those words my very first day of school way back in 1993 when a little boy named ronald threatened to slit my throat. the wind whipping through an open window at the end of the hall blows them right off me and they fall onto the dirty tile floor. “those are sad little lies!” i laugh. “i know you and i know this is your favorite class.” i pause just like he did but i’m older and far more accustomed to getting this right. “and you can say what you want but i know i’m your favorite teacher. so there.” so there. i am fighting like a child, now. and i think his face will split open right then and there. he is seething. now, i have no idea how he really feels about almost anything and i do not think for a minute i am actually his favorite teacher at all but i do know he’s a little bit scared about the responsibility hovering over a smart child. he returns to his litany of complaints. i single him out. i am unfair. i am mean. he does not correct my wrong assumptions.

i do expect more from him because i know as long as i do, he will work toward whatever i insist on. i consider trying to explain this but he is enjoying being mad, i think. i can see him struggling to stay in character. i try to offer him an option that allows us to return to class but before i can say what it might be he waves his hands at me dismissively and says, “no deals.” “fine,” i say. “i’m going back inside. you can come in when you’re ready to be smart.” he walks toward the door. “you ready to be smart?” he huffs and flaps his arms in exasperation. “NO!” he stomps to the other side of the hall, arms crossed. this is a temper tantrum. he is two. “fine. i’m still going back inside. you’re not.” i open the door. he walks to the door and glares at me. “promise,” i say. he shakes his head. he wants to come in, wants to be smart, but does not want to concede just to get those things. ordinarily i make it easy for a child to obtain grace but with this kid i’m not able to. “then you can’t come in.” “whatever. fine,. okay.” he snarls as he walks in and stomps to his seat. okay is as close as i’m going to get to “you were right. i’m smart.” i’ll take it.

the rest of the class is getting ready to talk about editing and for the first few minutes he is glowing with hatred. he puffs like a bellows. it takes him a very long time to slam himself back into his seat, slam his notebook open, slam his pencil on the notebook and then slam his hand on the desk for good measure. i ask a question and he is chattering away to the child next to him. “that’s what i mean,” i say quietly, looking at him, and he gets it. we continue. a few questions later i ask them something and nobody has a clue what i mean. silence. eyes on desks. a child near the board taps his pen on his desk with an impressive lack of rhythm. feet shuffle. angry child raises his hand. he still looks angry but he can’t help himself. he knows something nobody else knows and that feels better than any amount of fury he’s been able to muster up. and when he says the right answer i quickly say, “and that is also what i mean.” and he gets that, too. and the thing about boys this age is that you can watch all the ugliness drain out of their faces in seconds. sometimes you can watch them trying to catch it and shove it all back in, keep it there, but it slips away from them too quickly. and the part of this child he’d scrunched down all day comes crashing up into the face of him and he goes beyond happy right on over to smug. that quick. for that little. for exactly what i’d offered him in the hall that he’d tossed aside.

the last part of class is his. he shares ideas when he can, which is pretty often. if his hand is up and i call on someone else, he becomes incensed. insulted. and there are days, plenty of them, where i think no amount of pay, no amount of summers off and going home at 3pm is enough to offset the ugliness of walking into a classroom. but there are days, enough of them, where i think i would not survive if i couldn’t walk into this room and be part of this strangeness, where i think i would do this job for free.

eraser

or... the children are still learning that things should not be just what they are.

it is not my goal every morning to go into the classroom and "freak out the squares". i was raised funny and it comes out a lot in class.

a large chalkboard stretches across the front wall of my classroom. the half of it nearest the window is covered over by a dryerase board. you know the kind. a shiny white board you can write on with markers. special markers. if you use regular markers the entire world will stop and people will scream, "no!!!!!! that's regular!!!!" there is nothing good about the dryerase board but because i write too much anyway i use it. i need the space. as with the markers, there is a special eraser for this board. well, not really special. but it turns out if you use the same one you've been using on your chalkboard, results will be disastrous, at the very least. because disastrousness in a ninth grade class can only lead to further disastrousness in the form of lamenting children who do not quickly recover, it is necessary to maintain a two-eraser system. this means not only that you must have two separate erasers but also that you must remember which is which and use each accordingly. and because supplies are always in short supply at a public school, it is also important to hide your erasers. because they will, like your markers, walk away when you're not looking. teachers borrow lots of things. pens. pencils. markers. erasers. scissors. staplers. desks. it is a dangerous world out there and a teacher who can't keep track of her erasers is no teacher at all.

now, i managed to keep my erasers through an entire school year but the thrill of my accomplishment made me careless. i did not lock them away over the summer and when we returned there was nary an eraser to be seen. i went to set out my array of twelve beautiful, new dryerase markers (only three visible to the eye of a ninth grader) and my chalk. the chalk was missing as well. i waited a few days, thinking chalk and erasers would turn up. nope. i began making mental notes to purchase new erasers and to forage for chalk (there is always chalk. you just have to know where to look.)

a week or so in, i needed to erase something on the dryerase board and opened a file cabinet to look for a paper towel or napkin or maybe some of the green tissue paper i'd seen somewhere. my hand rested on an old felt puppet one of the speech teachers used with her students. a simple thing, a pink-faced boy. eraser pink. and i erased the board to the gasps and howls of horrified ninth graders. you'd have thought i was erasing the board with an actual child. "what is wrong with you?" howled a child. "what? it's just a puppet."

but children can adapt to anything and these children did. the eraserhead puppet worked better, was more thorough, protected my delicate skin from the dangerous sprinkles of erased marker better than any cruddy standard eraser ever could. and i erased every day with the head of that small child puppet until the children began to express concern about his sorry state. "miss, you need to wash him. he's filthy!" "miss, his face is completely gone. he's disgusting!" and i began to feel guilty about it. this fresh-faced, pinky cheeked boy was now a dingy mingling of all the marker colors i owned, all twelve. i stalled a few days but really i had no intention of washing him. i loved his hideousness. no other teacher would ever take him.

a few days into the concerns/complaints, i opened a drawer in that wonderful filing cabinet again and found two things i had been living without too long. far too long. first, i found the shell-pink head of the eraser boy's sister. clean and fresh and ready for erasing. and when i lifted her gently from her resting place in the drawer, i found under her skirt a box of giant, glowing sidewalk chalk. the fat kind little kids can grip but in colors you're pretty sure will glow if you put them under a blacklight. and i know the children. i know what change does to them, how shock of any kind just knocks them out of their own skins. so i waited until they left, until the bell herded them off to some other room with some other dryerase board, and i chucked eraserhead boy in the garbage. i hung his little sister on the hook at the edge of my dryerase board. and then i got out a stub of chalk. with my fragile little angels in mind i selected white. regular chalk white. and i wrote some things on the board.

although there is some concern over the possible death (the highly suspected death-maybe murder) of eraserhead boy, there is general rejoicing at the newness of eraserhead girl. the children are proud of me. but while i am writing on one board, their eyes shift quietly, soundlessly, to the other board where there's a list of information written in -gasp- white chalk. on a chalkboard. but they are sharp and they know more is happening than that and they scan for the chalk they know i didn't have yesterday. their eyes settle on the fat white stub of chalk sitting so heavy in the chalk tray it might pry the tray off. so pudgy its back side rests against the board itself while its front side looms precariously close to the edge of the tray. and they do not say a word but several of them are writing notes on the insides of their brains. new eraser. new chalk. too much. too too much. and in the interval between classes i am busy with a student and i do not see how it happens but someone writes "this is the coolest chalk ever" in round, neat handwriting in the middle of the chalk board.

it strikes me as odd that they acclimated so quickly to the doomed family of puppets(i know there are more and i will find them) i've begun parading across the dryerase board. especially when the chalk is so clearly overwhelming. but this is not the end. in my classroom there are plenty of things just waiting around for a good idea. mostly there's lots of yarn. in fact, piled on the windowsill under the air conditioner that does not work but does allow a great deal of rain, snow and wind to enter the room and fall on the children is a pile of yarn. four or five or maybe six skeins of white yarn and one small ball of pale pink. it is there mostly because it is close at hand and because children often have emergencies that can be pretty well managed with a little yarn. i have the dryerase board all written up and the chalkboard all written up and i want to erase the chalkboard and write a little bit on it for a group at work sitting right up under it. i tell them to get out paper and be ready and i walk over to the ledge of white yarn. i bring it back, talking to the group as i erase what is written and drop the yarn in the chalk tray. i pick up the sidewalk chalk and begin to write and a voice from the middle of the room calls out, "why are you using yarn as an eraser?" there are a few giggles and several rolling eyes. the suggestion is that yarn is not the strangest eraser she's seen in the room. everyone returns to their work.

at the end of class, a boy from the small group i'd worked with asks if he can erase the chalkboard. i nod. he grabs the yarn and brushes it slowly over the surface of the board. "cool!" he whispers while a few others gathered around him look on.

bacon chocolate is no joke, my friend

for those of you who don't know why we're eating bacon chocolate in class, read back a post. for those of you who read regularly, you already know we eat strange things in class (and smell strange things and look at strange things) as often as we can. i do not like to be bored. and the kids have already passed judgment on almost everything as either bad or good and i like to mess them up a bit.

so it was time for the bacon chocolate and not everyone got some. only those who brought permission slips. quite a few got them, took them home, lost them. not my problem. one of the things we work on in class is taking responsibility. because when we don't, all i hear is, "miss, i didn't realize we had homework last night so i didn't do it. " "miss, it's friday and i didn't think we'd be doing work so i didn't bring my notebook." "miss, last night was my sister's birthday and everybody got really drunk so i didn't read my assignment." and that last one sticks a bit with you, doesn't it. because it's not fair for me to expect a child to read in a houseful of drunk adults. but the truth is that if i keep expecting it the child will find a way- will go to a neighbor's house or a cousin's, or will read on the bus or train. because there's always a really good reason, a good excuse, that involves someone else keeping us from where we should be. and if i let the kid think other people can really do that, take that much from them, i'd be an awful person. so, no permission slip = no bacon chocolate. and some kids look sad about that, but nobody complains.

everyone is working on their superhero stories, storyboarding a bit, drawing their characters leaping, rescuing, losing control of awesome power. and i invite the seven or eight or nine from each class back to the library. of course we have our own library. and folks gather there like a little cocktail party, clutching permission slips. one boy does not eat bacon and has opted for a wasabi ginger chocolate bar. a girl who does not eat bacon asked for a chiles and cinnamon bar. i could find only a plain chiles one, but she's game. the rest get bacon. we break the bars up. they are expensive enough we will be sharing. they always ask what stuff costs and i tell them. they seem to judge their worth on the cost or strangeness of what i bring in. everyone stands close, in a huddle now, holding fat squares of a chocolate they've never even thought of. they wait. i tell them they can eat and it's like communion. solemn. brows begin to furrow. they chew slowly. no child in the history of the world has eaten chocolate so slowly, done so much to savor it, to experience it the way grown folks experience wine or swanky cheese or good bourbon. these children will love the soiree, i think.

i ask what they think because i'm pretty sure i know but they're still quiet, still chewing slowly, still wrinkled about the face. "that is some very good chocolate," says one. "it's so strange," says a girl. "strange but i really like it." the boy with the wasabi is surprised by how delicate the flavor is. he looks at the box. "i don't like dark chocolate!" he says, his eyes big. i tell him he doesn't have to finish it. "i like this just fine," he says, smiling, reaching for another square.

and it goes like this in all three classes. they are unsettled by the taste. it is not what they expect, and yet it tastes exactly like what it says. it tastes like bacon. it tastes like chocolate. but it tastes like something well past either of those things. because for these kids, they had to earn it, but also, they had to be willing to take a step away from what they know as good and bad, right and wrong. they had to be willing to take a risk that the world is not what they've always thought, not what everyone tells them. how scary that must have been. how brave they are.