Most of this
year, teaching has been vastly improved from the last: Students have now had a
year back in school, which blunts their hair-trigger anxieties and sensitivities
and provides some nuance back to their social-media narrowed points-of-view; and
the ninth graders now have had an actual year of middle school and so have
already learned to stay in the room and mostly not climb on each other; and I’ve
started the year without a mask, which allows me back my laughter and delight
in social relations as well as my vocal and facial expressiveness, all of which
turn out to be helpful in teaching; plus I’ve quit chairing the English
department, all of which allow me to focus squarely on my professional goal for
2022-2023—to enjoy teaching again.
But this last
Wednesday called everything back.
The week
before Christmas break is always bananas, and my History partner and I had
split our block in half, guiding 32 ninth graders to choose reading NoViolet
Bulawayo’s We Need New Names in fourth period and 32 in fifth to choose Angie’s
Thomas’s The Hate U Give. All students seemed happy with the resulting groups—fourth
period more scholarly (post-colonial novel with nightly content warnings) and fifth
period more fun (YA novel, please). Students this week had started literary
analysis essay work, and by Wednesday, were gathering textual support for
chosen questions and developed claims.
But my point
isn’t about these students or what happened fifth period, because the damage
I’m trying to describe happens later, when, in a faculty meeting, our principal
asserts the importance of restorative justice over models of disciplinary
punishment, and I agree with her, but my heart has fallen so low that when
Stephanie gets home I can’t bring myself to look at her and in a few hours we
go to sleep, and I hold on to the feeling panting inside me.
Fifth period
started with a teacher chasing a student into the classroom because the kid was
flying through the hallways and “could have hurt someone.” My ninth grader sat
regally in his assigned seat and said, I don’t care. This had me jumping up and
calling out, “That’s not how you talk to another human being,” and the child
again said, I don’t care: he’s old. Thus began a class that would involve a two
hour shelter-in-place because an Airsoft gun had been spotted on campus.
What occurred
during those two hours recalled 2021’s October 13th testing day, for
which I was asked along with the Social Studies department chair to come up
with a plan to occupy all ninth and tenth graders for three and a half hours
while upperclassmen took tests, and all ninth graders were placed in windowless
test-noncompliant science rooms: for three of those hours, my charges were tolerably
engaged; but at the 200th minute mark, admin was looking for me
because the Juniors needed more time with the PSAT and can we hold the ninth
graders now until one o’clock; but the five hours on stools in an airless room
without lunch turned out to be too much for the 14 year-olds, and rotating classes
through the gym, which was the ad hoc solution involving two to three hundred crazed
hungry kids in a single room until only ten minutes were left of the school day,
turned out to be too much for the teachers as well, who helplessly watched the
mad, thunderous chaos with both horror and absolute lethargy.
This year,
though, as I said, has been much improved. Still, fifth period last Wednesday reminded
me of that very worst day of my very worst year. Many in the YA group treated our
evidence search-time lightly. A few students needed help to refine their
argument claims, but during the shelter-in-place, the number of others bugging
or blurting or on a phone or in the wrong place or even on the floor meant I
wasn’t much help with intellectual refinement. And then a student had an
allergic reaction to something from lunch, and I had to coordinate care from my
locked classroom. Then the phone rang because the principal was calling and I
couldn’t get to the phone and a student I was calling to grab the line didn’t
know I was talking to him. Then security came to my room for a kid whose name
he didn’t have, and because the nurse told me to expect security, I sent him
off with the allergic girl who was then returned a few minutes later as the
wrong person.
There were a
few more rounds of this—the phone ringing, security knocking, emails misleading,
the allergy girl not dying—as minutes ticked past the end of class and towards
the end of day, and students finally started to understand that I wouldn’t let
them leave even then, not until we received the all-clear. When we were told
just before the bell that students could indeed leave—don’t linger, leave
campus immediately—kids piled across snack wrappers and cockeyed desks and a few
overturned chairs. The one moment of quiet during those hours was after a knock
on our door when two grim, fully armed policemen entered and called for my
running kid and, sternly, for his backpack. The gun, we thought as he grabbed
his pack: the gun was here in the room all along. But then the kid was returned
fifteen minutes later and told the class staring at him to fuck off.
Fifth period,
what turned out to be my last class of the day, was a long, enervating and
discouraging experience. But it was recoverable. The final two days of the week
were fine.
What ultimately
poisoned the week was not the anarchic shelter-in-place but the bimonthly faculty
meeting, wherein our principal answered concerns about students roaming the
halls and hanging out undisturbed every period in the lunchroom with a message
I do approve: It’s not right nor is it practical to respond to students
traumatized by school with punishment. We need to respond instead with respect,
love, and support. And right now, she said, we’re working on our systems of
support, which include reaching out to the community, reaching out to parents,
reaching out to partners, and building our bridges so that we can respond
person-to-person and react with care rather than anger and exclusion: Students
will not be disciplined, therefore, unless students are committing crime.
It wasn’t
until the next day that I realized why I was so burnt not just by the day but her
words, why I was so emptied out I couldn’t look at Stephanie when she asked me
about my day.
I agreed with
our principal.
But on
Wednesday, students and one in particular needed more from me than I was giving,
and my calls for help have remained, unsurprisingly and as ever, unanswered and
unacknowledged. I didn’t need the running kid disciplined; but the promise of the
described person-to-person exploratory dialogue, or at least an email to me in
response to my own, would have been useful.
I agreed with our principal. And yet the words made me feel terribly, terribly alone.
