Classroom Systems of Support

              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 13^th 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 200^th 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.