A Sign

As much as I share my reasons for being a teacher, there are many days that I leave school feeling defeated on many levels. There is just too much to deal with: the poverty, the abuse, the neglect, the ignorance...these issues spiral out of control in the classroom. Like two weeks ago when a 6-month pregnant girl jumped another girl in the hall in front of my room. Kids were standing on the radiators cheering them on, and my 11th grade honors class and I got locked in my classroom with four security guards headlock-ing and cuff-ing an out of control 15 year old female. Those things bother me on a deep level. I can call upon child development and social theories and all that graduate school knowledge that I have acquired, but I still have a heavy feeling inside from the sheer impossibility of my job some days.

Friday I had one of those "eff it" days. We went to the Brooklyn Academy of Music on a field trip--my class and another class of seniors, many of whom I don't know. It was a modern dance performance by the Urban Bush Women, a New York-based dance group of women from the African diaspora and Jant-Bi, a company of male dancers from Senegal. It was beautiful. Sometimes I don't get modern dance, but this piece was completely captivating--minus our students who screamed curses the whole time.

Things such as: "What the fuck?" "Speak fuckin' English!" "That bald bitch needs some fuckin' hair!" "She's blowin' him!" "Awww, shit, shorty's got some ass!"

Oh, yes, these comments were said OUT LOUD during moments of SILENCE and we were in the 8th row. It was awful. It was humiliating. I tried to get the kids (who weren't mine) to be quiet, and they then cursed AT ME. "No, YOU fuckin' shhhh." I was about to piss fire after 90 minutes of this. I wanted to hurt those kids. HURT them.

After the trip we were supposed to go to McDonald's, but I dismissed my students, told them to go home because I couldn't stand to be with teenagers anymore that day. I sent them home at 1pm. Screw it. I was literally going to say/do something I'd regret.

And when I got home and checked my email, some kind couple had fully funded my DonorsChoose project and bought me 30 copies of the novel Bodega Dreams for my students. After a day like that, when I just wanted to tell them all to go to H-E-double hockey sticks, I get hundreds of dollars from strangers so that I can teach a book I feel the students will relate to and enjoy.

Sometimes a sign like that is all you need. Thank god it came on that day.