When what’s lost is only hidden

I knew before I walked in the room that third period was going to be a disaster.

The three boys were all in class before me- a rarity. When they saw me walking down the hall- my arms full of laptop and clipboards, they closed the door and stood in front of it holding it shut. The teacher who used the room before me was still inside. She got the boys to move. But as soon as I stepped over the threshold they started complaining.

“Snitch.” “Rat” “Shut up,” they told me. “We’re not working for a snitch.”

I took a deep breath. Here we go.

I set up my laptop, found a five-minute timer on YouTube and projected it. I told the boys when the timer went off, we’d get started.

“We can start with a fun Kahoot! if you want to pick out a topic,” I told them.

“You’re a rat,” one said.

Another went to the whiteboard and erased the schedule I’d written on it. He then found a dry erase marker and scrawled the word all over the board. In big and smell letters: “R.” “A.” “T.”

When the timer went off, I asked if they wanted to start with a game before starting the lesson or if they wanted to just get to work.

“Shut up you dumb bitch,” one said.

“So no Kahoot, then?” I responded, my heart pounding, mentally weighing all the scenarios.

I could call to have the student removed, which would escalate the other two further and would all but guarantee that we’d not only not accomplish anything that day, but in future classes as well. I could ignore it, sacrificing productivity in this one class in hopes that the next class would be better. That maybe after a week they might have gotten over the fact that I had reached out to two of their mothers to share that they had been blasting music with sexually explicit lyrics during the previous class. I tolerate a lot of nonsense, but didn’t much care for listening to these particular songs on that particular day in the company of three adolescent boys. Or really ever actually. And anyway, when I asked them what their mothers would think about them playing music about parts of a male anatomy interacting with parts of female anatomy in the middle of English class, “She won’t care,” was their response. Making it almost a challenge. It was all so dumb and juvenile. The whole thing.

I called their bluff. Contacted their moms.

So here we were.

Me (the rat), my instructional assistant, and three truculent eighth graders. I made the choice to wait them out. I need to recognize that most people will (probably rightfully) react that this was insane. That the boys were disrespectful, out of control, and needed to face consequences. But I also need to recognize that I know my students. And I know myself. And I always try to work with what’s in front of me.

So for ninety minutes I sat there with those boys. Them refusing to do anything but complain about me being a snitch and gossip about classmates. I let them know about what work needed to be completed. Told them where they could find it and to let me know if they needed help.

“We ain’t doing no work today,” was the refrain.

Fair enough.

I could feel my hope and compassion leaking right out through my toes.

What was the point of any of this?

For seven months I’d been coming to this room- always met with varying levels of disregard, criticism, frustration, anger, and affront. There were no easy days. It was always exhausting. I was always second-guessing myself. I always felt incompetent and ineffective as their teacher. But I kept returning in good faith- because it was my job- and because I knew for these three I had to play the long game.

There was a reason the class size was so small. That they all had access to visits with the school social workers or psychologist. They were all given extended time and frequent breaks and positive reinforcement. They all needed all the support. And it still wasn’t enough. It could never compensate for all the unspoken trauma that lived in them.

All I could do was be a constant. Be consistent.

After that class though – that class was the first day in all the long days that I wanted to give up on them. I wanted to walk out of the room and be done with it. “Forget these kids,” I told myself. Only I actually said a different word beginning with “F.” And that only made it worse. Because in that moment, I felt like something had shifted in me that was uncomfortable. All of the sudden I understood there was a first step to dehumanizing another person. And I had just taken it.

I witnessed the transformation a person goes through from being worthy of love and compassion to something a degree removed. Less then. It happened in a split second.

I thought about people who became desensitized. People who routinely witness the worst of humanity. Who are so disturbed and traumatized by it, they start developing calluses. And they use their pain to justify neglect, apathy, abuse, rudeness, cruelty, and insensitivity. Suddenly, I could see the map of how atrocity plays out clearly.

Even how it can start with the best of intentions. With a commitment to being your best self day in and day out. To toughen your skin, not take anything personally, so that you could meet people exactly where they were. To be kind despite being faced with unkindness.

Maybe the seed is good intentions. But when watered with insults and false starts and constantly denied any notable progress or successes, what comes out of the soil is not hearty. It is incapable of blooming.

Leaving school that day, I hated that class and I hated myself. “Forget those kids” felt like surrendering to the despair. Felt like giving up on them. Felt like giving up on a part of myself that I valued dearly.

It felt like giving up on the idea of hope.

Everything is awful. Nothing will get better. No matter how hard you try. Your efforts are useless.

Just get to June. Just survive.

The world is on fire anyway. Why shouldn’t this just be one more thing that goes wrong? One more gaping wound that can’t be sewn back together.

“Forget these kids” meant I was giving up and giving in and that was devastating. Because what was I left with then? Nothing. No possibility. No goal. No victories. Only survival.

It’s not enough.

I just finished reading “Cloud Cuckoo Land” by Anthony Doerr. The novel tells the story of individuals across centuries who preserved an Ancient Greek text – the story of Aethon, who wanted to be transformed into a bird in order to fly to a paradise in the clouds. The manuscript is silly and absurd, but it carries each of the story’s protagonists through all manners of heartache and despair. And it ties each of them together into a tapestry. The story saves them. It feeds them. It provides them a sense of wonder. Makes them laugh.

Gives them hope.

And the passing on of this story. Through war, bombs, and calamity, seemed symbolic of what it takes to preserve hope in a world that makes every effort to shatter it at every corner.

The power of story. Something else that has felt lost to me this year, with all the other obligations and demands.

It is both humbling and dispiriting when the parts of yourself you take for granted are suddenly impaired. Ineffective. Missing.

“…the truth is infinitely more complicated, that we are beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be a part of the problem is to be human,” Doerr writes. Offering me a glimmer. Something that felt like possibility.

Last week, when I returned to third period, there were just two boys in class. One was quiet and withdrawn, eventually leaving to go check in with a mentor after checking in about missing work. So then there was just the one. I pretended the previous class hadn’t happened. That my whiteboard wasn’t covered in his handwriting. That he hadn’t shaken me. I sat down next to him and pretended he was available for learning. I took a deep breath and acted as if we could make progress on even one small thing.

He was watching old soccer matches on YouTube. Pointing out an incredible goal Messi had scored for Barcelona. We marveled at his footwork. At the precision of the shot. In between game clips, I introduced a lesson on functional text, bit by bit. He was only half paying attention. But that was fifty percent more attention than I’d had in previous classes. You take what you can get. At one point in class, I took off my glasses, which I’d been wearing because of an undetermined allergic reaction I’ve been experiencing with my left eye. The skin around the eye was reddened and scaled. It looked awful. My student looked at my eye and asked what happened. I explained about the allergies, but that I knew it looked bad- like I’d been punched in the face.

“If you’re being abused,” he told me, “You bring that person here and we’ll take him out.”

His response caught me off guard. I wanted to point out that a few days previously he had been the abusive one. But I believe that reckoning would’ve been lost on him. Instead, I told him it was kind of him to be willing to stand up for me, but that he shouldn’t be taking anyone out. I knew that coming from him, this gesture was meant as am amends of sorts. Or at least a sign that I hadn’t lost all three boys when I contacted home.

I know it sounds silly and absurd, to be placing so much stock in a comment made by a kid who otherwise disregards most other rules and conventions. All the classroom protocol for student-teacher relationships. But I’ve learned this year that teaching can be a pretty ridiculous enterprise. That every day is humbling and tiring. That most days you only witness the smallest of gains. That under the most violent of waves, there is progress being made. Something is getting through.

Even if it isn’t, I have to hold on to the notion of progress. He gave me the smallest of footholds, allowing me to hang on to the cliff face, rather than fall into the abyss. And that’s enough.

 “Sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden, waiting to be rediscovered.” Doerr writes in Cloud Cuckoo Land.

Sometimes it takes being shaken, to reclaim the parts you thought were unshakeable.

Sometimes it takes recognizing the strengths in your faults.

That as maligned as rats are, they’re also known for their survival and perseverance.