No 'I' in 'Teacher'

To begin at the beginning, I will explain that Hanukah vacation interrupted the flow of my existential dilemmas. Seeing as I had already overcome, over the course of my raging 20s, the existential grief that wells up from those strange catacombs of personhood, which one must explore in order to fully come of age, I had apparently seen fit to move on to the existential nitpicking and mulling that has been the day's bread of our school.
However, as I have explained, Hanukah interfered with all that. It was not so much that I rested, per say, for had I done I most certainly would have found myself wandering through that same exasperating labyrinth of thought that characterizes my reflections upon the learning process. No, it was the put-putting of normal life that took over - there were chores to be done, a wedding to plan (such a regularized affair, nowadays), a grandmother to see, parents to visit - and aside from the painting of a small picture there was no depth to my holiday, no internal sight-seeing, even.
Upon returning, I found - not without a twinge of regret, oddly! - that much of my frustration with the school had disappeared. For this I blame S, to whose name I have rightfully tagged the nickname "light of my life", and who is the new English teacher for our non-readers.
I thought that it would make me happy to be rid of these kids who, seated in any given lesson, proceed to wreck it, leave it, or both: anything to refrain from facing the un-faceable English script on the board, and their stunted or absolute lack where others - their peers - wield huge, powerful phalluses.
Not that I am unhappy - elated even - to be able to teach in a classroom in which everyone at least knows how to put together a simple sentence in English. It's just that, well, I guess I miss those little assholes.
S received the task of teaching some kids their ABCs and others simple words and sounds. I told her of the heartbreaking jolt I received when O, who has been mentioned earlier in this blog, asked me in the year's beginning if I would be so kind as to teach him the alphabet. "No one has ever taught it to me before," he explained simply. To imagine all of the stern faces he must have faced, peering at him angrily after each school test or report, is to know true mental anguish.
So I am glad I found S, who somehow combines the compassion of a saint with the sternness of a British headmaster, and is perfect for teaching these children. They leave her classroom with a feeling of accomplishment, something that has not been bestowed upon many of them since they learned to talk. This has led to calm - actual calm!
But I am also jealous, an emotion that takes me by surprise even as I write the word. Jealous, because somehow I had developed a love for those faces I so often dreaded to look upon in my classroom. I had apparently come to cherish the brick walls behind their eyes. I don't know whether this feeling should be characterized as selfish and egotistical (only I can smash these brick walls!) or self-destructive (I must smash these brick walls no matter what!), but either way, every crack was a Trojan victory. Now these victories are S's, and I must reorganize my thoughts around my own.
For this, however, there must be an 'I' in the classroom, where there most certainly is none.
There is an 'I' at home, where my fiance waits on me hand and foot at the moment, his penance for dropping me on my back the day before yesterday. And as I remain here, rediscovering time and again the complexity of muscular power involved in each of our tiniest movements, I am utterly self-involved and totally incapable of focusing any mental energy whatsoever on the classroom, just as I will often come away from a lesson realizing that my finger is bleeding, or that I have not had a sip of the tea I made for myself prior to it. This has led me to see my self and the classroom as two separate but opposing features of a larger me, a yin-yang, if you will. It is rather odd to see oneself this way, as if encompassing a mass of people totally unconnected with me, souls with whom I am in contact just three hours a week. And I can see that I have gone too far - I have overstepped the boundaries of my self - and this cannot lead anywhere good.
Another example of the 'I' gone awry is our science teacher, M, who came to school with labor pains the other day. "I'm having contractions," she murmured, while having a brief cry over the lack of lesson plans, and just before rushing off to teach a class. The next evening she gave birth, two months early, to an infant now in intensive care.
So where does school end and 'I' begin? Or, to look at it another way, how do 'I' refrain from encompassing an entire school (for it is certainly the ego that knows no bounds getting us into such trouble)?
I know of no answers as yet, but for now it seems right to focus on my back muscles, which appear to know their responsibilities quite clearly. What they cannot do, they won't: A refreshing concept!