Ode to E

This week E, the student who terrorized the lesson I wrote about last week, was removed from my class. I asked the principal to come in at the beginning of the next lesson to reinstate the values of the classroom (You are all here to learn, no one can disrupt another student's right to learn, etc), and when she reached the end of her little motivational speech, the students seemed, for the most part, to agree with her. It was therefore surprising that when she asked if anyone felt he could not take on the responsibility of learning, E spoke up. "I do not accept what was stated here," he chirped.

One has to feel sorry for E. Last year, I have heard since becoming interested in his case, he was visibly depressed. He spoke constantly of suicide, when he spoke at all, and his lack of place in the world and the school. He was silent, thin and pale. Puberty, it seemed, had taken a rather wringing toll on him.

But what was depression last year has become elation since the beginning of this one. Life says white, E boldly, boisterously and persistently says black. He rebels against anyone older than age 17. His wits have turned him from class mute to class clown, and he is drunk with newfound power. Perhaps for this reason E has feelings of persecution, as he told the guidance counselor, (though she found these feelings to emanate solely from the two teachers who are new in his life - myself and his homeroom teacher). E has overshot his mark, it seems, and once again finds himself displaced, like an Amish man who has joined the party scene only to become an alcoholic.

I find myself distinctly penitent over the battle I allowed E to wage against me. Things may be very different now if I had just taken him aside that very first day, asked him to tell me what was wrong and why he felt I could not teach him. Now, granted, this dialogue might not have worked at all, or made me appear pathetic in his eyes, but at least I would have known I had exhausted all options. As it is, I am left with the knowledge that I beat a 14-year old boy in a battle of wits - not at all a proud achievement. 

What is tricky about this age, I find, is that students appear to be adults - in speech, behavior, and often physical traits (some of my students are taller than me) - and this makes it exceedingly difficult to remember that, in their hearts and minds, they are little more than children. Engaging in battles of wit with them just a little less reprehensible than doing so with a 5-year old. Indeed, a middle school student walks a thin and perilous line between childhood and adulthood, and it is an educator's job to transport him safely, and with as little trauma as possible, along this ragged path. It is a trying and exhausting ordeal, but oh, how rewarding can it be!

I say this because today I visited my old school, the one that so ruthlessly divested me of any and all innocence and naivete I may have had last year. I was told that V, my shyest and quietest homeroom student, whom I probed and prodded and encouraged to speak all year, is now volunteering to speak in class. What's more, V, who had very few friends and whose name almost none of the students knew, made a video clip with two of the most popular boys in his grade for their first school project, which won the competition. 

Without too much boasting or tooting of personal horns, I would like to give myself just a little credit for V's achievement. Of course it wasn't just me who caused this change, but I doubt it is very wrong to feel a little, tiny bit good about myself. 

I began this year with a very harsh stance towards the students. Scared, perhaps, that they would not take me seriously. That they would walk all over me if given the chance. But this approach, too, exists on a very thin, membranous line between laxness and Machiavellian zeal. What I've realized, thanks to E, is that I'd much rather be a teacher who is taken advantage of than a teacher who traumatizes.

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

If I am coming home in a state of nervous breakdown, my throat a forlorn and arid desert watered only by the tears that strain through its surface like an underground wellspring, my head neglecting to recall a time when it was free of the fist pounding at it from within, like a madwoman straining at the door of the attic, well, then, it must be the new school year.
Don't get me wrong, there are things I have learned. I would like to list them here, if only to make myself feel as though I did, at least, emerge from the previous year's romp in the lions' cage with, if not intact wits, then at least a few fortified memory cells.
1. Don't let them get to you:
As exemplified when, on Tuesday, a boy I will call E began a paper ball fight that ended with the class in chaos and my nerved frayed as the jettisons of a paper shredder. My relationship with E began on rocky terms when, going round the room for introductions, he told me to consider him a seat-warmer, a potted plant, and no more. I was immediately put on my guard by this, and when later he made conversation with a classmate while I was talking, I reminded him that potted plants do not make noise.
This little witticism, which I imagined gave me a droll and scintillating air, was to be my downfall. The laughter of the class was a momentary victory over E, but any good teacher will tell you never, under any circumstances, to enter into battle with a student at all. I therefore recognize that E's misbehavior was my doing (as well as my undoing, for I lost control of the class on just the third lesson), and blame only myself. Luckily, the principal was there to back me up, which brings me to my second reflection.
2. When in doubt, choose the school for its principal:
A good principal is a principal who gets things done. In this case, E finished his day with a letter of apology, the threat of suspension hanging over his head. Of course, things would have been far better if I had been able to sustain a proper learning environment without the involvement of a deus ex machina, but this brings me to a third moral.
3. Sometimes, the odds are stacked against you:
Such is the case with E's class. Largely an amalgam of inferiority complexes, enraged impotence, rebellious tendencies and, not to mention, a gushing and uncontrollable tidal wave of ADHD - which, of course, garners extra force from a trembling earthquake of hormones - the stage has already been set for drama and tragedy, the script now subject only to those tiny amendments made spontaneously by the deftest of actors. Sometimes, if only to feel a little bit better about herself, the teacher must recognize that in some cases she regrettably has little to no influence over the occurrences in her classroom. On Tuesday, the second and third hours of the day ripped apart like an old patchwork quilt and I was shoved, shoulders quivering with oppressed rage and resentment, into a scene I recognized all too well. But I took a deep breath, my throat a dam holding back a whole sea, an entire ocean ready to burst out, and turned my back to the audience. I went directly to the principal's office. I told my tale shakily, and when I left to teach a class directly after I was perceivably NOT a bundle of frayed nerves, on the verge of meltdown. In that office there was no shrugging of the shoulders, no damsel-in-distress sigh, no raising of the hands in abject helplessness - I mean from either of us - which goes to show some understanding I have gained regarding what I am and am not in control of. What I saw in myself that day was an understanding that what depends on me is not what happens, but rather how I react to it. The stagehands may drop lights on my head, the mise-en-scene may fall apart and roll round the stage, and the audience may throw rotten tomatoes at my head, but I must keep my cool and play my part until it's done.
4. The parents are to blame, but that doesn't mean you have to blame them:
Speaking of acting, a certain amount of diplomacy is required when handling telephone calls in which one's first instinct is to say, "I'd like to speak to Satan please, regarding its spawn."
Exercising Obama-esque cool I called a parent, congratulated her on finally purchasing the required course book (biting my teeth on the knowledge that what-the-fuck-is-so-hard-about-buying-a-fucking-book-and-why-the-fuck-should-I-have-to-practically-blow-someone-to-get-them-to-do-it) and asking if, on an off chance, her adorable and intelligent offspring may have forgotten to imbibe her daily dose of Ritalin?
The thing is, it works. With the parents on my side I at least feel as though someone is commiserating (though said commiseration takes place in a minefield of political-correctness, expressed through enthusiastic exclamations on the child's rampant acuity and utter brilliance on all things). And the child avoids the schizophrenic confusion caused by two separate disciplining voices running its life. Everyone's a winner.
Who knew, that being a teacher would actually teach me some patience?