New Location

After a long hiatus (during which I dedicated my time to completing a masters degree), I am returning to the blogosphere! The new location for my blog is meditationsofatravelingnun.com, and I plan to resume blogging in September about once a week. Stay tuned for more!

It's mean, and that makes it wrong.

“We was bad.” Kristopher’s sunken expression reflected the general mood of the cafeteria. He glanced at Harry sitting by himself a few feet away. Harry was one of only three white boys in the entire class, and the heaviest by far. His eyes were red with tears, and he used a chubby fist to wipe his runny nose.

Half-a-dozen of my boys, all black, including Kristopher, stood military-style next to Mrs. Clayton, a neighboring teacher who witnessed the incident. She stood between them and Harry.

“What happened?” I looked at the boys perplexed. Kristopher and Navelle were quiet. Daryl was whimpering, “I din’t DO NUFFIN’!” Toby was playing with his teeth. Frank was laughing and punching Julius in the arm, and Julius was mumbling, “Stop it, Francis! It ain’t funny!” None of them met my gaze. Little Harry started to cry.

“These six were bullying this one,” Mrs. Clayton pointed toHarry. “Called him fat," she whispered. "Said he was stupid. They were ganging up, throwing food at him, the whole nine yards.” My eyes got wide. I didn’t know what to say. “You gotta problem with bullying?” Her question took me off guard. Bullying? In kindergarten? To my shock, I knew the answer.

“Only with my white boys,” I whispered. How could I have missed this? “They only pick on my white boys.”

“Well, you gotta tell ‘em to stop.” Mrs. Clayton shook her head and glanced around at the boys. “Tell ‘em it ain’t okay.”

Tell them it ain’t okay? Of course. Easy for you to say. The solution seemed at once perfectly obvious and completely impossible. How do you convince a child to stop being racist? They don’t even know what it means.

I took a deep breath and lined up the class. My six bullies-in-the-making didn’t say a word.

“Sorry teacher.” Julius’s raspy voice broke the silence. His pair of black chucks squeaked back and forth on the linoleum floor. “We was just playin’.”

I sighed. An hour later the classroom was empty except for me and the six boys. They were in trouble, but most of them didn’t care. Now was my chance to make the consequence meaningful. Now was my chance to talk to them, to tell them it’s not okay to pick on Harry just because he’s fat and white. But what could I say?

I cleared my throat. “Boys, what happened in the cafeteria today…you were picking on Harry. You can’t treat other kids that way.”

“But we was just playin’ around with him,” said Frank.

“Yeah, we was just playin’ with him,” said Julius.

“But Harry wasn’t playing was he?” I stumbled to find the right words. “Harry was crying, wasn’t he? You can’t play that way with kids.”

“Why?” said Frank.

“Because…” I found my voice trailing.

“Because it’s MEAN,” said Kristopher, suddenly exploding out of his chair. Julius’s eyes got wide, as if it were the first time he’d heard such reasoning in his life.

I blinked at Kristopher. “It’s mean.” I said. “That’s right. It’s mean. And that makes it wrong.” It seemed as if truth were dawning upon their faces for the first time, as if no one had ever told them it was wrong to be mean. “How would you like it if everyone ganged up on you instead? How would you like it if everyone called you stupid in front of everybody?”

And just like that they pictured themselves in Harry’s place, pushed and shoved, called stupid, milk poured over their heads.

“Man,” Kristopher said, his bottom lip trembling, his eyes brimming with tears. Daryl and Toby started to cry.

Mrs. Clayton’s admonition in the cafeteria suddenly returned. “Tell ‘em to stop. Tell ‘em it ain’t okay.” Could it really have been that simple? I’d balked at the idea in the cafeteria. It couldn’t be. But this crowd of sobbing five and six year olds told me otherwise.

It’s mean, and that makes it wrong. It really was that simple. How much heartache could we avoid if we simply taught our children to think this way from the start?
from December 6, 2012

A Difference

    I’m going back.

    Bags of luggage and empty shoes rolled down the conveyor belt. I slipped off my Airwalks and tossed them into a container alongside my coat and computer bag. The routine was familiar. The buzz of the airport washed over me.

    I’m going back.

    Ten more children would become a permanent part of my classroom in a week, pushing our size to an impossible 34 kinders. Nothing new. They’d been in my classroom already. I’d survived in the hopes that a new teacher would be hired. Now the change was indefinite. No reinforcements.

    When I joined Teach for America a month before graduating college, I had dreams of making a difference. Now, two days after Thanksgiving, it all seemed like a joke. A difference? Making a fool of myself more like it. I felt as if I’d been dropped in the desert with an empty canteen and three-dozen dehydrated children. My job? Turn sand into water for the next ten months. The pressure made me sick.

    I walked through security in a daze. Reality beat upon my head like a giant mallet driving another fencepost into the ground of “welcome-to-the-real-world.” Months of lonely disappointment echoed in my brain to a bitter and horrifying cadence. “You can’t make any difference. You can’t make any difference. You won’t make any difference.”

    I found a corner of the airport, buried my face in the knees of my jeans, and cried.

   

    Two days later I entered the cafeteria of my school and wanted to puke. Every morning was the same. Chasing kids down, breaking up fights, and consoling tearful children who’d been cussed out by their mamas. Or left standing in the cold for an hour without a coat. Or forced to go to school covered in urine because baby brother peed all over their shirt and grandma didn’t have the time. And I had to teach them.

  

    “I’m sick.” The words came out of my mouth Wednesday morning, and I knew they weren’t true. Not false. I did have a cold. But not true. I was fine. “I think I might need to go fill this prescription at Wal-Mart. I’ll come back if I start feeling better.” What the heck? I’d never told such a deceptive lie in my life.

    An hour later I was on the road, driving away from school, away from kids, away from pain, away from everything. My destination? The farthest Wal-Mart Supercenter I could think of, located on the other side of the city, over 30 miles away, to fill a prescription that I didn’t need for a cold that gave me the sniffles. It didn’t matter that I’d stretched the truth. It didn’t matter that I’d abandoned my kids. It didn’t matter that nobody was teaching them. I was running away, and I knew it.

    Walking through Wal-Mart’s automatic doors and into the pharmacy felt surreal. The quiet hum of normal people going about their normal business shocked my overwhelmed senses like a splash of ice water in the Sahara. I scanned the faces of busy mothers piling on groceries, a grandfather grabbing some extra batteries, friends joking with each other, chatting about the day. Didn’t they know there was a warzone 30 minutes north?

    Feelings are hard to describe when you’re asked to do the impossible and everyone acts like it’s a simple thing. “Oh, you teach kindergarten? How cute.” I wanted to scream. The world was a fog. Panic began to asphyxiate my breath as I finished my ridiculous pharmacy trip, sat down in the driver’s seat of my car empty-handed, and started up the engine. My heart plunged into darkness. I was driving back north. There was no escape. I was going back. They were waiting for me, waiting for that sandy canteen to spout water, and I didn’t know how.

    I turned up the music and blasted the speakers, anything to escape my desperation. Anything to escape. Anything. But as I sped down the expressway clutching the steering wheel in a white-knuckled grip, a voice, barely audible beneath the booming of the stereo and pounding of my heart, whispered softly, “Aren’t you tired? Aren’t you tired of running away?”

    I turned off the blasting music, and silence filled the car. And in the silence I heard my voice yell out in sobbing tones barely recognizable, “GOD FORGIVE ME.” God forgive me for running away. Forgive me for trying to escape. Forgive me for hiding in the boat because I’m afraid to walk on water. Forgive me for my lack of faith. Forgive me.

    Twenty minutes later, I rolled my car into the school parking lot and stared at the playground, where a set of brand new slides and shiny equipment contrasted sharply with our tattered building made in the 1950s. Government money meant we got a brand new playground and Smartboards in every classroom, while state budget cuts meant fewer and fewer teachers for a growing population of children.

    Staring out the window of my car, I began to realize that something was different. I don’t know how, but something changed in that car, between the automatic entry at Wal-Mart and the 60-year-old doors of my school, something that turned the weight of 10,000 bricks into feathers. Something that turned the impossible into a simple matter.

    And my classroom was never the same.

    I turned off the engine, grabbed my bag, and walked through the gate onto the playground. My kids were at recess. A pre-k assistant was watching them in my absence. They noticed my arrival immediately.

    “Teacher! Where’d you go?”

    “I saw yo’ car!”

    “You at a meeting?”

    “Michael been bad!”

    How could I run away? They were kids. They were my kids. But somehow that didn’t seem right anymore. Could I really call them mine? In the energy of the playground I heard a voice whisper, “They’re my kids.”

     In some ways nothing changed. In some ways everything changed. The same kids greeted me in the morning with all their problems, griefs, and challenges. The same empty classroom greeted me in the evening, trashed and torn to pieces, dirty walls pasted with learning objectives never accomplished. But I wasn’t running anymore. I wasn’t escaping a prison camp where my kids were instruments of torture. They weren’t my kids in the first place. They were His. They weren’t my problems. They were my calling. How could I run away from that? I’d be running away from God.

    I turned off the lights to my classroom that evening and said goodnight to the custodian before slamming closed an ancient door that never locked no matter how hard you kicked it. I kicked the door one last time, just to say I tried, then walked through an empty parking lot to my car. Would I ever make a difference? Would I ever see the change that TFA touts? Those horrifying words echoed in my head once again, “You can’t make any difference. You won’t make any difference.”

    But somehow the words had lost their fright between the misery of the morning and the solitude of the night. I kicked my car into drive and headed south. Things were different now. Or perhaps I finally saw how things had always been. How could I have been so blind? A voice hummed beneath the drone of my engine, "God makes all the difference. God makes all the difference. He will make a difference."

compiled from journal entries written November 24th - December 1st

Today's Civil Rights Issue

    The Center for Urban Renewal and Education recently published an article describing education as "today's civil rights issue." The argument is worth considering. Our public school system has become a trap for many low-income students. The money you make determines your neighborhood which determines your school which determines your education which determines the money you make which determines your neighborhood... etc.

"Public school reality today for black kids is one that overwhelmingly keeps them incarcerated in failing, dangerous schools. It's evidence of the indomitable human spirit that, despite horrible circumstances, many poor unmarried black mothers understand the importance of getting their child educated and will do whatever it takes to get their kid into a decent school... And yet when they try, they get convicted, jailed, fined, and sent back to the plantation."

    There are many other issues feeding the cycle of poverty, but this one is too often overlooked. Education was the doorway out of poverty for many generations. Things have changed in recent decades. For those living in low-income neighborhoods, the failing school they are forced to attend only widens the achievement gap and tightens the chains of poverty.

    

Resolutions

    Resolved: To enjoy my kids and remember that they are children.

    Father, I am tired of being a tyrant in my classroom. Make me a leader instead. I am tired of being a disciplinarian. Make me a healer instead. I am tired of dreading my classroom and kids. Make me joyful instead. I am tired of clutching my head in despair, yes, every planning period. Make me hopeful instead. I am tired of being afraid. Make me courageous instead.

from November 12, 2012

She Lost Her Voice!

   I said hello to Jhaide, a student from Ms. Storm's class, while she was getting her backpack in the hallway yesterday. She looked at me with the most horrified expression.
    "WHAT HAPPENED TO YOUR VOICE?!?!" Her squeal communicated a level of terrified amazement.
    I suppressed the urge to laugh and calmly smiled. "I lost it, Jhaide."
    Jhaide's eyes grew big. "You LOST your voice?!?" She gasped, then turned around and ran into her classroom. "Guys! She lost her voice! Listen to her! Listen to her!" Jhaide burst out of the room with a trail of six-year-olds bouncing behind her.
   I turned down the hall to make my escape, but could hear the buzz of little voices behind me. "She lost her voice?" - "Yeah! I heard it too!" - "Where'd it go?" - "I dunno!"
    Technically, I should have told them to be quiet. No yelling in the hallway. I tossed the idea. Just this once. This was far too amusing.
   from October 31, 2012.

To Live is Christ

"For to me to live is Christ and to die is gain."

- Phil. 1:21

    The more I come to know Jesus Christ and the comfort of his saving love, the more acquainted I become with the sufferings of this world. The more I come to know the joy of his salvation, the more impatient I become with this life. The more I come to know the peace of his presence, the more restless I become to enter his rest, away from the constant struggle of living in a fallen world

    Yet somehow the more I struggle with the pains of this world, the sweeter that final rest will become. With every burden I carry, the more aware I become of the strength of his arm that sustains me, bearing burdens that would otherwise crush me. With every fire that burns, the more aware I become of his enveloping peace that grants me safety in the hottest flame. With every storm that I face, the more aware I become of his mighty hand that stays the strongest wave and beckons me to walk on water.

    Lord, what can I say but that it is a privilege to be burdened by the struggles of this life? What can I say but that it is an honor to be refined through the fires of this world? Apart from pain, I would not know you. Apart from hunger, I would not eat your bread. Apart from thirst, I would not drink your water. In my need you reveal yourself. In my weakness I am forced to seek your presence. In my darkest hour, your light becomes a beacon.

    So I thank you for my need. It is in my need that you reveal your sufficiency. 

from October 31, 2012