Teaching In the Dark

It’s so hard not to be entirely negative right now. Very rarely am I a negative person, generally being the one to try and lighten the mood or to put things in perspective for others. Yet, more often than not as of late, I am finding my sunny-side-up has turned cynically scrambled and all attempts at grounding myself have buried me instead.

I don’t want a pep talk, so I won’t say much. I just need to make some tough choices.

Ruby K. Payne’s framework for Understanding Poverty assignment: like everything these days, done last minute and not well. I’m used to having hard-work pay dividends, and when screws are loose you simply find a screwdriver and push those suckers back in. I’m realizing, again, it’s not always that simple. I had a whole lot more than this written, but I just went back and deleted it all. I also have notebook paper and post-its covered with bits and pieces of unwritten blogs that I neither have the time nor motivation to put together.

Ok, poverty, get it done. “… the extent to which an individual goes without resources” – I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about this book, mainly because I still haven’t read it entirely and my mind is elsewhere ... always. Sure, poor is relative, this I have seen first hand. The less you have, the smaller your world becomes. We have a nine year-old waterboy on the football team, cute kid who works hard, is always smiling and cannot say more than a sentance without lying about something ... the motorcycle he drove to practice today, the beer he bought at Double-Quick last night, the five times he went to Disney already. He calls me Coach White, because he doesn't know my name. One day he asked me to buy more cups for the team, and when I told him I was just about broke he replied innocently, with not one ounce of intent to joke, "I thought all white people were rich." Perspective and exposure factor in of course, but there is always someone with more and someone with less, of everything. Change is also relative, and the ability or desire to do so. One of my biggest frustrations is pushing that wagon downhill so that it will pick up momentum and eventually begin to run on its own accord. I can’t change anyone, only they can change themselves. To do this, they have to want to. Why would they want to?

Hence relationships, the one part of the book I will embrace wholeheartedly; hard to make and difficult to sustain, and once established and nourished, even harder to sever … don’t I know that.

I come back to the beginning. I don’t think that the best I can do for these children or the best manner of solving their problems would come from me being a teacher. The vacations would be nice, and the experience has already opened my eyes and I’m sure will continue to do so, but so much more is needed. Perhaps education is the golden ticket, but they are not getting it, at least not in my district and not in my classroom. Because education is not received from 8-4 on a blackboard with paddles beside the desk and insight is not gained by constant emphasis on testing, results and relative “achievement”. If I did my job well, by the standards placed upon me from the powes that be and not by my own standards (which are strongly discouraged, if not strictly prohibited), my students would leave me at the end of the year knowing little more than they did when they came in. What is the point of teaching figurative language or connotation and denotation to students that cannot even read without basic comprehension? I don’t have an easy answer, and neither does Payne, unfortunately.

Sorry, I had to bitch a little. I love my kids, I do, and the small, silent flames that I can ignite once in a while in their minds. I just wish I could do more to help them, and that I didn’t have so many limitations keeping me from doing so.

“Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”