Hypocritical I ... and Good Luck Crickets

I feel I might owe it to anyone who actually reads this to blog once again, almost as a self-response, to what I had written previously. It was an incredibly rough week and, debatably, even rougher weekend. Instead of hitting my head against the wall, I blogged. Less painful, but I don’t hate *#&$!@% Mississippi or *#&$!@% kids … I just find frequent occasion as of late to hate how it is here, and how they act ... and how, at times, I respond. Right - the behaviors, not the individuals.

I feel as if I am more than partly to blame. I expected this endeavor to be far easier than it has been. I expected to be welcomed by a community starving for outside assitance ... instead, I am looked at as an uninvited outsider, not to be trusted, by many and still others act as if they are offended by my mere presence before ever having taken the time to get to know me. And I was also naively confident in my teaching abilities/general social skills. I had a significant amount of previous teaching experience, and had worked for years at an intensive treatment facility with some of the more difficult children in the northeast – and loved both employments. Almost. See, I have a terrible memory, and the memories I do choose to retain are terribly selective. I didn’t love both of those jobs all of the time, and only now, removed and in a different, difficult (to say the least) situation, can reflect and say that they were positive experiences overall. Relativity, of course, can fool us all when our eyes are only pointed in one direction or focused on one problem. Now, that pseudo-confidence seems to have been replaced with ever-present disappointment and frustration.

So … the good, the bad, and the ugly. It can’t really get worse. It can’t. If I write it and say it enough, maybe I’ll begin to believe it. As I previously wrote, it isn’t the children at all. They’re kids. They’re human. I was a punk too, more often than not, and miserable to some of my teachers. I remember one, in particular. A first-year teacher handed over to us our sophomore year, I believe, to teach the honors English class – and we tormented the poor guy, day in and day out. Why? Because we could.

We are all learning as we go, us and them, and have to make mistakes in order to do that. The expectations we sometimes place upon teachers, parents and students - or ourselves - are extraordinary and often unrealistic. I do it myself, to myself and to others. Everyday I screw up in some way, small or large, in front of a very critical audience. When I am angry, disappointed and frustrated, it’s generally at myself … that I’m failing over and over again. But I can’t be hypocritical, because in the face of constant failure – a life many of my kids are more than accustomed to, for many in this demographic are perpetually suffering from the mistakes of others and from no direct result of their own actions – I’m always encouraging them to keep their heads up and do their best, even if their best never seems to be good enough, and am perpetually espousing the power of positive thinking … then turning around to self-indulgently bitch in private about my 'problems'.



So, it’s simple, just as I spend half of my day tugging chins upward and attempting to pull a smile out of the girl who just realized the fifteen year-old father of her child is sleeping with someone else and could care less about her, trying to get a grin from the kid who’s father beat him this morning or mother left them last night, encouraging the guy who is failing my class because he can hardly read while I’m asking him to do so for 50 minutes everyday, or spending my entire planning period with the child that is pissed off at the world for being born into such a seemingly hopeless predicament yet cannot verbalize this frustration and instead lashes out at the very people he needs for support and guidance and is about to throw it all away … In the same way I ask them to, for their own good, I need to keep my eyes ahead of me, not at an unrealistically, or even hopelessly, distant horizon and not down at the dirty, cockroach and cricket strewn halls of my daily existence, and must force myself to wake up every morning with the firm conviction that nothing is impossible if I have faith. Call it what you want … faith in myself and in others, faith in reaping the benefits of hard work, or faith in the distant, intangible force that miraculously put life upon this planet and keeps it going despite our disrespect.

I can’t change others, I can only change myself. If I lead by example, maybe they will desire to change themselves as well. Right now, I am not doing that. For a while, I stopped caring – it was a battle for my survival (in my mind) and all I could concentrate on was making it through another day in one piece. Release some pressure, let off some steam. Last time I blogged, I didn’t want a pep talk – this time, I’m giving myself one. This is the most difficult thing I’ve ever attempted, teaching in the Delta, and only because it is so worthwhile am I being so hard on myself. I need to shave. I need to shower. I need a mantra.

Our school cannot be conquered in one day, nor the Delta in two years.

Thunder is currently shaking our house and a brilliant lightening storm is threatening to cut off electricity as heavy southern raindrops pound down upon the hard-earth outside. I needed this more than the crops, and am about to join my three house-mates in the front lawn to hoot and holler out this past week, this past month, and let the warm rain wash away any negativity I've allowed to accumulate. It might be ingrained in some who you would expect more from, or those that have been here for any prolonged period of time, and, even if they inadvertently lash out and blame me, I can’t blame them for it. It's the bitterness one gets when they've become jaded with their situation. It sucks, but it isn’t my fault and to some degree, neither is it theirs.

I'm playing pick-up tomorrow with a few guys I teach, and hope I can back up the trash I've been talking.

It can only get better ....

I haven’t gone for a run in a while. Think now is as good a time as any.

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.”