Just a thought.

Last year there seemed but a glimmer of hope for entering into relationships with my students which went beyond discipline in the classroom and academic rigor. This year has been a very different experience as has my approach to being in the classroom. I think a combination of things changed only with time: being a foreigner, a teacher with zero teacher training or experience, not understanding most anything, cultural peccadillos, and my lapsing impatience. I thought how I might like to enter into a very different dimension of friendship with my students this year. It seems as though I have. It has been more beautiful for me this year too. But ‘beautiful’ needs some explaining. Enter: “Civic Monday”. The first school bell of the first hour of the first day of the new week is a sort of initiation where we sing while the flag is hoisted, the national anthem recited, and the various meanings of the important days to occur that week are relayed by a student with the microphone. It’s not my favorite part of the week, yet it affords me an hour to stare at the Andes in the background and smell all the weird smells in the air that morning. Last year I remember a series of moments where students would faint or cry or just be plain-old out of sorts. Other teachers dealt with it each time. I remember being a kid that age, about ten years ago, smelling, being hungry, mood swings, frustrations and just trying to understand the road to adulthood as I still remained a child in many ways. It was also a beautiful time. I think some of my classmates in high school had formed much better relationships with our teachers than I did. But mostly, I think, it was the student who had problems at home who made the strongest connections. I, on the other hand, had a good Dad who worked hard; my Mom worked hard too and also lovingly made my lunch every day; I was privileged and loved, and truly wanted for nothing. Sure, I caused problems and acted out, but I always felt like I was going somewhere and that I had a lot of support in doing what I wanted to do. Now, I’m on the other side of that student-teacher ‘beautiful’, and I’m in another privileged position. Now when kids at school on “Civic Mondays” start to cut-up or cry, there’s a good chance they’ll come straight to me if I’m close in proximity. And it’s not always a situation that is solved by handing them some bread and saying, “You have got to eat breakfast or your school day will be a wash”, or, putting a Band-Aid on their wrist where they got cut from putting their bike away; sometimes it’s the inconsolable tears and whimpering that I deal with, the my Dad beat me this morning and chased me out of the house to the street where I escaped in a taxi, and now I’m afraid to go home because of what he’s going to do to me tonight for not staying home and letting him finish what he started.... This is hard. The rest of my day is mostly ruined, but I won’t go through the gamut of emotions here because it is without fathom and its depths are just an ugly side effect of the episode of child abuse itself. And it makes me feel small, shrinks me actually, and I’m dizzied by the not-knowing-what-to-do and the helplessness of the situation altogether. I do what I can, talk with whom I can, and things only scab over. They never get better or different, but ebb and flow with the constant progression of moments which put distance between one ugly schism and the next to surely come. The abuse won’t stop either, and although it seems a nihilistic and inept consolation for dealing with these injustices, I won’t stop being there either, no matter how boring "Civic Mondays" are. I’ve found a new admiration I for the teachers whom I saw help the students during my high school days who, other than being dedicated professionals, simply knew how to be a human being. But I think I have to remember that this need not only happen in the classroom but in society at large....