Today, a girl was wrestled to the ground, handcuffed, in the street, on the pavement, in front of the entire school bus lineup.  I felt mostly nothing as I watched it from a 2nd-story window.  Yesterday, a kid spit on my computer after I stepped outside the classroom to call his parents mid-class for acting a damn fool.  I felt nonplussed and wiped the spit off with a napkin and sent him to the Dean after finding his present on my keyboard, then went about the rest of my day.  Sometimes I feel rattled, and it’s not during the moments when kids are just like, acting crazy, even though I know they’re consciously doing that stuff.  It’s more when they consciously explain to me the situations they truly find themselves in.  Like Chris, who stayed after school with me for 40 minutes to explain that school’s not working out, and though his parents tell him not to hustle, he figures he’ll end up doing it anyway, because nobody is hiring and he has to get paid and his parents don’t make enough for him and them altogether.  I asked him what if he gets killed doing that, and he explained to me, like one explains that there are 4 seasons in a year or how you button up a shirt, that it will probably end up that way.  We are going to pick up applications at 2 more places tomorrow even though I am not supposed to drive my students around after school.  “Anything to keep me off the streets,” he says.  He knows better, but doesn’t expect better, and that’s what makes it hard to hear.

Since we got a whole bunch of new kids, school has been gradually unraveling.  I feel my old self coming back as I prepare to go in every day and regulate.  I get exhausted every day because all their needs are on my shoulders when I’m put in charge of them and I am simply not enough.  Even giving 110% each day, I’m never going to be enough.  They need attention, a job, discipline, excitement, engagement, affirmation, consequences, belief in them, constant supervising, micro-managing, things to be simplified, things to be challenging.  They need all the things that human beings are supposed to get from age 0 on.  Lately, class has been amazing, and overall, the kids are learning great things.  It’s just that every day, I have nothing left.  I don’t know how people can do this as a career without some kind of long-term shift in their “compensation”, and I mean that much more broadly than in just a financial sense.  Something bigger has to happen, different leaders need to come in, it can’t just all be a few people here and there fighting tooth and nail from 7AM to 5PM.  Families need to believe again, children need to want to try again, teachers and leaders need to keep the faith, the ones in power need to fight for us.  Otherwise, people start to die out here.  People’s spirits start to die in America’s public places meant to start our spirits on fire.  And even if you’re the one person insisting, “You CAN achieve, you CAN have other options, you CAN make it, there ARE other ways”, too many other voices rise with anger, with contempt, with condemnation, all various attitudinal manifestations of low expectations that poison our society’s youth, til they believe it about themselves – til they can’t even hear the 1 or 2 voices fighting back, saying, “Don’t give up.”  That’s straight Devil-work.

Every quiet day of pushing on becomes a new scream rising.