Water, not rock

I've been trying to write this blog post for the last two weeks and I can't seem to start it right, so I guess I'm just going to keep typing.  I hope you'll keep reading as I try to figure this out.

I have a challenging group of kids this year.  I know this because everyone and their mom told me ahead of time that I would have a challenging group of kids this year.  I also know this because last year, I saw these kids walk out of classrooms with impunity, throw each other across the hallway in play fights that became more than play, swear with creativity and without compunction at their teachers and each other, and, worst of all, put their heads down, on their desks, in their cell phones, casting themselves out of the school building and away from our reach.

All summer, I braced myself.  I told myself sternly that my only goal for the year was to release control; I would do the best I could with the kids who chose to be in my room, and that would be that.   That there was no such thing as "bad kids," only messy humans.  They might storm out of the room, they might refuse to put away their phones, they might bait my temper: I would be water, not rock.  I held my breath.

Then I met them, and loved them almost immediately.  It's not that they were sugary sweet -- quite the opposite.  They didn't trust me one bit, and I didn't blame them; they'd lived with the stigma of being the "bad class" for as long as they could remember, and they were self-perpetuating that cycle all the way to the bank.  But their love for each other rang sweet like truth, it was palpable, and it took my breath away.

Like when we played a silly teambuilding game on the second day of school, and one girl, during the debrief, looked her classmates in the eyes and said, "Y'all know I have a temper, and I'm going to try to be better this year, so call me on it if I'm not, okay?"  And the other kids laughed and agreed, and a boy chimed in with the same request.

Or like when a boy was suspended after an altercation with boys from another school and, upon his return, his entire class surrounded him with love and hugs and joy.

Or like when we spoke as a class about authority: about how it feels not to have it, about how their parents taught them to respond to the police: "my mom never cared to teach me nothing," one girl said, while a boy said, "follow their directions, put your hands up, don't talk back, don't ask questions,  and you'll be okay."

"But," one student said in every class, "sometimes you do everything right and it's still not okay."

"I know," I said, "so what do we do?"  And they looked at me as if I knew the answer.

And here is where it links, all of it, because my students are not afraid of each other -- well, not much, not really.  They are afraid of a system that declines to abide by its own rules and then gaslights its victims.

I'm voting for Hillary Clinton, and I'm happy to be able to do so.  I trust her as much as I trust any politician (except for Marcy Kaptur, SHOUT OUT TO NORTHERN OHIO!).  Many of my students may distrust Hillary Clinton -- and I understand their reasons for doing so -- but they are afraid of Donald Trump.  They are afraid of more than Donald Trump: they are afraid of the reasons why he keeps winning.  My students -- immigrants from Yemen, Mexico, the Caribbean, more -- have met racists before.  They just never realized that so much of the country would be willing to overlook his racism.

I am afraid of even more than that, when it comes to Donald Trump.  I am afraid of the people that Donald Trump will appoint, and I'm not (only) talking about Supreme Court Justices.  I'm talking about the heads of the EPA, the DOE, FEMA.  I'm talking about wondering how much could possibly go wrong in one more term of George W. Bush, and then watching over a thousand people die in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina as a result of cronyism, incompetence, and casual racism.

I'm afraid that New York City or Seattle will be the next victim of a buffoonish FEMA head, and I wonder how many of my former students would be hurt in the aftermath.

My students are not victims.  But my students -- not all, but so many of them, and not just the ones from this year -- have been abused, and are abused daily, by the adults who are most supposed to protect them.  Sometimes the abuse is physical, sometimes it is lawful, most often it is verbal, and it is always violent.  The rules of our nation are incomprehensible and inconstantly enforced.  My students have no reason to trust.

This group?  They trust me, I think.  And I'm more afraid of that than I am of anything.

Because they have no reason to trust me.  I'm friendly, I ask them how they feel, I laugh when they're funny, and I do my best not to be shocked by them.  That's really it.  And that's not enough for trust, it really shouldn't be.  I want to grab them and shake them and tell them that they're not allowed to just trust this strange teacher with a sparkly personality, that they need to stay safe, sacrosanct.

What's more, I am absolutely certain that I will screw this up.  For goodness' sakes, I haven't even finished grading their reading autobiographies from the beginning of the school year.  I'm planning their lessons by the seat of my pants.  I'll probably enforce the rules inconsistently, because, hello, I barely even notice when students are wearing hats half of the time, and I'm terrible at contacting parents.

When I am caught up in this tangle, I know that I am everything that's bad and ineffective about teaching, wrapped up in a friendly face and a warm laugh.

And I guess the important thing when I get stuck in this cycle is the same as the most important thing to remember about classroom management:  it's not about me.  It's never about me.

It's about all of us, about students trying to shock me and me resisting the urge to be shocked, Student A saying "these teachers don't know they PLACE," and me raising an eyebrow and mildly saying, "and what is my place, Student A?", and the group easing into a relieved laugh, and the class, moving forward, water, not rock; it's all of us, carrying forward, choking and sputtering as we duck beneath the surface and bobbing as we pull each other out, through tomorrow, through next week, through November 8 and January 20 and the end of the school year and the rest of our lives.