It Takes a Village to Raise a Child

My experiments with truth in education.   

I thought I’d swim, float, back stroke even. Then, tread water with the doggy paddle.  But I’m drowning. It’s temporary, I know, but as I look out over the horizon I see the next high tide pouring in to wipe out the rest of the little folks like me.  (Little folk = big brain and big heart)  For now, I escape by running up that green bank over there to my right (bed, home office, front seat of my car) and hold dearly onto the one solid tree while little brown boys and girls scream and yell and clamor, until they run up beside me. Hold on, it’s coming.

Could I have ever imagined the water so murky?

Years of critical examination=eyes sharp, categorized, nimble and quick.  Now in the doing, the practical, I grow endless compassion.

Can this lone wolf see it through the darkest night in order to make it to the other side? 

I am reminded of that famous story.  The one about a God son walking in the shoes of man. Well, I don’t feel like Jesus.  Not today, anyway.  I’m a method actor like Stanislavski, fully immersed.  The role I’ve been given?   The beloved teacher. 

A strong memory influences me.  It is my preparation. My 6^th grade teacher, Mrs. M, who wrote in my clunky 1980’s autograph book—

             Who will ask me Who? What? Where? When? Why and How?  

She’s the teacher who later told me that she’d lie and say she was my Jewish aunt. ‘Make sure you go to that school,” she said.  The good school where my Jewish friends would go naturally. (Jewish will always mean a better education to me since then)

Mrs. M was strict and stern and big and fat (she had rolls on her neck and the kids counted four, not two boobs.  I once counted 8, when her brazier was tight enough). She wore lipstick every day and she was a piano player with long nails that tapped, tap, tap on the white keys.  She transformed naturally into a director in the afternoons as she partnered with the other “top class” teacher to put on the annual full length play. I still remember the lyrics to Anything Goes.

Mrs. M inspired me.

She inspired me to be an educator and an artist. 

She had all of us in her heart, in the palm of her hand. You could hear a pin drop and there was time for us to play, yes! But we worked and listened and we wanted to learn and she wanted to teach and she had so many years of experience.  She had bags under her eyes and she had glasses on her desk.  Her face was caked with powdery cosmetics.

She knew things and she knew me. 

I chose her without thinking, even before I knew I was going be cast as the beloved teacher.

How would Mrs. M fair these days—with the new school model? What would she rate?  How would she measure up in a new teacher project school, the school with the motto—“put the teacher in-the-line-of-fire?”  Would she go down in history as a superhero or villain?

Who out there can dare to teach, speak, believe [in truth] and keep a job at the same time? Who out there has this privilege?  Anybody?  Who that NEEDS to teach, to pay the bills, without a Daddy?

How many good souls are we losing a day— in this war on educators, this war on schools, this war on our democratic society? 

Are we done with it?  Is ‘education’ a commodity? IS that what everybody’s fighting for? 

If it’s really about kids, and this is the solution, then boy—we’re really starting off with a huge crack in the foundation. Like: when did we ever think one person could be responsible for the education of a whole child?  

Did we think we could create a professional learning community while changing the ground rules so that we’d all race to the top?  How can we all win, then? 

When did we decide it was okay to stop working together?

When did we decide we’d do it better by empowering those with less experience?   

When did we think schools could be bureaucratic induced bubbles, trampled over by reports and accountability and factories for the time consuming task of reinventing the PENCIL, while blindfolded?

How can we make a child who can’t sit still for very long take a six day long test=9 hours, not counting the extended time and the proctoring?

How can we hold any one individual responsible for the education of a whole child?  Who would give any one person the belief that they have so much power?

Anyone who believes that they are alone responsible for the welfare of a child is deceiving themselves.  We are not that powerful.  IT TAKES A VILLAGE TO RAISE A CHILD.

A child who is on medication or who’s hungry (or scared of Daddy), a HOMELESS child or one that’s being raised by tired work-horsed to death folks is a whole village responsibility. Or even the offspring of middle class, working class educated folks scared to death of slipping into the cavernous dungeon of poor schooling— that child cannot be saved by one person!

It takes a village to raise a child. 

You can teach humanities and play classical music until you’re blue in the face and you can teach to read and write text based evidence in style, but any child will die when you send him out into the village starving.  That child will fight you when you close your door at night.  You’re selling them.  You’re selling them a false hope if you don’t take care of the village, don’t you know?

This strange demon we call racing to the top. 

Parents are TERRIFIED and OUTRAGED and SILENCED at the same time.

Teachers are blinded and FEARful.

Administrators RUN but can’t catch up, RELIEVED they don’t teach black stares.  Many of them LOST carrying their own crucifix.  They are secretly ashamed.

We are BULLIED every day from all sides. 

Parents, students, principals, evaluators, experts and anyone else you can imagine. 

No one knows who to trust.  We are lied to and misinformed.  BAMBOOZLED.

It takes a village to raise a child. Yet, we’re pitting educators against each other. We’re dismantling schools piece by piece, like dispersing families, divorcing, dissecting, dismembering, disjointed- dysfunctional.

Sorry, but you need to know—no one can do what really needs to be done alone. 

We have been duped into believing the oldest myth in the history of humankind.

Waiting for Superman? Ha!

We are not a yes-no, a right left.  We are a whole, think Pizza pie and the deliciousness of it, how the cheese melts on all sides.  Education is organic, holistic.

Each and every one of us has an intricate purpose in the education of a child. And even if you’re doing your best and can afford to shelter your child from the “public” chaos, don’t be fooled.  Your little boy or girl knows.  They see FREEDOM is not for everybody.  They see we are forced to pick and choose.

It takes a village to raise a whole child.  

Voice, rather Teacher’s Voice

Lesson today on voice in 6^th grade reminds me of the lesson in writer’s workshop where non-stop writing happening and that was supposed to be a lesson on voice.  Child named Nylah exclaims, what is the purpose of this activity and I ask her (ever so politely) what do you think? Another child chuckles and apparently he’d been paying attention.  Voice, you jerk, VOICE!  Uh, and what is that supposed to mean? (I'm saying all of this nicely, but sometimes these conversation come out a little muddy in 6^th grade and especially in my school) Anyway, she repeated the question.  Discussion ensues.  Blah, blah, blah and what did that fine fellow on the video speak of?  Oh, soul?  Was it soul he called voice or was it spirit?  But how do you teach that, she clamored, on to the very mystery of it all.  Especially for me, a teacher of writing.  Precisely! I exclaim as if I had known it all along, and then said, who is the only expert on that?  Me?  Yes, you. You are the only one who can teach yourself voice.

The activity by the way is the very one in which I am engaged right now, and that is writing not stopping, writing without a trace of judgement or back tracking or formality or audience (except we all know there is an audience and there’s also a backspace button on my laptop) HOWEVWER, I will say that judgement is lacking more than the other times.

THERE!!!!  It is, my dream, my VOICE, the same dream that told me that I had to start all over again.  Do you mind if I tell you?

My books were wrapped up in colorful rubberbands and some bloke (not from England but it sounds good, don’t it?) some bloke from England leans into me and says, “Why don’t you take a lesson or two on voice? Cuz all this here, is old.  PUT IT IN THE PAST” 

Disgust, hate, vomit, sadness, fear, crying. Self loathing, pity, desire, fuck you fuck you and really? Start again.

START AGAIN???? 

START AGAIN????

aNyway, the result was a lesson noT on test prep but voice.  VOICE. 

I’ve sung songs in the dead of night, dreams and microphones, belting out the rich flavor of my minds, ive been famous and only in small circles though, blending

I sang I sing.

I want to sing but voice in writing is bigger than the shower or the microphone cuz it’s my baby and a baby can never fit into a bathtub.

How long was that?  Enough?

---- starting to redefine, refind, my voice.  (fuck, I though I had it and im old now)

Going Blind

My words have become tiny.  They are scribbled down between loose leaf paper lines, a tiny cursive reminiscent of a young boy and a felt tipped pen.  Little scrappy words huddled together in the crack above my bed, the jagged yellowish claw the rain brought in, the one that I called ‘cousin’ because I knew it would just stay indefinitely. 

So now more than ever I’ve been depending on my eyes.  And that ain’t good, maybe.

I tell them to watch and watch carefully.  I say, remember and never forget.  I tell them to hold on now and step back, slowly.  Then at home I remind them of what they’re supposed to do. 

My eyes have got some story (the one no one wants to hear.)

They’ve seen concentration camps right here in NYC.  They’ve seen hunger and desperation sitting right next to great wealth, leisure and safety.  They’ve seen people get lost and why some stay there and little boys who fight and snarl like animals.  They’ve seen excess and stupidity.  My eyes have seen who you are, who you really are.  No joke.

They see big brother lurking. Cameras hidden in light posts and drones.  They see intravenous humiliation at Guantanamo and how smart people sell poor folks false hopes.  They see all you crazy fucks laughing like snitches in the back room talking shit about people who really are just poor and hopeless and tired.  They see into the mud.  They see behind doors. 

My eyes have seen the extinction of one poet every day for weeks. 

Perhaps this is why my eyes are finally growing listless.  It is for real.  I now need reading glasses to read the small print.  I won’t be surprised if one day my sight disappears completely.  In my journal I found a page about a dream in which my father lost his eye sight. That could’ve been me. 

I blink and squint often. Even when I’m alone.  It’s like a tick. 

I think— will my words and my sight disappear together? Like lovers on the prowl for a happy ending. What would be left then for someone like me?

Then I’d become just another crazy Puerto Rican.  Like my grandmother who was born with nothing and her family died in flames and the nuns who loved her sold her across the seas for nothing more than that.  That’s what they did back then. 

Without my eye sight and my words, I might become a religious zealot.  I’d beg the Gods to save me, be willing to sacrifice my friends and family because they’d all be the devil on the final day of judgment (with the widespread divorce and masturbation)

Perhaps without my eye sight and my words, I’d get a subscription to cancer and let the bloody germ eat at my intestines and spit me into the universe of morphine. 

Or maybe, when I’m blind and mute—I’d find some miraculous inner strength, like Helen Keller did or the slaves who thought better not to jump off the ship even though they knew what awaited them was far worse than just a beating. 

I doubt it.

Instead, I’m practicing witchery.

I crouch down and burn my spit in a cauldron.  I snarl at the flames and watch the tiny red and orange sparks waft up over the dark grey smoke and into the sky. Each spark becomes a firefly and kisses a star. Together they dance.  Their light looks down onto me, fond of what I’ve become.   They help me cast my magic spell, like little angels born of fire.  

Then I chant and swing my arms in the air, my elbows and toes bend, my hips, my belly bare, my hanging breasts clink like champagne glasses and my chin tucks under my chest.   All at once, I am up into that black night and I hiss and twist and clap.

This is how I will change things.  It will happen in the forest of my soul.  In the fire crackling shimmer and whistle of my soul. Hear me?

Yes.  I’d be able to bear it then—the blindness and the words dead.  The dance would make up for all the wounds and bloody scraped knees I wrap up daily.  It would be my call to all the children we lost.  It would tell them they are home.  With me. 

What is Knowledge?

There are a few things one can learn on the other side, the other camp.  One thing that is paramount is the existence of camps.  Obama comes to mind, constantly criticized for wanting to work with the guys (gals) on the other side of the line.  Bipartisanship.  Like the fabulous Broadway musical Wicked when the two witches realize that although they each had been given "antagonistic" roles, they needed to work together, following some goal outside themselves.  Wasn't the objective in that play to "free the animals?"

What is our objective here, in the now, in the world, in the heart of our living room-- in this precise moment in history?

Not sure who needs to be freed anymore, and maybe it's still the poor children, the poorest of families in my (and their) communities.  But maybe it's also "free" ourselves from the burden of camps.  From the burden of You vs. Me or the That or Nothing.

I am no longer afraid of dissolving into the madness of conformity.

I know who I am and I understand the passing on of knowledge.

I can debate and play with you on any day about CONTENT, but most of us agree that human beings need to feel connected to SOMETHING and that SOMETHING has to be BOTH about ourselves and about the world around us simultaneously.

I don't want experiments on poor people's backs, but the more I see the more I understand that even the most privileged who are young teachers are suffering.  They are carrying around the history and the decay of the ages, hoping to make a difference, but babies themselves, wondering and mostly lost and tired and angry.

In the very least I don't have to worry about them going hungry.

What is the most severe-- poverty of the mind and soul or poverty of loins? The death from hunger, the death from abandonment or the death of the essences of life--love??

I get amazed that educators get lost ON BOTH SIDES OF ANY CAMP YOU CHOOSE when they forget the purpose of childhood and the purpose of schools.  If we are not there to love each other and love the children in front of us, to teach them love of the other and love of themselves, to teach them that all knowledge can grow from love, any knowledge that we choose--

then we are lost.

What is knowledge without love?

What kind of schools are we creating when the structure stamps out love, when there is no time to breathe and to smile and to rejoice in the beauty of our existence?

What kinds of schools are we creating when the children in OUR charge, in our CARE-- can't play in a safe place?

What kinds of school are we creating when we ourselves are so tired to do the right thing, sharpness envelopes us like darkness, like the plague because we are always "barely surviving?"

I am sorry to all those who out there I have said the simple word, "No." That I will not do more than I can because if I do I will die, that I will not forego the most important task of my job and that is to have enough energy to share with the innocence in front of me.

_________
Again, forgive the typos or the grammatically incorrect, I've got little time these days.

Avatar

There's a scene in Avatar when He talks into the camera, doing "science." 

Funny how he was his brother's twin, and yet they were so different.

Two lives living the same dream--someone else, and yet the same.

     Today was a bad day, Groundhog Day, ended badly because all the kids who had worked so hard had to fight.  They fought after the Assembly about Community & Bullying. They fought because no matter how pretty the idea was, there was no recess and 6 graders need to run around at one point in the day if they're going to last to 4pm.  Especially the boys.  But two girls fought anyways, each defending herself from the teasing boys.  One said She was fat, or so it was inferred.  (She didn't use that word of course.)  The other cuz he poked her?  Either way, fighting happened.  It was four days after our conversation about "non-violence" and having the courage to do something different.  We don't want to be a coward they told me.  4,500 in Children's March did it, I said, to fight Bill O'Conner in Birmingham, with no violence.  One kid explains it was a "different time and place."
     Well said.
     I'm an Avatar today.
     Working, living, breathing in my twin's body, trying to understand the Natives.  On both sides, the Natives, the young folks in charge and the babies they are trying to teach.
     I'm an Avatar because I'm on a mission by default and this, well this-- is my small attempt to "do science."
     All the kids tell me that their parents teach them to defend themselves.  That non-violence is a "nice idea" but not realistic.
    Who am I to tell?
    I hate violence and yet I hate apathy, too.  I love King and Gandhi but X made some sort of sense, even in the Matrix Morpheus fought a battle or two, who didn't love Morpheus?
    Every teacher has taken days off in the one month I've been there.  Some 2, 3, 4, 5 times even.  Burn out.
    Me?
    Not yet.
     But I'm tired.
     I got tired when a small sassy kid said it was my fault he got detention because I smiled at him during Assembly and so he thought "everything was alright."
     Really?
     Another kid asks just three days before, "Why you always so angry?"
     Some days I make a difference.
     Other days, I'm on a journey surveying their hard, cold ass---distant world.

Month 1; Day 20

I took a job in the classroom…teaching English, aka, ELA.  6^th grade. The last classroom teaching job I had was twelve years ago.  Since then I finished a degree, travelled a lot, taught adults, designed trainings, consulting, curriculum writing, dreaming, raising my two children, failing and succeeding at the small most important things, the large things linger.  I’ve been doing what I’ve always done best—hovering over the field of education as if education were one of my ducklings.

Teaching is one of the most difficult, multi-faceted jobs out there.  Teachers deserve a hell of a lot of money if they’re doing well at it.  Teachers need a lot of support and love…especially if they’re teaching in a school with poverty, learning disabilities, high needs populations—which I would probably say describes most schools in the public/charter sector today; at least in NYC where I am.  Where I work. 

It’s been a long time since I’ve worked “at home.” My own town.  My own crazy kids.  Not neighborhood kids really, cause they travel from the other side of the Bronx.  But nonetheless, I’m not in another country nor am I on a plane between states. I find myself right here and I walk to school now.  I’m localized totally.   

I’m three and half minutes away.

Macro to micro in a flash. 

Much has changed.  I’ve got a smart board.

Much has stayed the same. 

I’m good at it, this teaching thing, no matter what the age.  Kids need lots and lots of love—the kind of love that is swaddled in high expectations, structure and clarity. The kind of love that picks up the details of progress, the nuance of relationships, the steady beat and pulse of a child growing.  Put a ruler up next to a plant and watch how slow it grows, but it does grow with exactly the right amount of sun and water and potting.  How easy it is to kill its flowers, yellow the leaves or dry them out.  How painfully monotonous it all is, the everyday task of making lessons real, trying to sell the miracle of reading to a bunch of rowdy kids who shake and shiver with meds or with nerve endings busted, never reworked, faulty wiring and years of mixed messages.  How to make reading and writing relevant to these hungry souls? Sweat the small stuff.  Children live and breathe in the small stuff.  It’s their world these fine details— the lives they stuff into small cubbies or push back to the back of the desk, the pencils that disappear day in and day out, the notebook war. 

What is my job really?

I have 75 patients. 75 children. 75 students. 75 human beings in my charge. They rumble into my classroom as if my classroom were like a yard. 

Pick up the debris and transform it into garden.  Every day raking, tilling and planting, pulling out the weeds.  Every day, every second, every minute packed, every second you breathe, filling the lungs with air, strong like the Gods and then the wind changes and what?

Start again.

How do you go from macro to micro?  How does one grow old after a lifetime of youth?  What is the road from independent to mutuality, from fast to slow, from bigger than life to just life?

Small boy hugs me.  Wants to know if I'm staying.  Four teachers quit on them in 4 months.  I chuckle.  No, chortle.  (That's a vocabulary word, btw)  It's as if he knew I had an interview the next day.  No one knows except him that I had left the door open.  Just in case.  Special ed can't sit still but he knew more than anybody.  I tell him, "I'm thinking about it"  

"I hope you decide to stay," he says and I turn away thinking, is this God playing tricks on me?

Eye contact with my autistic student.  He's finally agreed to write in the date every day.  He's made a commitment to be a part of my new community.  "They say good things about you," I tell him.  He chants something over and over again but his eyes dart in and out of mine and I know he hears me.  "And I believe it's all true." I tell him.  He knows that for me, it's just beginning.  Kids who can't take care of a notebook take care of him.  They tell me what he does and what I need to watch out for. They protect him and they want me in on their little secret.

They're welcoming me into their family.  

The only time their spirit dies is when I say take out a book and read.  Write something.  Then they get scared and angry.  

How do I get them to love reading when it's painfully slow and hard in a fast-paced electronic world?

In another class I talk on and on with pause and purpose and a child says I speak like poetry, like Dr. Martin Luther King. Then I feel encouraged.  

They hear me.

Month 1; Day 20 and counting.

The Old Labor Force

There’s that wrench sitting on the shelf,

Behind the paint can and the dented cardboard box filled with plastic gloves.

Prize sized and silver yet

Adjustable widths and flexible lengths

Cold and stiff, hiding (our so it seems) in the darkness, closet-ness of a cold house

Trapped

Door closed and trembling vents, the radiator hits back and forth

Against the back rim, with no heat but the dents grow deep

Our wrench, the one in question—does not budge.

Like clouds, background noise or scraps for the dogs

There it is still.  

In all her glory.

Not a peep, waiting, like the Good Men said she would.

She might oxidize waiting that way, in the damp 

And they were right.

It wasn’t until I searched for a roll of toilet paper that I found her.

Have you ever? A roll of toilet paper, I say

I found her unveiled, unkempt, dismembered (but ironically SANE)

My first reaction was to hiccup, then a cackle escaped

Because I had been looking for her for so long, the perfect tool

Until then she was nowhere to be found (or)

At least, I learned later on and after further investigation

That she had been banished.  Expatriated. 

Home Depot informed me that they had stocked up on the latest models

*Limited Edition* models, shiny, unhitched, unexperimented with

The veterans should not have let this happen.

So, I had to ask, whose fault was it? 

I interrogated the spouse

the kids

the lover

And the police, even. 

I wanted to know. 

I went to the town school and asked if they had seen her back then  or whenever

They pointed me to traces where she had unjammed old doors,

A memory board, apparently was her doing

What about the doll house, I asked, what ever happened to that? 

Layed flat on its back in a perpetual state of under-construction

On my way out, they all pointed to the State (implicated)

Let’s not talk about them, I say, talk about her!

To the eyes of men she was simply lost

Unveiled, unkempt, dismembered (but ironically SANE)

Behind the old mop and broken vacuum, she sat

Quietly waiting.

Her steel body appeared to weave in and out between shelves,

Making music with her silence

Prophesizing and philosophizing

Asking why?

Asking when?

The wrench was my friend and I miss her.

She was my best friend, even.

She reminded me of happenings and hope.

She reminded me of reconstruction and possibility.

She was back then our *Limited Edition*

With no *Lifetime Warranty*

And didn’t.

She had nothing.

She was just a wrench

Made in a time when a wrench was all you needed to fix things.

Perfectly useful and necessary.

But now, we are at 'the end of the day' days

And at the end of the day, right—

Wrenches are old & unnecessary