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.