Day -26: A Humbling Day of the Teacher

Today was my birthday and also the Day of the Teacher.

Juan greeted me first thing in the morning with a big bouquet of calla lilies from his family's garden. "They're called Alcatraz," he kept repeating, which perhaps is a variety of calla lily. Who knows? Anyway, they were beautiful and all wrapped up fancy with blue ribbon. Our first grade buddies and my class sang me "Happy Birthday," a team of students made me a card with my name written in hieroglyphics (or a kid's book version of hieroglyphics, anyway), a bunch of my former students came back to visit me and give me hugs, and I got another big beautiful bouquet of flowers from a mystery parent when I was out of my classroom. I was happy with my students as they finished another part of standardized testing and made gorgeous Mother's Day cards. Those were the good parts of the day.

Then after school I found out that my friend's student got taken out of school in handcuffs and involuntarily committed to the psych ward of a hospital, at least overnight. He will almost certainly be expelled from our school.

This fourth grader has been extremely challenging almost from the moment he came to our school late in the fall. He deliberately tripped a first grader for absolutely no reason, gave his classmate a black eye, threw a chair in the principal's office, grabbed the vice-principal's arm so hard she had bruises, and lots, lots more. I knew him a little bit because he spent time in my classroom on two occasions - once when his class went on a field trip and he couldn't go and another time when he had a time out from his regular class. He was certainly the most challenging student I ever encountered, but he could be sweet and funny and insightful, too, just like any kid.

I don't really know what precipitated today's incident, but I do know that at lunch the office was locked down, he was in there screaming, there were four police cars outside, and in the end he was taken off to an ambulance in handcuffs.

Here's something I wrote on my train ride home:
I feel sad for the world in which this happened, for the world in which a boy could feel such anger, could be so disconnected from the social norms of behavior, could get so little help - apart from being one of 32 kids in a classroom with one teacher to meet his and the 31 other students' needs. I feel sad for the world in which a father could feel so tangibly the effects of discrimination and racism that he didn't want his son even tested for special ed services because of the stigma and the over-representation of black boys in special ed. I feel sad for the world in which a nine-year old boy could feel so unsupported, so confused within himself that the best thing he could think of do to was to hide his ADHD medication after pretending to take it. I feel sad for the world in which a boy could be laughing about basketball at recess in the morning and then at lunch be in a screaming rage. I feel sad for the world in which a nine-year old boy gets taken out of school in handcuffs. And I feel sad for the world in which this image of a black boy in handcuffs does not seem so strange; it's what his father was trying to avoid without knowing how. I feel sad for the world in which some people's spirits get broken so easily that I have a strange sort of respect for this boy's defiance, for his refusal to back down in the face of teachers, principals, and even the police. Not that he's in the right, of course.

That's what I wrote before my stop came. A few more thoughts: I feel sad for the other students at our school, too, the ones who got hurt by him physically, the ones who he scared, and the ones who were his friends sometimes. I feel sad for what seeing a boy taken away in handcuffs does to them (not that many kids saw this, but some did and many more will hear about it). And I feel sad for my friend, this student's teacher, who cared about him and tried so, so hard to figure out how to have him as part of his class.

And what I started thinking about as I rode my bike the rest of the way home is that on this Day of the Teacher, I guess it's important to remember that we teachers can only do so much. We are part of this crazy, messed up world, and sometimes we are in this web that we can't circumvent, where society plays out in ways we can influence but not separate ourselves from. And sometimes that breaks our hearts. I don't know what this student needs exactly, but I know that he needs more than a teacher and a dad and a vice principal that care about him. He needs a whole world that cares about him and his future. God, I hope he sees good doctors tonight.