One of the hardest parts of working at a school is coming to grips with the fact that there are kids in this world that nobody cares about. I know that sentence seems harsh, and yeah, if those kids were starving we’d make sure they’d get some crackers and all that. But these kids don’t have families like I do. They don’t have to make three weeks worth of plans around their birthdays because there are so many people who love them and want to celebrate with them. These kids get an envelope with a pencil and a sticker, and they get their principal saying, “Happy Birthday” during the morning announcements and that’s it. These kids don’t have people that L-O-V-E love them like I have people, (tons! I have tons and tons!) of people who love me.
One of the un-chosen few came into the office today. This particular one is currently homeless, living in temporary housing with his many, many brothers and sisters and his grandma. Mom’s nowhere in the picture, and grandma isn’t really either, best we can tell. I don’t really know firsthand what his home life is like; I’m not there to see it. I just know what I’ve seen and the stories that I’ve heard from him and his siblings. In addition to being homeless, he’s also got other problems. Some of them are part of the homeless thing–he doesn’t smell very good, doesn’t seem to shower often, has dirty clothes. Some of the other problems are not related to his living situation–at least not directly. He talks a lot in class, he’s always smarting off to the teacher, he doesn’t do well in school and he doesn’t have any friends. His best and only friend seems to be his little brother; when they are together is the only time I see them laughing and having a good time. Outside of those moments with his brother, he behaves as if he was modeling textbook behavior for “fatherless child without discipline.” That, in a sentence, makes him really hard to love.
Today he got kicked out of class. His teacher, who happens to be voice-less at the moment, literally could not talk over him to teach her class today, so she kicked him out of class. She told him to get his mathbook, go to the office, and he wasn’t allowed to come back to the office until after he was done with his guided practice.
The real kicker about “Guided Practice,” though, is that, by its very nature, it needs to be guided.
So he showed up to the office, book in arm, and paced around for a while like an ant who’d lost his cohort train. I was helping someone at the time, and I paused my conversation to ask him what he needed. I asked, Why are you in the office? He told me that he’d been in trouble. For what? I begged some more information out of him. For talking too much, he said. Four words from the boy so verbose that he was ejected from his elementary school classroom. Four Freaking Words. I told him just to sit tight until I was done with what I was doing, then I would talk to him about whatever was going on.
And there he sat, in the incredibly inappropriately placed park-bench in my office, silently, until I was able to come back to him 10 minutes later.
I don’t know why they are all so easy to manage one-on-one, all so impossible when they are in a group.
After he’d explained the whole situation to me, I had him move to the kid-friendly table in the office and crack open his math book. Having once had to stand in for a math lesson in this very same teacher’s class, I felt pretty confident that I would be able to handle whatever lesson the Guided Practice was going to demand of me. The lesson was about fractions. Finding numbers on a number line, trying to get kids to understand that 5/8ths comes between 1/2 and 3/4 even though it seems like it wouldn’t because look! 5 and 8 are both bigger than 1, 2, 3 & 4, so clearly it comes after, right? As I read the instructions outloud to the both of us he said, “Why are you reading those? We’re supposed to be doing the Guided Practice.” I gently explained that sometimes, if you don’t know what you’re supposed to be doing (as he’d already said), it was a good idea to go back to the beginning to see if you could figure it out.
Soon after, I explained to a little boy what 1/4 meant. It’s like 1/4 of a dollar. How much is a quarter worth, I asked? $0.25, he said. I said, How many of those do you need to make a dollar? 4. So, if you have 1 quarter, and it takes four to make a dollar, could you also say that you’ve got 1/4th of a dollar? 1 out of the 4 quarters it takes to make a dollar?
Lightbulbs. I spent 45 of the saddest minutes of my life at that table today, teaching a poor, attention-starved boy about fractions. We went from 4ths to 8ths to 16ths to 32nds, and when I asked him to write “four thirty seconds (4/32)” as an answer to one of the problems, he literally wrote “4/30 sec.” on the paper. I laughed and said, “It really does sound like that doesn’t it?” And then explained to him how we write fractions with just the numbers, but when you say them out loud the “nds” and “ths” are implied. He tried to write fractions with the “nds” on the end, telling me over and over again that he wanted to make sure Ms. Teacher understood what he was trying to write. At the end of the problem set I looked down at his scratch paper to see that he’d written “Tudering with Mrs. Sarah” on the page, along with a 100, the 00′s of which he’d turned into the eyes of a smiling happy face.
Not more than an hour after that I had a parent threaten me with physical violence because she was angry. She wasn’t specifically mad at me: she was angry at the whole world. I just got the brunt of it because I’d answered the phone. I played it cool on the phone, but when I got home I told the story to Zack and cried into his chest because I can only play it cool for so long. What that lady said hurt my feelings, yes. It was hurtful, but I can hardly even remember what she said. The reason that I’m still crying though, the reason that I’ve been crying all night, is because of that Unlovable Boy. I can not even begin to deal with the pain that I witness every day in the eyes of “The Trouble Kids.” And if we’re going to be truly honest here, the other reason that I’m still crying is because I’m ashamed of myself for thinking about the way that boy smelled while I was helping him learn which fractions come between 1/2 and 3/4.
