I want to write, but I can’t.
So I write this instead….
I was giving the SAT this saturday. Once again I was in a history class where I had given the test before. I was surrounded by quotes, pictures, and events. The past. While sitting there and checking id’s when the kids showed up my mind went to the past.
I was standing in the cafeteria after dropping off the students at lunch. Suddenly there was a commotion and I saw a kid take his tray and throw it. Then he ran. I ran. He was a fast little guy. I would find him hiding under desks in the classroom. It was the first time I had been left with the kids. I was a student teacher and the lead teacher had left the building. The kid was in my class.
That boy was doing the right thing. He was doing what he had been told in the past. Yet he wasn’t listened too when he tried to explain. It became too much. He wasn’t an ordinary boy, but are any of the kids really ordinary? Rhetorical question. The boy had many things including voices that talked to him. I can’t remember his official diagnoses, but it was something. In that moment we would talk under the desks. It would be tears and the flowing of the words. Where the duty wouldn’t listen to him I listened.
When I was student teaching the kids invited me to their sporting games. It’s amazing how you become a part of kids lives when you teach. Several were playing in a soccer championship and it turned out that the boy was in it. Afterwards, he would ask his coach if he could get a ride home from me. The scary thing is that the coach let him just based on the fact that the kid said I was his teacher. Not that I’m a bad person, but the guy didn’t even know me. And I guess that speaks to the situation. He had no one there for him.
I would take him home. His mom was working. His Grandma was having a garage sale so that they could earn some money. They needed money. I remember growing up and going for ice cream after soccer games. He had just won the championship. There was nothing like that for him. No celebrations. It was a family struggling to survive where they couldn’t even be at his game. Grandma let me take him out to celebrate. He chose Burger King.
He walked around that restaurant showing everyone in the place his medal. I ate lunch with a champion.
I so hope you are well.