In life, there are constants. These constants brace and calm us wherever in the world we may be. Like the warm mushy hug of your comfort food, or the security of the sunrise, constants never fail us. For me in Honduras, this constant is lunchtime – 11:40 p.m., euphoria. My 4:20.
Sure, I may say a silent prayer every day that I soaked my apple in enough Chlorox to not end up with explosive bowel problems, but still I know that these 40 minutes every day are mine. I can read if I want to, I can speak with my teacher friends if I want to, hell I could even sit in complete silence if I wanted to. Most importantly though, my sweet 29 nine-year-olds are at least 30 feet away from me at all times. If I could liquefy “lunchtime,” I would put it in a porcelain bathtub with 100 rose petals and soak in it for 40 minutes. It is delicious.
But ah, alas, it is 12:20, and 12:20 is often quite rotten. Like myself, my kids are in Home Mode, where we just try to coexist peacefully until it is time to leave school. Of course, I am still teaching them to the best of my abilities, but their learning switch as been turned off, which is trying on my patience (READ: Somebody please buy me a stress ball before I use someone’s head). 12:20 marks the beginning of reading class, which I am always entirely too excited for, and which they loathe more than English.
I don’t blame them entirely. Reading is where we practice most of our writing. They are a little offended by this. Wouldn’t you be too, though? I can read the word LIAR being licked by hot flames in their eyes when I say, “OK time for reading class!” and do a little jig up to the board where I write “Plot and Resolution,” and then merrily add “What is the plot and conflict of ‘Awful Aardvark? How is the conflict resolved in the end?” When I turn around to face the wolves, I can see the fire flickering out, and then they quietly and hesitantly get to work. Oh wait, I forgot:
PLEASE WRITE IN COMPLETE SENTENCES.
I don’t know what will come of the world on December 23, 2012, but I imagine it may look a little like my classroom after I drop the Complete Sentence Atomic Bomb. The sky turns a dark green and purple, cliffs fall into the sea as easy as sand being pulled into the ocean, the sun reels us in so close that we are whipped by it’s flares, and Pat Robertson gets a bid for the presidency. After that madness, a few of my kids slam their heads on their desks and angrily erase the beginning of their incomplete work.
“You’ll thank me for this later,” I assure them. But I know that they are nine-year-old kids and “later” means 4:00 at home playing their Wii, or tomorrow when they can’t decide to use their orange or purple marker to number their spelling test. Eventually they will look back on this formative fourth-grade year and think, wow, that Ms. O’Donnell sure did us a solid for always making us write in complete sentences. For now, it is their job to dislike me as they commiserate about schoolwork. Hell hath no fury like a fourth-grader scorned.
The last and most strange and interesting class of the day is TEAH, which stands for Technical Education, Agriculture and Health, and which most conveniently, I know nothing about.
At Day-Star School, there is no curriculum, which is equally frustrating and liberating. Luckily we have textbooks for every subject. So while, I have absolutely no idea what to teach my students, the books do, so I follow them like a Rabbi with his Torah. The only class that does not have a textbook is TEAH, and so I am writing its curriculum on my own.
This is hard because of two reasons. 1. It is the last class of the day and my students could give two shits less about what I say 2 . It is extremely difficult to keep 30 nine-year-olds occupied without resources. I’m trying very hard though going over things like the different parts of the body and the food pyramid and the five senses, but getting them to understand me is like getting my friends to understand my love of the band Phish, impossible and heartbreaking.
(Author’s note: If you would like to understand my love of Phish, listen to their album Billy Breathes or any one of their live Hampton Virginia shows. Also, if that isn’t enough you can watch the documentary Bittersweet Motel.)
Sometimes in TEAH I, gasp, give up, and we do homework, or have guided discussions, which the kids seem to enjoy. In eighth grade in Portsmouth Catholic Elementary School we were given a class like this called, Creative Writing. Being the novice writer that I was, I was over enthused to begin this class, until I learned it was to be taught by our gym teacher, Ms. Patty. Ms. Patty, the woman who made us dance to Richard Simmons on perfectly sunny days. The woman who watched in delight as our history teacher made us run laps for every question we got wrong on our midterm.
The first class of creative writing that year began and ended with us stapling Ms. Patty’s personal papers and my heart breaking. I don’t remember the rest of our time in that class, and probably for a good reason. I know sometimes I may get lazy at the end of the day, but I’ve promised myself I would never leave them with the kind of memory that I have of wanting to learn and having that want denied. I promise to never make 4B staple papers against their will.
The bell rings at 2:20 and my kids walk quietly out of the door in a single-file line until they are sure they are out of my view. Then I hear their screams and their feet hitting the pavement as they run to their buses. I sit at my desk and for a moment it is very quiet and still. I look at their empty desks and collect my breath and my thoughts and their art projects. I don’t know how I’m going to leave these kids at the end of the year. I’ve come to know their senses of humor, the way they write their names, how their faces scrunch when they are confused, and what they dream of being when they “grow up.” I want to be there when they “grow up,” and I want to laugh about the time Nathalia put her feet behind her head, or when a giant white horse interrupted our meditation session in the grass with the loudest neigh any of us have heard. But this year will come to an end and so all I can do is teach them as best and as well as I can now and hopefully they will remember how to indent a paragraph and the importance of planting trees.
“Hola Mees,” says the limpiadora with her broom and mop. I gather my things and head out.
“Que tengas un buen día,” I smile back as I skip down the stairs to start planning our adventure for next week.
Sunday, October 31, 2010
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