I am so sick of looking at their faces and theirs hands- awkwardly flipping book pages, as though there were navigating some foreign landscape- and knowing that it's not their fault, and knowing what they go home to at night. Read: It's not goddamn fair.

I dropped off one of my students at her house last night, after tutoring. A sweet girl, a little attention-hungry. Her mom reluctantly walked over to the car to meet me. She was holding a lit cigarette in one hand, and a giant can in the other, with the top popped, wrapped in brown paper. The lawn was scattered with beer cans, and the house itself was a broken-down trailer. I'm pretty sure that she's better-off in terms of home life than many of her peers. She lives essentially across the street from me- a one-minute walk. I live in a big brick house. The house immediately across the street from her is a giant southern-style almost-mansion, with expensive architecture, a front porch, and landscaping. I wonder what she thinks. This morning, I invited her to start coming over after school to do homework and make cookies or something. We'll see if it happens. And if it does, what happens when I leave?

The post-break low point is past, and now I'm thinking that I almost certainly want to teach next year, for the right reasons this time. I know that wherever I go will be Less than this, in every way. I don't want to go, anymore. I want to stay, but I already promised, and besides I know better than to think that staying here wouldn't destroy me. But who cares, it's one for hundreds, and I could do so much better than I am doing now. I can't write. I can't sort out what I could possibly have to say to this, can't sort out the inside things from the outside things because the because the outside things are bigger so expression is frivolous, but I can't turn off the inside things, which makes it worse.

I keep failing them (my kids), in both senses. I will work this weekend and try to plan some good lessons, but it feels like building sand castles at low-tide.

The G-ville (haha) soccer team won last night, against an experienced team of athletes. This was the infant team's second season, and I've watched their (teacher-corps) coach agonize over his team's struggles. In this place, with these kids, every defeat is a tragedy. (They already feel so defeated. ) While the experience alone more than makes up for it, last night was incredible.
Five minutes of beautiful in a thousand hours of maybe, or maybe someday. So worth it.

School Community

The pair of them, brother and sister, marked into my room for academic updates on their children. He asked about students I took to be his offspring, but I'm fairly certain that most of the students (and there were several) that were hers were only slightly if at all related to her. A giant of a boy who generally cuts up in my class, and had better things to do than take any of his nine weeks exams, smiled sheepishly and cowered beneath her glare. She is a regular substitute at the school. A few minutes later one of her charges confesses that he sometimes cries about how he doesn't stay with his mom, but a minute earlier three adults had commented about how lucky he was that someone cared enough to stay on him about his grades.

The inclusion teacher who regularly works with students in my class room took her pregnant goddaughter to the doctor, since she stays with the teacher now instead of her mother. The same teacher kids around with the kids like she is one of them, but they seem to respect her.

I had two parent conferences (of the five or six that showed for report card pick-up and wanted to talk) with other teachers in the district, one with a high school teacher watching out for her niece, and one with the daughter of one of our cafeteria ladies.

The teacher who teaches in the room next to me calls nearly all of the kids by nicknames. They treat him like a brother, and he has insights and access into their hearts and minds that I couldn't build if I spent the rest of my life here.

The students are the children of the faculty; if you need a phone number, or need to know if someone has a phone, or need to know what's going in someone's home life, or who they run with, or whether or not they were involved in the town-to-town fighting that went down over the weekend, you usually know who to ask. Most of the teachers are from the area (the rare exception being those of us who have intentionally come to critical needs areas) and most of them will never leave. There seems to be an unusual conception of parenthood around here; adults are universal parents, and children find parents wherever they may be found.

Sometimes I feel like I understand, feel surrounded and supported and responsible within the community, and know that I can do something here. Hours later I feel like an outsider and a fraud and helpless against the forces that dominate my students lives.

The school community, though close-knit, is not exclusive. There is a niche available if you are willing to open your views a little, and accept the niche that opens for you, including laughing at your own strange habits, like walking fast and talking fast and looking stressed and not eating fried chicken. Most important, of course, is that you care. That alone is the deciding factor between belonging to a community and visiting one. If you love the kids, if you celebrate and hurt with them, and fight for them, even and especially when they won't, then you are theirs. The school community belongs to it's children.

I was already crying when he hugged me, but in the embrace I just let go. Call it weakness; it felt so good to cry, to grieve out the stories (the kid's stories) that haunt every day and settle into a dirty haze that slowly darkens dreams. There is so much of it, and so much to do, that there is never any time to mourn, and without mourning, there is never any dawn, and there is never new light.

There is such release in abandoning the dishonesty that everything is OK.
Teaching in the Delta is like committing your heart to perjury. You pretend, based on some conception of strength, that there is nothing here you can't handle.

Before Mississippi, it is easy to believe that poetry is worth writing, a canvas is worth painting, a book is worth reading, a photo is worth taking. Before this we trust in our own competence and strength; it has, after all, always worked before. Enveloped in the false security of good home lives, loving families, close friends and strong academic backgrounds, it is easy to have faith in the beauty of living. Every minute is a canvas.

Once that illusion is broken, it is irreparable, and it takes time to get there. For months and months, you go into school, thinking you are going to fix everything, make it all better, amazed time and time again at the chaos and often tempted to complain about the disorder, the unfairness. Unlike your students, you were not raised with the inherent understanding that life is unfair. Through battle after battle, you march into school, winning some and loosing some, but still clinging to some faith that it will get better, that you can win this war.

When you realize just how deep the darkness really is, it threatens to swallow you. Poetry and art and even conversation require too much faith to even begin. You cannot fix this new world that you have stumbled into, and now that you know it exists, you can't go back to the one you came from. Suddenly, you are helpless. It's too hard to write, to focus on work, to wake up in the morning, to laugh and mean it.

I've been in a stage where I'm burnt out, heart broken, mentally filthy and damn near hopeless for my students. I've been day-dreaming about the future, thinking about next year, mostly because I've hit a wall here. I think about plans for next year because I am overwhelmingly guilty about all that I am not accomplishing with my students, and all that I don't think I can accomplish anymore. I stopped loving them. It feels like I'm watching them disappear a few at a time, until I've lost them all completely, and it is a battle of me against them, instead of me for them.

Crying tonight was like coming back to life. It's not OK. It's not going to be better. But we are accomplishing something, with some of our kids.

If there is one thing that makes this program possible, it is the other people. The only people who can offer comfort are those who understand, first hand. Thank God for friends.

Edit: One more thing. I do love them. That's why it hurts.