I have this little boy in my class. He’s nine years old. He has deep dark skin and a
huge white smile. It takes up half his face. He is pencil thin and I can fit my thumb and
forefinger around his wrist. I think he’ll get a baseball scholarship for college. At least I
tell him that every day. He says-OK I can do that.
He’s a smart kid but when he gets upset he regresses into this hurricane. I’ll be in the middle of teaching a math lesson and he’ll be acting up. The boy says he has a demon inside him that comes out after lunch. I told him to tell the demon to go take a nap.
Anyway, sometimes this side comes out and I have to scold the boy. I’ll take his recess or say that I’m going to call the security guard (that's our form of a social worker in the inner city).
I’m trying to teach him to walk away. It’s a hard thing to teach kids who live in the inner
city. How can you walk away? If you do, you may end up beat up or dead? So when he gets upset
he’ll pick up a chair and at times throw it on the floor. Or the boy will slam open the classroom
door and throw himself down on the hallway floor and cry. The tears stream out of those
little brown eyes like there is a hidden well inside him waiting to find its way out.
It worries me seeing him cry like that. That smile is so big and to see those kinds of tears,
well it’s a strange contradictory of sorts.
Today he comes up to me and lays his body on the desk.
–Get off the desk, I tell him. –Go do your work.
He likes to be dramatic. I think the boy believes he’s on stage half of his life or something. There is an audience and he likes to entertain.
It’s the end of the school year & I’m getting tired of telling my students to go do their
work. It gets really old, especially when you can’t help but think how nice it is outside.
So I’m a little more irritable than usual.
–I’m not kidding. Go do you work. You’re driving me nuts.
I'm a first year teacher and learning how to communicate with children effectively.
He sits up, -Give me a snack MS. O, please give me one!-looking at me & blinking his long eyelash eyes.
-I don’t have snack today.
Most days I bring the kids snacks. We pass them out sometime between the first bell and lunch. They don’t get enough breakfast & it’s a quick remedy to get them motivated.
He takes his worksheet and starts shredding it. I'm not amused, instead feeling exhausted. Nothing
phases me anymore. He takes the corner of the paper and rolls it into little balls and sticks
them in his mouth and begins chewing.
–What are you doing, I ask.
I am blank and unblinking.
–I’m eating paper, he says.
I’m at my wits end and feeling much older than 22 at that moment, but he looks so tired sitting there popping those little balls of paper in his mouth. So I ask him when he last ate.
-Yesterday at lunch he, he says.
-What about dinner? I say.
-We don’t have any dinner for awhile, he says chomping close to my face.
-Mom lost her wallet. Somebody took it and she got her money in it. So we only have
fifteen bucks til pay day.
He looks at me then like I’m a kid and he’s trying to teach me something.
-Payday aint til next Friday Ms. O.
I say to him, -Well you have to have something in your fridge. Tell me exactly what you
have in your fridge and we’ll think up something you can make.
-There’s nothing. Really I gots nothing in the fridge.
He chews his paper wads slowly. The boy is very matter or fact about it all. It’s like
somebody telling me about a friend they knew who got their house caught on fire.
Tragic yet forward. It is what it is. Kind of thing.
-But don’t worry, he states- the other night I told my mom I’m taking out the garbage and I walked
down to CVS to meet my uncle. He gave me twenty bucks. I bought her a wallet. It was a dollar so I
had fifteen left.
He stops and he’s thinking -Wait no the wallet was five and so I had fifteen left..yeah…that’s right.
The boy smiles that big white smile at me then; I laugh.
-So I take that extra change & I put it in the wallet and I gives it to my mom. I give it to her on Mothers Day.
-I smile big at him and pat his head.
-I’m proud of you. I say it a few more times because this is how you have to be with these
kids. You have to say get to work ten times, but you have to say I’m proud of you twenty
more because its even harder for them to get that.
-What did she say when you gave her that, I ask.
-She says, thanks and she was happy and then she said, ' I can’t worry about always
feeding you, first I have to make sure I feed me and this baby.'
He pats his belly like so. His mom has one inside her. I don’t ask about the dad. There is no need
to.
–Yeah she does need to make sure that baby grows huh, I reply.
He nods then and smiles. He gets it- this kid. I find that teaching has humbled me.
How I admire a child of a mere nine years.
Sometimes he comes up to me and gives me a hug in the middle of my lesson.
I'm about to tell him he should sit down & keep his hands to himself in a polite teachery way.
But he hugs me so tight, right there in the middle of teaching, subtraction with regrouping, that I just let him hold onto me for a moment. Then he goes back to his desk and does his math problems.
Once in awhile I ask the boy, -Why do you hug me so much?
Because, he states with eyes deep as canyons, - I need a hug.
I nod, then.
Don’t we all.
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