from The Wire: "Mr. P," on his first day in his 7th grade classroom. 

After the abrupt end of my career in dance, after a couple of years listless shuffling what was left of my deck, I went back to school to get a teaching certificate. Eventually I honed in on special education, with a focus on children with learning disabilities and emotional handicaps. Those were the kids that drew me in, their huge need matched my huge need to feel useful. My fifteen and some years of teaching started in Florida and ended abruptly in Maryland. Dunno. Rugs get pulled, eh?

My first teaching job was in a special education center in Florida. I taught emotionally disturbed Kindergartners. The children had already run into big trouble in their pre-schools or regular Kindergarten classes and they were placed with us. The students, roughly evenly black and white, with a few Asians, a few Hispanic, qualified for free breakfast and lunch 98% of the time. Basically, they were all dirt poor.

“My” children were five and six and once they trusted me, they would let me teach them. In most cases, during the years I worked in this center, the children reached the first goal the school established for them: the student will be able to experience their environment with pleasure. When these children came to our center, they weren’t able to do that, and I felt like that was a damn shame. Here’s a poem:

Children, I will teach you.

We will make Green Eggs and Ham,

sing the alphabet in funny voices, celebrate

your good behavior with stickers and playtime,

watch The Red Balloon, dance on Friday afternoons.

Eric Carle, Maurice Sendak, A.A. Milne, Dr. Zeuss,

Ezra Jack Keats, Chinua Achebe, Beatrice Potter,

and their friends will join us and you will sit quietly,

soaking in poetry, pictures, and tales of wise animals, 

foolishness, kindness, impossibilities, and satisfying resolutions. 

My last teaching job was in a large middle school in Prince George’s County, Maryland, in a town half-way between D.C. and Baltimore. The school population was about 60% white and 40% black; the faculty was a fair mix of black and white, men and women; the children came from well-off families, getting by families, homeless families, and no family at all to speak of. When they were poor, more often than not, they came from a poverty of long standing in their family histories.

During my first year at that school I was a “co-teacher,” supposedly working in tandem with regular teachers, supposedly helping the kids with learning disabilities. The special ed students were in large classes meant to be “regular” education, but most of the other students were placed there because they had behavior issues that were deemed “incorrigible,” or were emotionally damaged or learning disabled, but undiagnosed. Chaos reigned. I tried to teach and now and then I felt like I had taught someone something useful, but most nights I left the school feeling utterly frustrated, lost, and depressed.

During my second year at the school, I taught (by myself, which was better) an “intensive” class of 7th and 8th graders language arts and social studies. Once I won the battle with the administration to get my class size in line with special education guidelines, we, the children and I, had a pretty good time and I think they learned. No, I know they did. But I messed it up by needing open-heart surgery in April of that year. I couldn’t return to that job, in fact I never returned to full-time teaching. 

I recently watched TheWire, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wire,

which originally aired from 2002 to 2008. I didn’t watch it then because, because… Wow. The story is about life in Baltimore, Maryland, but it could be about any city in our country that has poor neighborhoods, political corruption, problems in police departments, a shrinking middle class, children and schools in crisis. So, any U.S. city.  I spread the 60 episodes out sensibly over a couple of months, didn’t binge, because I could only take one or two episodes a night and not every night. Some nights I felt weak. Every American should watch The Wire from start to finish, I think. That won’t happen, of course. Some Americans would rather be shot; for others watching The Wire would never occur to them, simply wouldn’t be in their radar; and for many Americans there would be no opportunity and anyway it would be redundant because they are living it, know the scenes all too well. The fourth season brings a group of middler schoolers into the story and I followed them living out their plot lines with recognition, rage, heartbreak, and in one lone case, joy. Okay, I am, “to the depths of my being” one of the tribe who think this series brilliantly written— accurate, perceptive, and brutally honest, but the thing about the series that both broke my heart and cheered me up the most was that in the final season they zoomed in on the children. We all need to zoom in on the children. Until we do that, we will get nowhere. We can have “conversations” (Jeez louise, I’m sick of hearing about conversations) until we exhaust ourselves, but we can also do things differently so that poverty doesn’t beget poverty, and a zip code doesn’t get to say it all about a child’s chance in America. Let’s finally do as much as we can to help every child thrive and see if that doesn’t help all of us. We need to nurture the roots of us. And yes, I’m a Democrat.

What exactly is a Well-Regulated Militia in 2012?

What exactly is a "well-regulated militia" in 2012?

Who needs protection in this country, the world, if not the innocents? Those children hadn't even lived a decade.

White Star-Gazer Lily symbolic of sympathy, purity, hope

I'm in the 6th decade of my life. I've lived a full, incredible, sad, joyful, foolish, and useful life. I've gotten to go places, do things, love and be loved as a child and as an adult. I've been a giver and a taker.

I've never needed to own a gun. And here I am! I have been frightened by guns, though. The "D.C." snipers killed their first victim only a mile from me. And there was a more private time when a gun owner scared me badly, both for his sake and my own, because he...no. I won't tell that story here. I ran far away from that person and stayed away from him and his guns.

Did you read "In Cold Blood?" They were all asleep, weren't they? I could reread it and get my facts straight, but I won't today. I'm sadder today than I was yesterday. Why is that, I wonder? 

I used to be a Kindergarten teacher. Emotionally disturbed kids. I taught older children, too, who were also handicapped one way or another. Not "right" for some reason. I was happiest with the youngest children, because when I tried to help the little ones, I felt like they still could be helped...

You know what else? I would have lunged at the killer on Friday and been killed myself. Like that principal, that psychologist, those teachers in Sandy Hook Elementary who died. I've no doubt that I would have done the very thing those adults in that building did. It is in your blood when you teach little ones. Keep monsters from hurting them or die trying? It has come to that.

Do we really differ so much, that some of us think we need to carry concealed weapons, buy assault weapons, keep weapons in our homes, locked away from our children or, in too many cases within their reach one way or another? 

If a killer comes into my home with a gun, will he give me time to unlock the gun safe and get my own gun? Do we all need to have guns so that we are all safe from people who have guns?  That's the right to bear arms extended to everyone, isn't it? We can all shoot each other, then. Is that a well-regulated militia? Who will protect who? I'm, like so many of you, so sick of this national insanity. 

And something else: there is profit for people who make these weapons. They exploit the paranoid and selfish. Profit. Money, money, money. Trumps decency every time, it seems. Out there in the world; the big bad world. Come on. Really. Does it have to be like that?

Seasonal Poem                        




I will write your mother's name
and your name on a list,
make a folder for your family,
put it with the other thirty-four.
We can go to fifty.
One morning in December,
your mother and maybe your father
will go to K-Mart and shop for your Christmas.
I'm glad I could do this for you, child.
This writing down names. This easy work.

I used to teach you (children much like you)
to count pennies, sing funny songs, move like an elephant,
line up when you hear the bell, speak one at a time.
Together we had Mother Goose, Beatrix Potter,
the old tales from the old countries,
Maurice Sendak, Ezra Jack Keats, Eric Carle.
Piglet had a high voice and Eeyore had a low one.
I'm no longer the adult on the playground with you-
on guard against trouble, giver of time-outs,
hugs, thumbs-ups, stickers. ( Could I even give hugs, today?)
I was always in awe of you. I was always exhausted.

Now, because I can, and want to, and should have done
something before but didn't because and because and because,
I've become a volunteer in a small office on Thomas Drive.
Everyone who helps out (we hook people up
with donated money) speaks in an inside voice,
tries to follow the rules, washes their hands and coffee mugs.
Seemed simple to me, at first, but it isn't.
Flimsy trailers are hell on electric bills.
I don't make decisions. I keep records, fill in forms,
and I work on the Christmas list.