Fear

Last week ended when my principal sent me home early, to recuperate after a physical assault from a student. I’d spent my planning period before that in the boardroom, reporting something I can’t even describe in public. The evening before a mother had told me to “call 911” on her son next time he acts up—she’s done. I’d watched a kid carried down the hallway between two police officers, screaming that he hates our school, I’d been called a “b” and an “f-ing b” by a kid showing off to her friends and a kid mad about the application of consequences, I’d found out one student is pregnant and another punched in the face by bullies and frightened to come to school, and I had a student escape back into the classroom five times after security carried him away.

I woke up this morning and spat out the remains of my tooth guard. It’s my second one since January, and last night my molars sawed it in two. I moved my tongue around a second, slowly tasting the sharp tang of my fear. 

All week long the tension had built. All week long my jaws had ached from grinding, my head held sharp darting pains, and I wondered if the nausea I felt came from the flu or my churning emotions. I didn’t want to go back today. To an environment which is so unlovely, so disgustingly loud and dirty and unpredictably nasty and vexatious to the spirit. I was afraid of something. Of myself, more than anything. Of not being enough. Not holding it together. Not giving my best, any longer.

But today was fine. My classes rolled evenly along. Students were about as they ever are, roller coasters of teenage hormones propped up along cliffs of poverty and drug crime. Sometimes silly, sometimes sweet, sometimes selfish. My fear vanished the second they walked in and were their regular old selves.

Yalush, they're sunset, okay?

I am trying, you know, to see what my students can be brought to do for themselves. But also, right now, at this particular moment, I am trying to survive. I am taking notebooks deep into the woods to sit beside streams (and surprise passing little children into waves, since they are the only ones curious enough to look down by the riverbed) and write out the anguish of my children’s lives, to write my anger into compassion and the wall of defensive indifference that has sprung up around me into open arms of caring, as best I can. 

It’s the Dream 

Olav H. Hauge

It’s the dream we carry

that something wondrous will happen

that it must happen

time will open

hearts will open

doors will open

spring will gush forth from the ground–

that the dream itself will open

that one morning we’ll quietly drift

into a harbor we didn’t know was there.

Det er den draumen


Det er den draumen me ber på


at noko vidunderlig skal skje,
at det må skje

-
at tidi skal opna seg,


at hjarta skal opna seg,


at dører skal opna seg,


at kjeldor skal springa

-
at draumen skal opna seg,


at me ei morgonstund skal glida inn


på ein våg me ikkje har visst om.