We staggered banged with terror through a million billion trillion stars

 How do you take a moment of total, resigned defeat, and turn it into a joke? That was the question that confronted me when I entered my trailer, chipper and refreshed, Monday morning after Thanksgiving. The handle of the door was gone, yanked completely off the trailer, with the inside handle flapping down, and I already knew what I wouldn’t find inside. Sure enough, the projector was gone, the cords hanging forlornly from the mount. My desk drawers were open, and the revolve tablet that the school gives to every teacher missing. Everything else was pristine. Well, if not pristine, at least how I’d left it before Thanksgiving.

Teaching without a projector is hard. It means no pictures, no movies, no pre-organized graphic organizers to fill in with whiteboard markers or instructions or jeopardy or lecture notes. My whiteboard handwriting is terrible—students can’t read it. As I reviewed all of the activities we do in class, my mood plummeted deep into the bluest shaft of resigned surrender. Teaching just got a lot harder.

I called the office to report the robbery, found out five other trailers had been broken into, as well, and began mentally playing my plans for the next few days: my standard students are playing their review games on development, then testing, my IB students writing reports in the media center. The projector won’t become crucial until Wednesday, when I will try to introduce new material to my students. The comfortable schedule we’ve built up, of copying the Title, page #, date, and Warm Up off the board, is gone. So is our organized note-taking, in which students only copy that which is bolded on the board. What do I have left?

Stations

·      Socratic Seminars

·      Essay-writing

·      Gallery Walks

·      Text-shares

·      Projects

·      Presentations

·      Skits

Well, that doesn’t look so different from my normal classes. The difference is that the presentation of material, which I used to accomplish via powerpoint before each of these activities, has just become much more difficult. I feel a wave of fatigue wash over me at the thought. 

6:56 am. My students would be coming through the door in two minutes. I set up the happiest, most upbeat music I could, plastered a smile on my face, and told students, laughing, that “someone had gone Thanksgiving shopping in our trailer.” The students were outraged, and the smile started to slide off my face, but then one of them said, "well, it is Black Friday," and a giggle built up in the classroom. Soon they were deep in detective work, analyzing the crime scene. Only one mentioned feeling as though someone had just bludgeoned through their education. And yet, whether or not they take it personally, their education just got one jot more difficult, and my outrage on their behalf is melted into a kind of exhaustion that can barely think about re-planning my week’s lessons so that they work sans projector.

a man who had fallen among thieves
by e. e. cummings

a man who had fallen among thieves
lay by the roadside on his back
dressed in fifteenthrate ideas
wearing a round jeer for a hat

fate per a somewhat more than less 
emancipated evening
had in return for consciousness
endowed him with a changeless grin

whereon a dozen staunch and leal
citizens did graze at pause
then fired by hypercivic zeal 
sought newer pastures or because

swaddled with a frozen brook
of pinkest vomit out of eyes
which noticed nobody he looked
as if he did not care to rise

one hand did nothing on the vest
its wideflung friend clenched weakly dirt
while the mute trouserfly 
confessed a button solemnly inert.

Brushing from whom the stiffened puke
i put him all into my arms
and staggered banged with terror through
a million billion trillion stars.