"But use a feather when you hit me," their larger than life voices chanted.
My first teaching job was one replacing a well-known Chattanooga minister's daughter who'd given it her all for a year. The room I received was in a modified auditorium where a Special Education Class was the prior year. My classroom was separated from my team and the room had nothing but loads of junky furniture and files in it. I once heard a fellow teacher ask what page the other was on, and I was puzzled because the only books in my classroom were books I'd bought at McKay's. Inner city in Hamilton County was very different in 1998.
My first class of third graders is one I think of from time to time. Recently, I decided to look up some of the names from the roster on Google. Twelves of the fifteen boys' names that I could find had mugshots. Often what was shown as their "charge" in the mugshot stemmed back to something similar that they'd do in third grade...stealing, verbal assault, battery, etc. I thought that was a turning point of sorts, when I realized that what I'd done with the class in third grade didn't change their lives forever. It made me melancholy. As teachers, it is ingrained in us that we could be the change agent for children. I guess I never really let "could" resonate and I assumed that "could" really meant ARE. I kind of like to keep thinking the ARE because it helps me keep the focus.
There were many things that plagued me for the students. I would see the children enter the room in the morning and they'd pull out white little wads of paper from their ears when they came in the classroom. Finally, I asked one of the little girls why so many of the children had wadded up paper in their ears when they came to school in the mornings. She told me that they'd put those in their ears so that the roaches wouldn't lay eggs in their ears at night while they slept. So, there were things I couldn't even imagine dealing with and then being expected to come to school to try to learn.
One of the things I decided to try was to copy a Shel Silverstein poem to read daily each week so that they could at least "feel like they could read" until I could figure out how to really teach them to read. You learned how to inventory students for their reading level in college and how to write integrated units, but you never really learned how to teach a nonreader (or a room full of nonreaders) how to read. I came to find that much of the character education we needed in our classroom was found in the Shel Silverstein poems. I noticed that the discipline the children received at home was particularly strict, usually physical. That's when I found a poem about "Hitting" by Shel. I noticed the children would read the poems and really "feel" what the author was saying and that they'd recite the poems when they were upset or in transition.
We read our poem of the week each day for the entire year. By the end of the year, the children could...Read With Their Eyes Shut... ;)
Then, one Spring day, I walked in the room and the students were waiting for me. They were sitting together in their desks as though they'd been talking. Usually, I'd tell them all about the rule of waiting outside the door until I got to the room, but I could tell something was different. It was silent except for the occassional sniffle. One of the little girls, her eyes red and swollen from crying, got up from a seat where they'd all been sitting together, tossed her white ear papers in the trash, looked right in my eyes and said, "Mrs. B., you don't know do you? You don't know? He died. He is dead." One of the students who was trying to lighten the moment said, "I thought he was already dead, but now I'm sad, too." Fanny (the little girl) said, "Shel Silverstein died. We all heard about it this morning."
I don't think I realized until scrolling past a Shel Silverstein poem this morning on Pinterest, but that moment in May of my first year teaching was worth reflecting on. It's moments like that--when the real world collide with things you study that make you, as a teacher, know that what you do is so....real time. I wish all of my students went on to success all because of a Shel Silverstein poetry reading, but the 12 out of 15 statistic shows me that, unfortunately, that is not the case. But the 3 of 15 who didn't have a mugshot online....there's the hope, I suppose, that something made a difference, if not me or a poem, something along the way diverted the 3 from a path of hurt. We try, and that's all we can do, is try.
