*reflections on teaching* year 2

II.
Did I Sign Up For This?
second year

As a new teacher, there is shock the first time you hear it. All educators have dealt, at some point, with the assumption, the stereotype that we’re in this field for the money and the summers off. My first time was my own mom, remarking that it must be nice to get a paycheck, even when you aren’t working. She used to make remarks like that, anyways. Then she watched me live through my second year of teaching. That year is my own personal answer to those types of comments.
Through a combination of some spectacularly horrible scheduling and my second-year naiveté, I was convinced that it was a good idea to have a majority of the special education students from our grade level included for science and social studies in my general education classroom. To defend my second-year self a bit, kindly recall that my first year was spent crammed into the tiny, overheated corner room, trying not to step on twenty-eight fifth graders. When I heard the number eighteen – eighteen! – general education students for the first four hours of my school day, the fact that these four special education students would join the rest of us for the afternoon’s lessons didn’t seem all that important.
And so, I got them. Justin was the mildest, an emotionally impaired kid who tried to be sneaky, but just wasn’t; Bobby, severely learning disabled, but easy going – well, easy going right up till the day when mom was jailed for her fourth DUI and anger leaked into the classroom; Tim, autistic, but shockingly communicative, often depressed, prone to chair tossing and self-injury; and Michael, severely learning disabled and emotionally impaired, able to spell his name on a good day, prone to screaming shortly before he began tossing desks, chairs, and stripping posters from the wall.
I don’t believe those eighteen general education kids gained much academically that year. My afternoons were spent corralling them out of anger’s way, striving to captivate children with talk of simple machines and Core Democratic Values while their classmates were forcibly removed by up to three other adults.
But the defining moment of that year, the story I tell the cynics, isn’t one of those violent removals, awful as they were. It is instead, a scene that was played out in one hundred eighty different ways; yet on this day it stopped me dead in my tracks and forced me to ask the hard question: Can I possibly find the strength to do this for the next twenty-five years?
There is the typical hum of a class lining up. It’s gym day; glasses are snapped into their cases, locker doors are slammed as tennis shoes are retrieved. I check to see who’s still tying those shoes, and who’s taking advantage of the moment to engage in a little mini-party with friends. In that moment, as my attention is focused elsewhere, two meltdowns occur. Michael has lost his pencil, and is convinced someone has stolen it. Rather than alert me, he’s decided to do his own detective work. This child – in a body larger than my own – is tromping from one end of the line to the other, lifting my kids by the shirt front and screaming, “Give me my pencil, NOW!” In the split second that my eyes are following Michael, they shift focus to Tim. He’s curled up in a corner, head keeping a steady rhythm on the brick wall as he chants, “I wish I were dead, I wish I were dead.” Life slows for a moment as I think, “Kid who’s endangering others, or kid who’s endangering himself?”
I couldn’t tell you what the answer to that question was. What I can tell you is that they did make it to gym, late as usual, and that my meager planning time was spent dealing with the aftermath of meltdowns one and two. And I can tell you that some variation of this story played itself out nearly every day in my classroom that year. But somehow I made it – somehow we made it – and I found I had more in me than I knew was there. And my mom? She’s so busy being grateful that I’m not living in her spare room, scanning other people’s groceries at the food market that she doesn’t have time to comment on the amount of time off in my year. She now understands that having the summer off isn’t about a lovely, extended vacation. She understands that it’s about recuperating from twenty-some energy-zapping individuals so that you can bear the thought of walking into a classroom again for another nine months.