the stakes (september)

Here I am again. So many of that sentence, though, are changeable things: for I and Here are never ever anything again. At least I hope that's true, because this is my second year as a teacher & there are so many things I want to do differently! There is a kind of confidence I didn't feel last September, but it's difficult to hold onto alone in this quiet room, so different from the space I'll inhabit for the next nine months. The closest I come to knowing who I am for real is when I am in front of with these kids, which is also the closest I come to forgetting myself entirely.

School starts tomorrow. For most of my students, this is a good thing. These are children for whom "summer" does not mean camp & lazy days, but hot tempers & dangerous hungers & nowhere to go. Summer means accidents, & tragedy. This weekend, an incoming freshman on the swim team - one of the "good" kids - was shot in the neck & will be, at best, paralyzed. These are the stakes. & yet how can they be, when they are also that absolute absence of stakes, that space beyond my control, those 16 other hours in the day when I cannot save them. Being a teacher is so much about control. Having it, & knowing where you do not have it, letting that go.

At some point I realized that I can't save them. That is, I cannot swoop down like a terrible angel & save them from this traumatic, ugly thief of a world. I can only create a space for critical thinking & dialogue & love & engagement - a space of beauty & radical possibility - in which they become capable of saving themselves. I cannot date this realization because it is something I have to remind myself again & again.

Today, for instance. I have to, because tomorrow 150 other children will be clambering into my heart all desperately in need of saving.
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P.S. I hope to allow myself more time this year to write here regularly, so keep in touch.