Do You Know...

Becoming a teacher, I realized the pitfalls of living with so many students early on in my younger days as a teacher's aide. It happens so often, you are pulled into the world by your heels, into situations you wouldn't find yourself, into neighborhoods you wouldn't go. A profession that interacts with people comes with one of the most primitive realizations of survival whether medicine, education, military, or any of the other social systems constructed to make society function.

There is death in everything, our food system, our families, our newspapers; no getting around it. It doesn't make it any easier to face, this commonality that links us together. Being a teacher comes with knowing death too often. At one time, it was rare to know of a student's death, and the reason was usually medical. Not here. Tragedy at your service.

How many now? Students that have been murdered that were once under my care and sit down, time to sharpen pencils is over. Making better choices is what you try to educate them with, teaching them how to negotiate socially, how to regard authority without reacting in violence, how revenge is not justice. Read, think, decide. Read, think, decide, discuss, look it up. That is what school mostly is.

Family dynamics, street ethics enter. Solutions are bullets and knives, "I just found it under the seat" said the assailant after he stabbed a boy who threw a carton of milk at the other's head in dispute. The victim was stabbed six times, and bled to death before he could be taken off the schoolbus. The boy was a good humored leader, a singer in his church choir, an achieving teen who threw a carton of milk. He ran into the instant power rush gotten through murder. Does the assailant ever think beyond the action? How do they think their life will go on? Do they imagine that the victim will reset, as in a video game, and rise again in onscreen resurrection?

Neglect comes into view. Children home alone, seven year olds left to watch many and much younger siblings. Fire. Can't get out. Matches, candles, furnaces, too near combustibles, faulty wiring, no one to lead them to safety, no plan to get out, balloon construction wooden housing. Drugs, alcohol, lead poisoning, brain wiring damaged in grandparents, parents, children.

In the paper today another one, she had gotten as far as her twenty-third birthday. House fire, boyfriend got out, she didn't. I see her second grade self, being mean to the other kids, picking on the nerdy ones, growing with abuse problems herself. She liked to write stories. She was crazy for animals. Alcohol problems in her teens. Family broken, arrested, drugs, shootings.

Katie.