Essays, Etc.

Elementary, Etc.

During my first year of high school, I volunteered at my old elementary school. I signed up to help my fifth grade teacher, and after I filled out all the paperwork that said that, no, I wouldn’t try and kill or kidnap the kids or, God forbid, tell others about their grades, I was accepted.

I have always enjoyed working with children, or at least being around them. I find them amusing, and extremely honest. Of course, I only like it when they’re honest about things that a) I care about, and b) don’t involve me. If it involves me I hate the little asshole for the rest of their life.

So when a kid told me that I looked “stupid” in my “stupid shirt” (which was an awesome shirt- it had the Ghostbusters car chasing the ghosts from Pac-Man), I reminded him that, on that particular day, I was grading his “stupid journal” which was worth “fifty stupid points.”

Then he shut his "stupid face."

But no, that wasn’t enough. I wasn’t going to let some stupid little asshole get the better of me, even if he was only eight. I marked him off for the most trivial shit I could find. Too much space before the period and the last word? Marked. Too high off the line, or too close to it? Marked. Misspelling a tough word? Marked. Being an asshole for no reason to someone is perfectly nice to you? Marked.

I know this is ridiculous, and that he is a child, and I’m just being a dick and showing authority, but I didn’t really care at the time. I was teaching him a lesson, even though he’d never notice it, ever. But I was, and it would be ingrained in his brain somewhere:

“I was a dick to that girl and I got a bad grade.”

My teacher was only slightly better. The kids would drive her up the wall, and at the end of the day she would sink into her chair, swivel to face me, and mutter “Those fucking kids.”

I had never heard a teacher cuss before, and wasn’t expecting it from a teacher as sweet as herself; she was known around the school for being so kind to everyone. But I could see why she was so exasperated.

Whether it was when she was sitting, standing, or in the middle of teaching a lesson, there was always at least one kid asking her something or demanding she do something. I did the best I could to help the kids, but I’m basically inept myself.

Once a girl needed her to lift a chair off of a stack, because it was stuck. I came over to help, sure that I would shock her with my teenage strength, surely shoot fear into her heart.

“What if she uses it on me? She could probably throw me through a wall,” she would think, as I lifted the chair triumphantly above my head.

She would shut the hell up for the rest of the year, lest I use my muscles upon her.

“I’ll help you, sweetie.”

I came over, grabbed the chair, and lifted. Nothing.

The girl looked up expectantly.

“Heh, it’s really stuck, huh?”

“Yes. That’s why I asked you to help me.”

“Heh. Hehehe.”

I felt awkward, and felt even worse when I lifted it again and knocked the pile down.

At this point I had disrupted the lesson and every child was staring at me.

The teacher was trying not to laugh.

“Don’t mind me, just uh... Chair issues.”

The girl began to giggle at this point, and then I started laughing a little, too.

I stopped laughing when a little boy came over, picked the stack up, re-adjusted it, and picked the chair up and gave it to me.

“Um... Thank you.”

He shrugged.

“No problem.”

“You must be very strong.”

He gave me a look like “Maybe you’re just weak as hell,” and I took the chair and handed it to the girl. She didn’t know who to thank, so she thanked the both of us.

“You’re welcome,” I said, proud of my clear demonstration of management skills.

The boy just shrugged and walked off.

So the teacher had a reason to cuss. She just didn’t cuss at the person who deserved it most: me.

It got worse as, throughout the year, the children in her class kept beating the shit out of one another, and other students. She ran out of referrals within the first three months. To give you an idea of how bad that is, most teachers don’t even use half their referrals within the year.

I remember that one day, after the children left and we were grading and chatting, she looked up at me and went “Do you know what happened today?”

“No, what happened?”

“So I’m eating lunch, right? Just, you know, enjoying my sandwich. Then I get a call on the intercom to come to the office. So I go up there, and one of my girls is sitting in the principal’s office. I asked what happened, and the girl had hit another student for taking her milk. She hit her so hard across the face that she had to go home.”

“Wow.”

Ms. Thompson shrugged.

“Did I tell you about Jack?”

I wasn’t entirely sure which one was Jack, but I assumed that it may have been the asshole who said that my shirt was “stupid.” I hoped that he had gotten suspended for saying that to another kid.

“No.”

“So he bombs this test the other day, just completely fails it.”

Things were looking up.

“His mom calls me, and kept complaining to me about how Jack was upset and asking why I failed him. I said that he did poorly on the test, and that if she wished to talk to me it’d be better to email or, God forbid, come in, because I was on my lunch break at the time. She said she was too busy to come in, and since she was already on the phone with me she wanted to ‘deal with it now.’ So she basically told me to give him a higher grade on the test, because he’d ‘do much better on the next one, [she] promises.’”

“So what did you do?”

She shrugged.

“I kept his grade where it was.”

I didn’t blame her; she had enough shit to deal with on her own. She was getting married, her father had recently passed away, and she was moving into her fiance’s home. The last thing she needed was to get argued with for doing her job.

If the volunteering stint did anything for me, it just made me pessimistic and touchy on the subject of the education system. Whenever someone asks me if the experience made me want to go into teaching, I laugh in their face and tell them that it did the exact opposite, and made me feel for every teacher I’ve ever had.

I think the most affecting thing Ms. Thompson ever did was on my first day of volunteering. We were alone in the room, and she was grading. I was sitting there twiddling my thumbs because I had finished my work, and she looked up at me and went “Shit. I forgot. Lock the door.”

I laughed.

“Why? Someone coming to assassinate us?”

“Close enough. Parents have a tendency of walking in whenever they feel like it. Thank God for locks.”

She got up, locked the door, and sighed in relief.

She sat back down and resumed grading, before looking up at me and smiling a soft smile.

“Now I just have to worry about my tires being slashed.”

As we sat in the room and I heard her pen slashing across the paper in violent movements, I imagined an enraged parent doing the same with a knife on her tires, not just angry at Ms. Thompson for failing her child, but mad at themselves for doing the same thing.