Waking Up With Meaning and Purpose

I'm not very good at waking up any other way

Even though I’m exhausted, even though the kids were off the wall, even though I just spent a lot of money to fix my ancient car and I’m not 100% sure this will fix it all, it was still a good day.

Seventh and eighth grade are formative years. For some, they are the difference between getting into a good high school or not, setting down the path toward a good college or a great one, or learning how to fit their own particular personality into a social group where they feel they belong… or not.

For some, seventh and eighth grade are the difference between life as a productive citizen and jail.

It’s pretty stark in the places where I’ve taught. Where I taught full time several years ago, I watched my wonderful, sweet, relatively happy eighth graders go from having tons of promise at the beginning of the year to joining gangs by the end. It was depressing. I did all I could to try to show that there were better ways, but some times we are just up against too much.

The kids I teach now have more advantages, and I love the school. The administration is incredibly supportive. These kids still face huge challenges, that I believe they can overcome. The inertia of urban poverty casts a shadow of dysfunction that is hard to escape, even with involved parents, dedicated teachers and great administrators. You have to fight it, every minute of every day. It’s like Mordor or something. A dark cloud that follows you if you don’t fight it.

I teach kids that copying each others’ papers is wrong and will get you a 0. I teach that in school we have to actually do work. I teach that we have to learn to be quiet from time to time. I am very direct with my students about the fact that we are learning how to behave so that we can eventually get good jobs to provide for our families. How much does it sink in? I’m never sure, but I can tell they know I mean business.

A Substack author I read who is a professor of anthropology once said that teaching is a bullshit job. I told him off, relatively politely, in the comments. We matter in these kids’ lives, and we can give them stability that they don’t get elsewhere.

Most of my life I have had jobs where I knew I was making a difference in some corner of the world. As a union organizer or working in harm reduction, I certainly knew what I did mattered. I seem to need to directly connect with the product of my work. And when you teach urban kids, there is nothing indirect. Pro-social behavior, following the rules, doing the work, all lead almost immediately to getting into a good high school and even college. The other paths are too terrible to imagine my sweet little kids going down.

Yet I do imagine them. When I look at my students as they are doing the various things they do, I sometimes remind myself that I am one of the things standing between them and jail. There are others that matter more, to be sure, but teachers have a great deal of influence. With everything I do I have to show them that I care about them and that I care enough to enforce the rules, not just blow off the day and let them do whatever they want.

They crave the structure, even though they think they don’t.

It’s wonderful to have my own students again and to be able to dig in with them for the relatively long haul. I wish I had them longer, but I’ll make the best of the time we have.

Meanwhile, I’ll figure out how to work in more exercise, more meditation, and trying to do the things I need to do to stay healthy, even though I’m so exhausted by the end of the day that I just want to curl up and go to sleep.

I’m off to pet cats at the shelter… howling, biting at times, but ever cats. Same as the kids. There are no bad cats and there are no bad kids. There are just cats and kids who need more love and attention, and seconds of cat food.

I’ll be sure to keep the cat food to the cats. Feeding my students cat food would be too far off the beaten path, even for me.