"Like Treating AIDS Patients"

So my time at Edison has come to an end--for now.  I will be back there full time in the Spring, so expect more musings about Edison Middle School then.  Starting in January I will be teaching a class at Edison High School.  "Edison" is, of course, a pseudonym for the school I will be working in.  Edison Middle and Edison High aren't even in the same town; they are in different school districts and have very different reputations.

I wanted to share one final meditation on my fall time at Edison Middle.  It is pretty obvious from looking back at what I've written so far that Laura and are not really a good philosophical match.  When I think back about what I find so difficult about sharing classroom space with her I start to marvel about how little she appears to like children; she seems to be driven by a desire--perhaps a perceived need--to control their every motion.  She has said on a few occasions that her best training for working with middle school kids was training horses.  I haven't been able to get to know Laura well enough to figure out where that need for control comes from--and it's not really my place to do so.  On a few occasions a kind of self-reflectiveness has come through, and she has said things like "maybe I just need to get over my control issues," but such awareness hasn't translated into compassion for the kids.

What's interesting to me is that I am capable of giving the benefit of the doubt to the kids, but I have a hard time doing so with Laura.  I have long believed that everyone is best served when you assume best intentions, but her apparent animosity towards the children--her apparent desire for them to behave like adults--has made that very challenging.

This wasn't what I meant to write about.  I meant to say that though Laura and I didn't really click, Rosaria (the ELD teacher) and I did.  In fact she and Laura may be the opposing sides of a very sad coin.  If Laura is strict and controlling to a fault, Rosaria might be accepting and permissive to a fault.  I'm thinking of all times that Miguel came in and boasted about getting "level twos" (referrals for bad behavior) or telling stories about brother or his parents and shifted the conversation away from learning language.  I'm thinking of all the mothering she did for him, which he was clearly asking for, but which might not have been what he really needed.  Miguel strikes me as an exceedingly charming young man, a storyteller with very weak academic skills, who uses his charm and his storytelling to get by and to avoid doing what really must be done.

I shared my sense of Miguel with Rosaria the other day, and she nodded.  And then she said: "You know, Gil, working with these kids in these [ELD] classes is a little bit like treating AIDS patients.  Sometimes I feel like it's my job just to make them comfortable, to keep them alive a little longer.  I know where the road goes, and it's pretty bleak for most of these kids.  But while I have them here..."

She sort of trailed off.  We shook hands.  I left the classroom I shared with her and Miguel and Brenton (the most cheerful child I have ever met who is failing all of his classes), and walked across the hall to Laura's room and noticed that, in the week or so that I had been away, the little clusters of desks had found their ways back into orderly rows.