Teaching

For one of our graduate classes, we're reading a book with a story about Josh, a middle school student who cuts himself, and the question is posed, “how can a student concentrate on English or algebra when he feels unloved at home and unsupported by his parents.“ I was thinking about this comment while I was washing dishes tonight, after having listened to some political heads on some news channel discussing potential policies of the presidential candidates as it relates to education. I began to wonder how much good that money is doing for kids like Josh and many kids in my class who feel unloved and unsupported at home. I wondered how different the results of these efforts would be if the government stopped giving money to traditional education programs. What if they took that money, those hundreds of googledillions of dollars (I am pretty sure a googledillion does not exist, but since millions and billions do not make sense to me because they are such ungraspable numbers, people may as well start saying “googledillions”—at least that sounds fun) and put them towards programs that worked at the root of our problem in education. Hunger, abuse, sickness, neglect. To me, it is not that kids are dumb or cannot learn, but that they have bigger things to worry about than studying for their spelling test on Friday. Be it broken families, broken hearts or broken bones, these struggling students are struggling because school is not their life; life is. What if those googledillions of dollars went to programs designed to help people get jobs or pay for health care or do any number of things to help take the pressure off of these struggling families and help these kids not worry so much about living and helped them live a little? I think they would be more able to learn.
I met with our new counselor the other day. She had just arrived at our school; she had been hired this summer, but a condition of her employment was she was not going to be able to start work until this past week. She seems nice and she has been counseling for a number of years. I had heard from another teacher about a program the previous counselor helped to run. This counselor would pack up backpacks of food for certain students to bring home for the weekend, since many of these children receive most of their food from the free breakfasts and lunch the school provides, and do not have much to eat over the weekend. The new counselor told me she was aware of this program, and then gave me a list of all the counselor-y things she has to do. Give whole class counseling presentations. Meet with SST students. Worry about attendance issues. It was an impressive list, I am sure, and she added a caveat at the end of her to do list that if she could find some time later in the month, most likely October, she may be able to contact the food pantry. Even so, it would be a lot of work for her to get the food and pack the bags. I offered my own services to do the bidding, along with my class, the fourth grade as a whole and our whole wing of the school. I feel this type of program goes to the root of all the problems we see at school. I became a teacher because I want to help kids. These kids are hungry, they live with people who have other worries besides signing notes and selling cupcakes on Thursday nights and they need to eat. I feel like my babbling on about rounding numbers to the nearest hundred thousand is pointless to a lot of my students. I may as well be teaching them to round to a googledillion. The next line in the book reiterates why I want to teach. It goes to the heart of why I want to be in the classroom. The author says that maybe the best thing for a teacher to do is to listen to her student, as she may be the only one he opens up to. I want to be there for my students. I want them to learn but really, I want them to feel loved and to be nine and ten years old. If that means we, as a school, work together to make sure they do not have to have adult worries, like what they are going to eat on the weekend, so be it.