i can’t picture giving up on these kids or any kids, but i guess if you burn out for long enough you smoke out whatever hope you clutched close like an open flame in your palm. like it’s either going to burn too hot and burn you to bits, the caring the empathy the fucking how can i help you how can i pluck you out of suffering how can i help you be safe lights up your chest and suffocates you and you’ll have a fucking breakdown or maybe you’ll get tired of inhaling the smoke day after day after day and finally give up.
like, i’m trying to picture a scenario where i wouldn’t care if a student came in with a black eye or was crying in the corner or who reeked of cat piss but look;
it hasn’t been an easy year, and it’s only October. And teachers will say every month is the hardest month, except maybe september. But october really sucks. The time when the shiny honeymoon of new school year fades and a pile of emails from admin are unanswered and we don’t have enough desks and when they chip away at our prep periods and tell us that yeah we might get shot and give us a five gallon bucket for kids to poop in if we have extended lockdowns and also when parents tell us we’re the problem and we’re corrupting the youth with a sinister conspiracy of subtle rhetoric to pull children into a cult whatever the fuck wokeness means. schoolboard meetings seem like fucking WWE steel cage matches
but i think what keeps me going is how fucking lucky i feel that i’m not a 13 year old in 2024. I mean jesus christ the shit these children have to deal with: a constant onslaught of needing approval and bullying and it never stops and this algorith seems designed to rip them apart and half of them don’t know what a noun is and half of them can’t sit through a video thats over 2 minutes long and half of them seem to communicate explicitly in tik tok memes and i know these seems like a blathering luddite or another reactionary but i’m the kind of kid that would have withdrawn and spent hours talking to an ai characterbot or lock myself in a room to play fortnight for 12 hours a day
This is may sound like an adult sounding a false alarm but it seems collectively like we’ve given up on them, the covid kids, the kids who had the very basic formative years not in a kindergarten classroom but in their living room and maybe others are giving up but i can’t do that.
Student, if i can’t pluck you out of the trailer with the tarp for a roof maybe i can make this classroom a safe place to be for 49 minutes a day who the fuck cares if you don’t know that a verb is an action word. just keep the flame lit.
just keep the flame lit, and i’ll try to help you carve a home in this husk of a world. so if you’re a 13 year old in the corner sleeping through a lesson, even if it’s because you spent all night playing roblocks, i’ll wake you up, sure, but i guess it’s an honor you felt safe enough to fall asleep in my room.
Student, if you take nothing from this, just keep the flame lit. keep going. it will fall into place. And teacher, if you take anything from this, keep the flame lit. it’s only october. keep the flame lit.
