I’m going back.
Bags of
luggage and empty shoes rolled down the conveyor belt. I slipped off my
Airwalks and tossed them into a container alongside my coat and computer bag.
The routine was familiar. The buzz of the airport washed over me.
I’m going back.
Ten more
children would become a permanent part of my classroom in a week, pushing our
size to an impossible 34 kinders. Nothing new. They’d been in my classroom
already. I’d survived in the hopes that a new teacher would be hired. Now the change
was indefinite. No reinforcements.
When I
joined Teach for America a month before graduating college, I had dreams of
making a difference. Now, two days after Thanksgiving, it all seemed like a
joke. A difference? Making a fool of myself more like it. I felt as if I’d been
dropped in the desert with an empty canteen and three-dozen dehydrated
children. My job? Turn sand into water for the next ten months. The pressure
made me sick.
I walked
through security in a daze. Reality beat upon my head like a giant mallet
driving another fencepost into the ground of “welcome-to-the-real-world.”
Months of lonely disappointment echoed in my brain to a bitter and horrifying
cadence. “You can’t make any difference. You can’t make any difference. You
won’t make any difference.”
I found a
corner of the airport, buried my face in the knees of my jeans, and cried.
Two days
later I entered the cafeteria of my school and wanted to puke. Every morning
was the same. Chasing kids down, breaking up fights, and consoling tearful
children who’d been cussed out by their mamas. Or left standing in the cold for
an hour without a coat. Or forced to go to school covered in urine because baby
brother peed all over their shirt and grandma didn’t have the time. And I had to
teach them.
“I’m
sick.” The words came out of my mouth Wednesday morning, and I knew they
weren’t true. Not false. I did have a
cold. But not true. I was fine. “I think I might need to go fill this
prescription at Wal-Mart. I’ll come back if I start feeling better.” What the heck? I’d never told such a
deceptive lie in my life.
An hour
later I was on the road, driving away from school, away from kids, away from
pain, away from everything. My destination? The farthest Wal-Mart Supercenter I
could think of, located on the other side of the city, over 30 miles away, to
fill a prescription that I didn’t need for a cold that gave me the sniffles.
It didn’t matter that I’d stretched the truth. It didn’t matter that I’d
abandoned my kids. It didn’t matter that nobody was teaching them. I was
running away, and I knew it.
Walking through
Wal-Mart’s automatic doors and into the pharmacy felt surreal. The quiet hum of
normal people going about their normal business shocked my overwhelmed senses
like a splash of ice water in the Sahara. I scanned the faces of busy mothers
piling on groceries, a grandfather grabbing some extra batteries, friends
joking with each other, chatting about the day. Didn’t they know there was a
warzone 30 minutes north?
Feelings
are hard to describe when you’re asked to do the impossible and everyone acts
like it’s a simple thing. “Oh, you teach kindergarten? How cute.” I wanted to
scream. The world was a fog. Panic began to asphyxiate my breath as I finished my
ridiculous pharmacy trip, sat down in the driver’s seat of my car empty-handed,
and started up the engine. My heart plunged into darkness. I was driving back north.
There was no escape. I was going back. They were waiting for me, waiting for
that sandy canteen to spout water, and I didn’t know how.
I turned up
the music and blasted the speakers, anything to escape my desperation. Anything
to escape. Anything. But as I sped down the expressway clutching the steering wheel
in a white-knuckled grip, a voice, barely audible beneath the booming of the
stereo and pounding of my heart, whispered softly, “Aren’t you tired? Aren’t
you tired of running away?”
I turned
off the blasting music, and silence filled the car. And in the silence I heard
my voice yell out in sobbing tones barely recognizable, “GOD FORGIVE ME.” God
forgive me for running away. Forgive me for trying to escape. Forgive me for hiding
in the boat because I’m afraid to walk on water. Forgive me for my lack of
faith. Forgive me.
Twenty minutes
later, I rolled my car into the school parking lot and stared at the playground,
where a set of brand new slides and shiny equipment contrasted sharply with our
tattered building made in the 1950s. Government money meant we got a brand new
playground and Smartboards in every classroom, while state budget cuts meant
fewer and fewer teachers for a growing population of children.
Staring
out the window of my car, I began to realize that something was different. I
don’t know how, but something changed in that car, between the automatic entry
at Wal-Mart and the 60-year-old doors of my school, something that turned the
weight of 10,000 bricks into feathers. Something that turned the impossible
into a simple matter.
And my
classroom was never the same.
I turned
off the engine, grabbed my bag, and walked through the gate onto the
playground. My kids were at recess. A pre-k assistant was watching them in my
absence. They noticed my arrival immediately.
“Teacher!
Where’d you go?”
“I saw
yo’ car!”
“You at a
meeting?”
“Michael
been bad!”
How could
I run away? They were kids. They were my
kids. But somehow that didn’t seem right anymore. Could I really call them
mine? In the energy of the playground I heard a voice whisper, “They’re my kids.”
In some ways nothing changed. In some ways
everything changed. The same kids greeted me in the morning with all their
problems, griefs, and challenges. The same empty classroom greeted me in the
evening, trashed and torn to pieces, dirty walls pasted with learning
objectives never accomplished. But I wasn’t running anymore. I wasn’t escaping
a prison camp where my kids were instruments of torture. They weren’t my kids
in the first place. They were His. They weren’t my problems. They were my
calling. How could I run away from that? I’d be running away from God.
I turned
off the lights to my classroom that evening and said goodnight to the custodian
before slamming closed an ancient door that never locked no matter how hard you
kicked it. I kicked the door one last time, just to say I tried, then walked
through an empty parking lot to my car. Would I ever make a difference? Would I
ever see the change that TFA touts? Those horrifying words echoed in my head
once again, “You can’t make any difference. You won’t make any difference.”
But
somehow the words had lost their fright between the misery of the morning and
the solitude of the night. I kicked my car into drive and headed south. Things were different now. Or perhaps I finally saw how things had always been. How could I have been so blind? A voice hummed beneath the drone of my engine, "God makes all the difference. God makes all the difference. He will make a difference."
compiled from journal entries written November 24th - December 1st
