Holes

When students punch holes in the school walls, we cover them up with extra posters from January’s 2^nd annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of Service. They are handmade, construction-paper-thin attempts to eclipse the least tasteful events of passing period. The posters are always slightly imperfect in shape, so that the veins in the cracked plaster poke out slightly along some edge, like peeking odd-shaped wounds beneath band-aids.  

There is a sense of feigned intentionality about the posters, as though they’re all meant as bits of quirky interior design, but thwarted by the positioning.  They’re hung a little too high, or too low, or slightly crooked. Sometimes the posters themselves are subtly trapezoidal, as if cut out by a kid, or a teacher who was tired. 

I assume the Ops Director merely saw the stack of posters one day and had the thought. Something about the grandiosity, given the circumstance, of commentary on human redemption seems like it is best explained as a byproduct of practical building-operations solutions. 

A few of the posters are in student handwriting, which is a nice touch.  But most are in the recognizable handwriting of the assistant principal, Ms. [assistant principal]. The loopiness is a dead giveaway to staff, the cursive l’s anywhere where straight lines should be:  the backbone of a capital R or the parallel edges of a capital M turned to narrow lassos. 

Everyone recognizes her handwriting because last fall in advisory, students listed their “Hopes for the Community,” and someone put them all the appropriate ones together on a bulletin board.  Five of the nine were written by Ms. [assistant principal], who moved from Central Square in Cambridge to the middle of Lawrence when the school opened, a well-intentioned blonde who gets some credibility from her intrepid Spanish.  In the center of the bulletin board is “walk or run somewhere without being called/yelled at,” the capital “I”s curly and self-disclosing.  Ms. [assistant principal] has alluded to yearning for an old hobby, running through the tree-lined streets of Cambridge.  

Yesterday there were two posters from the service day hanging in the “fatal funnel,” our wryly alliterative nickname for the part of the back hallway where students bottleneck into the girls’ bathroom. What act of violence could have rendered this white wall so vertically damaged as to need two of Dr. King's pleas for human goodness?

I learned later that [Student] lifted [Student] up by the neck and slammed him into the wall. He was back the next day, apparently unscathed.  Today, my students and I each learned a new word. Theirs: juxtaposition.  Mine: choke-slamming.  The bottom poster was to hide the twin leg-dents from [Student]’s thighs. 

Both posters were in student handwriting this time. “I have decided to stick with love.  Hate is too great a burden to bear.” And below, as if in expectation that funneling passerby would be still unconvinced:  “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that.  Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that. “ 

           

The incident infused an unfortunate additional layer of meaning into the title of Parker Palmer’s book, Courage To Teach, which I started reading this week in my search for certainty: am I really done working here? I don’t mean to imply that I’m afraid for my body. The atmosphere in this place has affirmed by own physical fragility, of course. But more selfishly, even, I fear that the literal impact of my effort is smaller than the symbolic worth of teaching forward through these posters and holes.    I’m not sure a symbol is enough for me anymore.

In reference to teachers for whom a sense of duty has quietly usurped a sense of passion, in reference to me, Palmer writes that “a vocation that is not mine, no matter how externally valued, does violence to the self- in the precise sense that it violates my identity and integrity on behalf of some abstract norm.”  

A Quaker once told me that violence is not the same as force.  Violence can take the form of inaction and even passivity.  Palmer writes, “when I violate myself, I invariably end up violating the people I work with.  How many teachers inflict their own pain on their students, the pain that comes from doing what never was, or no longer is, their true work?” (30). Could it be that my obedient act of walking through these doors every morning is somehow not unlike these disordered holes? 

The education reform movement is so fraught with military metaphor.  It doesn’t feel as odd as it should when our history teacher, who is in the Reserves, shows up to work in his military uniform and stands in the fatal funnel, at attention for bathroom duty.  This desensitization must stem in part from the rhetoric; urban teachers are “on the front lines.”

These three years that I’ve spent “in the trenches,” as they say, I’ve taught a little bit of reading, the instruction seemingly as insufficient as poster-board over plaster holes.  And I’ve tried to turn violence to obedience in those around me, but perhaps my own obedience has become an act of violence. 

Is it time to go? Only one Martin Luther King, Jr. poster was left in the stack to choose from for the latest hole. 

“Life’s most urgent question will always be: what are you doing for others?”

Damn.