The danger in caring

“Why don’t you just leave me alone?” he [Tomaso] asked. His voice was very soft and he raised his eyes to me. “Why are you always looking in me?” I saw his hand close around the scissors and lower them. “I wanted to hate you. Why wouldn’t you let me? Why wouldn’t you just let me be alone?”

[…] I was overwhelmed. The question of questions he had asked me. What right did I have to make him care about a world that did not care about him? For every child I saw, for every child I touched, that question was there. And he had not been the first to doubt my wisdom in it. For me the sorrow came in having no answer, in never being quite sure that the pain I gave was better than the pain I relieved.

-Torey Hayden, Somebody Else’s Kids

This scene follows an attempted attack on Torey by an emotionally disturbed boy in her special-needs class. Her four elementary students are as diverse as could be. Boo is autistic, abuse left Lori brain-damaged, Tomaso is violent and in denial about his father’s murder (which he witnessed), and Claudia is pregnant. Somehow, they form a community.

Reading this book has made me cry, probably more than any other book. It’s also caused me to think about why I’m drawn to teaching, and what I want from it. Hayden describes the utter beauty she sees in these kids, their expertise at pushing her buttons, and her fluctuation between trying to pretend she’s omniscient and doubting she knows anything useful. She’s an idealist and a dreamer, and I needed a dose of that before starting student teaching. It’s easy to let details swallow up vision instead of fleshing it out. That scares me.

Torey Hayden reminds me that school is about the learners, not about the lessons. Lori’s brain damage has left her unable to process symbols: though her IQ is normal, she can’t even distinguish the letters in her own name. When Lori is humiliated in front of the “regular” first-grade class for her inability to read, Torey apologizes for the school. “We should never have made you feel that reading was more important to us than you are.”

I know foreign languages are scary to a lot of people. While I believe everyone who’s learned their native language can learn another one, I don’t want to blindly demand a skill or a rate of learning from everyone. May I have sympathy for the learners who honestly don’t get it, even when it seems ludicrously easy to me. May I avoid mixing up the struggler with the stubborn, or the confused with the lazy. Too often, lack of sympathy is the plague of the teacher who learned her subject matter easily.