I’ve seen things I never thought I’d see. I’ve heard stories I’d never thought I’d place faces to. I’ve felt things I’d never thought I’d feel. Not even in a thousand years.
When I fall asleep, I see their faces. I told him, his eyes bright, I have 85 children. He started giggling, confused. What was this lady talking about? Was she mad?
I might be just about it with the job I have. It feels like a stretch of human physical limits to be the gargantuan that one must as a teacher. The expressions worn on peoples’ faces when they react to the statement that I am a teacher are truly baffling and unnerving in many cases. How lowly and undervalued a job title. It truly is treated like a minimum wage job. How can that be difficult?
Let me tell you that the work that we do is never done and the feeling of unsatisfied yearning to be there for your children never dies away. Being open-eyed in the field only makes the feelings sting more strongly and hurt all the more when others scoff.
Let me tell you that it is not about being HUMBLE. It’s not just the feminine in me coming out and fulfilling function. It is not just something NOBLE. Sure, it is a calling. This work is a collective force born on the backs of those that answer the call to be a part of the collective of société.
The smiles on my children’s faces nearly knock me off my feet. The difficult moments when we struggle to find the calm in the storm are those in which we learn valuable lessons about the human mind and our own. How am I feeling? How is this person feeling? Are we so different, even if the ways that we react and show these feelings vary so much? We learn about how we work together, or don’t. About how we relate to one another in so many ways.
My children speak LOUD. They speak in loud voices and other times in tears, whispers, connection signs, clenched fists, silently raised hands, suffocating embraces, crayon doodles, backflips, letters written on lined paper and pencil, notes scratched on florescent Post-it’s, eye contact or lack of, changes in behavior… They will not be silenced even if that is the structure they grow in serves to cater to this.
It will be my job to be their advocate. It is my job. I will be their amplifier. I have learned that this does not come easily. First, you need a handle on your classroom management, your curriculum, your place, and the context. Only then can you transform visions into reality. That’s where I feel myself approaching. I am only sorry that it comes so late. I feel emboldened and invigorated looking with full consciousness of this past year into the future. I feel alive and ready and strong.
I not only have the want and ideas, I have the heavy hands and feet to break down the walls that exist external to me, pushing in around us, forming the very fabric of society at present. I have the heavy hands and feet to break down the walls that exist yet inside of myself. They have already started to come down and have begun to replace the vacuous pockets of space between ribs with rubble. And so as I tear through what holds me down on the ground and away from the stuff of clouds. In so doing, I get closer to creating the change I once envisioned and had become scared to reach for.
I had fallen into the lake and nigh drowned. I’ve been laying wait on the beach in the longest night I’ve ever known. When the sun comes up again, I’ll too stand up to face the day. One in which I am the teacher I need to be for my 85 today and the countless more tomorrow.
Gabriella Gini 