Smoke bomb, flare, hit, cacophonous boom down alleyway, sneakers hitting blacktop and running away from impending blue lights. Second crash. More rubber hitting asphalt. Glass falling like raindrops, crystal cacophony, chimes. Between white banded blinds, the blue streamed and wiped white apartment walls clean. I buried myself in pillows and towers of blankets to protect from the hurting world around me.
When “i don’t have feelings” responded earlier that night, I dropped a jar of salsa. Black pants stained now green. Chunks of peppers, garlic, and onion in between toes and computer cords. I felt as if I had stepped out of my teacher Halloween outfit only to see myself wretch cold, green salsa across the wood floor.
I woke up to music: cold and loud. Shivering in the car. Moving through the day.
The end was the most meaningful.
One of my students used the word neurotransmitter in a sentence last week. [I have been working with my friend and learning about his research — about DNA, PCR, bacteria incubation, and testing methodologies. For some reason, using a microscope is the most difficult of these things thus far. My friend at the lab is thinking of tasking me with my own small project. Today I used a pipette to test the concentration of DNA in solution. Machines that look as if from the 80s with displays that require too many buttons, cost 10K. No germs, no breathing, open flames. I wear green gloves today, not the powder blue like the others in the lab.] She used it correctly and joyfully, so excited about what goes on in her brain. That day, she made me smile. Cheeks hurting
Today, she made me cry. Heart hurting. Do not cry in front of your kids. Be strong for them, consistent, emotionally stable for them, I tell myself – in a world that is full of no’s, impossibles, inconsistencies, changes, be something that proves all of these things are the / can be the exception. Today I failed. My ability to hold back emotions with my kids is something I begin struggling with more and more. As weeks pass into months, I’m realizing how much I love them. I thought it would be difficult to love another group of kids as much as my first (and second, the same babies), but it is like I have learned over and over again – our hearts are funny things. Love is not zero sum, we can only love more. Today I cried because I love this kid.
Her face hung lower and lower as the class passed on. An eager student ready to share an overly-prepared presentation evolved into eyes holding back tears. All I could do was offer ears and words. I remember last year, a student of mine had broken down in the hallway, tears soaking cheeks as she talked about her family. Reducing me nearly to tears then, too. She is now a favorite.
How anyone can teach and neglect to look at the child as a person with a story that so informs them as learners baffles me. How anyone can go through this life without feeling, without listening, without humbling themselves to understand another person’s perspective is no life at all. This last part is hard and only recently do I think I came to understand how very wrapped up in a perspective we can be if we don’t shift out of comfortable positions we lean, lie, and remain inclined to stay in.
I open my laptop, looking at the survey results from my students. “HI ms.gini its o—– d—–” A name reads back to me that I have not seen since last year. One of my students who was redistricted has happened back to my website. I ask in the survey, “What do you want to tell Ms. Gini?” His reply, “A great teacher.” I ask in the survey, “If you could travel into the past, what would you do? If you could travel into the future, what would you do?” His reply “go back to m——— (elementary school name)” A love for a student is something that I cannot equate to having my own kids as I don’t have any of my own, but it is akin to kin, there is something familial about spending so much of our waking hours together, seeing each other on good days and bad days, making mistakes together, growing, learning, laughing, crying together. I miss this student and feel a sense of sadness and happiness at once in knowing that he sought out my website to reach out to me.
And again as I am writing there are the familiar blue lights that paint my white apartment walls again and the two throaty sounds emitted from the car outside my window. Blue is a color of calm, of sadness, of trust. So much of that is needed in this world that is so in need of love. My kids remind me of that every day. My kids remind me why I do what I do.
Gabriella Gini 