We went where the children were, into the concrete buildings that announced themselves from a distance by their rectangles of fluorescent light before dawn, each classroom another illuminated cell in which a small republic would soon attempt the impossible.
We drove there carrying lesson plans, coffee, sharpened pencils, and private theories about service. Some of us had hints about some calling. We also hoped to one day be worthy of homes and worthy of citizenship, despite the wayward, wandering nature of our pilgrimish selves. We privately fingered some phrases about the nature of this calling, as with prayer beads. We learned to do this while sidestepping certain reflections, their attendant questions. To serve whom? Serve what? Serve how?
Inside the lit boxes of concrete, copy machines predictably jammed and bells divided the hours into predictable portions. Loudspeaker voices droned on, with a scripted confidence that seemed to expose our own uncertainty. Lord, I believe, I prayed on my knees, rosary between my shrinking breasts, heal my unbelief.
There were forms for absences, interventions, accommodations, referrals, observations, evaluations, emergencies. Somewhere beneath the paperwork, a quieter practice breathed its ragged breath. It was not the sort to be documented, so tended to be found lacking when it came time to speak in its defense. We were quiet in meetings, or coughing.
Some of us imagined that if we served long enough, well enough, we might eventually become free of ourselves. It seemed noble at the time. No one warned us that the self is not only the thing that interferes with attention. It is also the place from which attention is given. Grind it finely enough and something essential becomes dust.
It settles everywhere. The children breathe it. So do we. Outside, the century acquired stranger habits. Bats slept with white upon their noses. Birds disappeared from places that had always expected birds. The seasons arrived carrying unfamiliar weather. We learned new acronyms faster than new names. Every year another expert assured us that the future had finally been measured correctly. The children kept arriving anyway.
***
The week before I began teaching, I attended a county training wearing the best clothes I owned: a purple spaghetti-strap dress beneath a crocheted sweater arranged carefully across my shoulders, an improvised modesty. I needed a paycheck before I could afford professional costume. I can’t remember what I did for shoes.
I arrived late after misjudging the parking and found the last empty seat beside two young men who already seemed entirely at ease in the room. They were funny, bright, and quick-witted with soft jibes and easy answers. They were the sort, I see now, upon whom institutions instinctively confer authority.
“That’s a rough school,” one of them said when I told him my assignment. Then he explained how I ought to meet the moment. I listened carefully because I assumed he knew something I did not.
Twenty-two years later I remember almost none of his advice. What remains is the question that kept me listening. It was too raw to say aloud. What do the children need, to live here now? The two questions occupied the same room, and rarely acknowledged one another.
Years before, when I was the age that my children are now, a teacher had handed me a box of tissues and gave me space to sit awhile. She did not explain my sorrow or try to fix it. She did not ask me to become more positive or more resilient or more realistic. She recognized that bewilderment sometimes accompanies seeing and let me sit in her office as long as I needed before marching on to my scheduled class. This was some of the most profound instruction of my life.
***
In the decades since that first training, I know more now about curriculum, assessment, language acquisition, trauma, literature, and revision. Mostly, though, I know about the limits of certainty. Enough, perhaps, to stop mistaking certainty for wisdom.
Meanwhile, the children continue arriving, carrying entire worlds that no data set, policy document, or professional development session could possibly anticipate. They arrive laughing with friends. They arrive grieving grandparents, translating for their families, having crossed borders both visible and invisible before first period. They arrive eager, despite everything their forebears have constructed around them.
This, the part that steadies me on my better days, still knows nothing of expertise. She places all the eggs of her shaking faith in a single basket, calls it nothing. It is neither measurable, or scalable, or capable of surviving particularly well in committee. It’s nothing, but a stubborn belief that another consciousness can still be met with attention.
Each morning another consciousness walks through the door asking, Will someone meet me here?
The loudspeaker begins its announcements. The attendance form waits to be filled, then saved. Somewhere beneath all of this, another lesson clears its throat. The children are here. For now, that is enough to begin again.
