...in which a teacher rant ensues... [View All]

My "project child" (i.e. the one who demands most of my time and energy) this year is R, a ten-year-old boy with an emotional/behavior disorder. Child gave me a hell of a time first semester, but we made a *lot* of progress. He's very bright, and by early January he was the least of my worries.

End of that month, though, he moved from his dad's house, where he had (by comparison) a lot of structure, to his mom's, which is a circus of assorted teenaged cousins and siblings, some with fairly extensive police experience, none of whom can seem to get up in time to get him to school by 7:50. Things started going downhill, with not much response to my repeated requests for a conference.

Today he was late again. Went up to let him into our building and found him more sluggish than usual on a Monday morning. Asked what was wrong, he said he hit his head on a trampoline frame Saturday when he overrotated a backflip. A quick look revealed a three-inch-diameter knot on the backside of his head with a partially healed gash in the middle.

So, you went to the doctor, right? No, Dad put a napkin on it. (This is a direct quote.)

Did you throw up? Yeah. There was blood everywhere.

You never went to the doctor? No, Dad put me in the bed and told me to take a nap. I felt better when I woke up.

Oh.

The family is poor, like those of most of my kids, but this is the kind of poverty-of-sense that I worked with in Atlanta. When we finally got Mama on the phone, she stated that she wasn't going to call the doctor "because you know he'll just tell me to bring him in". You think? Do you fucking think so? He finally got picked up by a cousin, but I don't know if he ever saw a doctor today.

I'll say it again. If we want to do something about the future of *all* children - and I'm not at all sure that we, as a society, do - then we can't just engage with them while they're at school.