Student at the Mall

I have not described the six weeks I spent teaching some special education students just before I had to stop teaching for a while and have a hip replacement operation. I have been shying away from this because aspects of it are too painful both psychologically and physically. During these six weeks my physical condition went downhill rapidly. First I was able to stand up and walk around class with relative ease, though with a lot of pain. Finally I could scarcely get from my car into the school building, and I spent the day in one of the classroom chairs that had wheels. I used to wheel around the room while I taught these kids. And at last I had to call the school one morning and tell them that even on Vicodin the pain had become so great that I could no longer teach until after I had had the operation and had recovered.

One of my students was an African-American young man whom I shall call M, a seriously disturbed student with a terrible anger management problem. He had great difficulty sitting in one place for more than a few minutes. He and I talked and he told me this and a few other things about himself. He had spent time not long before in Juvenile Hall. Sometimes if told to stop talking to other students, he would fly into a rage and kick the chairs. Several times I had to write him up and have him taken to the office.

One of the things he told me a number of times was that he could only learn things if he had a special tutor. Near the end of the six weeks I think he started being tutored after school. I might have tried to do this myself but at that point I was in no physical condition to add more hours to my school day.

Yesterday while I was shopping in a mall not far from home, a young man whom I suddenly recognized as M approached me. He was very friendly, and in the two or three minutes we spoke I asked him if he was being tutored the way he wanted to be. He was not. Furthermore, he had been transferred to another school much closer to his home. He told me he was failing everything. He said this not with pride, not as though he were bragging, but just in a matter-o-fact fashion, as though he was used to total failure and accepted it.

With M.'s has deep psycholoical problems, I can predict terrible things in his future. Sooner or later he will end up in prison, in some psychiatric facility, or dead -- probably shot by police. The system will grind him into little pieces and spit him out because no one seems to be helping him.

He reminds me of a bizarre incident that happened to someone else, another African-American I knew. This fellow, in his early forties, had become so high on drugs that he was found wandering around on the streets at 2 a.m. Eventually that night he had an encounter with the police in which he was shot dead while standing half-naked atop a parked authomobile.

With me, if M. encounters the police, I don't think it will have anything to do with drugs. I think it will have to do with his anger. And the police will not understand that what they have before them is an emotionally-disturbed kid who in many ways is not responsible for his own behavior. They will see him as nothing more than a criminal.

As we stood there in the mall, M. asked if he could have my phone number -- "Or maybe you would want to have mine." As a teacher, I do not know whether or not I am even allowed to become involved in a student's life outside school. I have tried hard not to. Nevertheless, I gave this kid my card with my phone number on it. I don't know if he will ever need to call, but this probably cemented something he felt before I had to stop teaching his class -- that despite his disciplinary and anger problems, I liked and accepted him.