Three months downstream and, at least for the moment, things are better. The girl from the park bench is in Chicago of all places, probably just hanging out at a friend’s house blowing grass and not working or doing anything productive, but at least she’s safe. The girl from the car wreck moved to Florida where her life is still shit but at least, I think anyway, she’s safe.
And I’m back in the classroom. We opened up after what would’ve been Christmas break and while I don’t have the number of students I did I still have a classroom full of teenagers who make fart jokes and talk about D&D and use some weird code language that I don’t understand and laugh when I get confused and bitch about the mask mandate and tell me their problems and ask for my advice and are laughing a lot and are very much back in a safe space.
And to some extent I’m back to sleeping again at night, or at least I’m doing better than I was for the last ~3 months of 2020.
I still have former students reaching out to me, which is… I don’t know how I feel about that. One student sent me a FB messenger message that she had been so depressed that she hadn’t showered in 5 days, but finally built up the fortitude to do so. She cleaned herself up then applied for a job as a hospital janitor, putting me down as a reference. I gave her a glowing reference (even if she was a pretty mediocre student) and she found out a day or three later she got the job. At 22 or 23, this is her first real job. Of course she had to message me, with lots of emojis and capital letters and such. I was thrilled.
A coworker of mine feels that any contact with any student, current or former, outside of school email is suspect and is crossing a big bright line. I feel otherwise and am happy to continue to be there for the students that have moved on to other things. Maybe my coworker thinks in some sort of creep. I don’t care. Unfortunately those students – the ones that keep in contact, the ones that are doing well and have their life on track – are vanishingly rare. Most simply spiral down into an abyss of drugs, abuse, poverty, and misery until there is nothing left. I fear for those kids as if they were my own flesh and blood (which probably makes me a bad teacher) but there’s little I can do for them. It sucks, it hurts, but I’m slowly resigning myself to accepting the fact that this state of affairs is simply the nature of this. So if I can do even the tiniest bit of cheerleading for them, even if it’s months or years after they’ve left our campus, I’ll damn well do it.
With the encouragement of one of my favorite Dopers I’m turning my student’s stories into a novel. It started as a sort of memoir but has morphed into a YA novel. I doubt it’ll ever see the light of day but it’s therapeutic to write it out.
So @puzzlegal I appreciate the offer but for now I think I’ll let this one settle. If the shit hits the fan again maybe I’ll start an MPSIMS thread to vent.
And of I thank all of you who read, listened, understood, encouraged, and commiserated. Not for the first time this board and its humble denizens have rescued my soul in a way that they can never fully appreciate and for which I will always be grateful.
) superhero adventures with a woman who was a cross between amanda whats-her-name’s character from Aquaman and Wonder Woman, only played by someone highly reminiscent of Michelle Pfeiffer. All with a sound track of Vietnamese outlaw rap.The thing that woke me up and that I actually said out loud (and had no relation to the dream that I’m aware of); Arroway and Banks should have died of old age having never been able to translate, let alone interpret the messages.