Love in the Form of Snowsuits

Substitute teaching in a variety of locations has a way of opening one’s eyes to realities we may overlook when we spend much of our professional life in the same building. Sometimes a trip across town is a greater leap than a voyage abroad. This reflection takes a hard look at issues of equality in Canadian schools.

I recently walked into a Grade 3 French immersion classroom in a rural community.  The students greeted me with rosy cheeks and cheery smiles as they walked in the doors and peeled off their abundant snowsuits.  They immediately went about the serious business of being obedient schoolchildren.  They hung on my every word (partly because I spent a good part of the morning impersonating Red Riding Hood in French, and partly because it was their natural habit of mind). 

The most challenging students in the room were two boys who were obsessed with measuring things and doing puzzles.  I had to confiscate their tape measure at one point because they were estimating and checking when they were supposed to be writing stories.  I commented that one of the mathematicians may want to consider being an engineer one day (at this point he was using the springing function of the tape measure to carefully propel objects across his desk).  “No,” he said.  “I want to be a farmer.  My dad wants to take over my grandpa’s farm, and then I’m going to be a farmer, too.  I really want to be a farmer.”

The picture of wholesomeness.

The next day I walked into a Grade 3 classroom in an English school in an urban neighbourhood on the literal “wrong side of the tracks.”  A little girl in a pink coat was curled up in fetal position on the carpet, and remained there, unmoving, until I left.  “Give me back my g**d**m slime!” exclaimed another girl, flopped on a bean bag, grinning feverishly.  Little boys ran around in their stocking feet, sugaring themselves with Christmas treats at 9am. 

“Is there anything I should know?” I asked the teacher. 

“Have you been to this school before?” she asked.  “There’s a lot of trauma here.”

The children in her classroom were not measuring things or writing stories.  They were not hanging on anyone’s every word.  They were going about the business of being schoolchildren in an entirely different way than the previous day’s youngsters: they were in the room.  Except that a third of them were not.  They hadn’t even come to school.

The teacher was wonderfully maternal.  She oozed kindness.  She oozed love.  She existed, every single day, to pour goodness on those kids.  She and her pet rabbit, Joe, were the softest part of these students’ lives.  The children occupied themselves immediately with cleaning out Joe’s cage, feeding him, and picking up the rabbit debris that had scattered throughout the classroom in the process.  One girl never once left his side.  She just sat there beside his cage, petting him all morning.  “I got to take him home,” she said wistfully.  What love.

I put on a video that nobody watched.  They were busy learning to be children.

40 minutes later, I accompanied another half-class to the music room, where they were greeted by their music teacher and another 15 youngsters.  The teacher had them under his spell.  They clapped and tapped their echo-rhythms hypnotically, and then he sent them off to what I can only describe as happy chaos.

There were about 25 computers in the room, to which most of the students immediately gravitated.  YouTube ensued.  Headphones on, little girls sang and danced to their favourite videos.  Others just listened quietly to whatever interested them.  And the rest of the kids? It was a musical free-for-all.

The classroom had about six piano keyboards, three electric drum kits, a bin of recorders, and a lot of beaming children.  They went where they wanted, when they wanted.  Putting aside their drumsticks, they sterilized recorder mouthpieces and rejoiced in the inevitably unmusical sounds they made.  They got rhythm loops going on the keyboards, and played random pitches to the techno-beat.  They tried out all the sounds and settings.  The demo songs came on, and the children assumed the melodies to be coming from the jubilant thumping of their own fists on the keys.  They bounced and bopped.  They sparkled.

The teacher placed simplified sheet music before some of the more astute enthusiasts, who figured out the first six notes of Fur Elise using mostly trial and error.  But for the most part, it was not do-re-mi-fa-so.  It was not E-G-B-D-F.  It was not ta-ta-ti-ti-ta.  It was a heyday of experimentation with the cause-effect relationship between action and reaction, motion and sound.

These children, too, were clearly needy.  One girl wandered constantly around the perimeter of the room, disappearing regularly into the hall to hide in the staff washroom next door.  A little bull went charging through the classroom, middle fingers brandished, hollering incoherently.

“This isn’t school,” I thought.  “This is therapy.”

After another 40 minutes of musical mayhem, I was tasked with returning half of the little bodies to their classroom.  Three girls crawled on their hands and knees the whole way.  Two boys slid down the bannister, and then took the stairs five at a time, nailing their final landing with a heroic roll across the floor.  Everyone yelled the whole way.  No one cared.

Period 3: Phys. Ed.  For the first time in the day, I was to be the only adult in the room.  Miraculously, the children came and sat in a circle on the floor for an entire ten seconds while I uttered those two magic words: Freeze Tag.  They then ran in gleeful circles around the room for a good 20 minutes.  No one knew who was “It.”  No one cared.  They were running.  In their socks.  In their flip-flops.  In their glory.

And then one little boy (he who was to try and somehow earn “tokens” for some undisclosed reward) went wilder than the others.  He ran up onto the stage and refused to come down.  He opened and closed the curtains.  He flicked the lights on and off.  He scurried up the ladder on the wall and pulled at the doorknob to –what? The electrical room? Happily, it was locked, so neither of us will ever know.  I had horrible thoughts about what might happen to our intrepid explorer if his little stocking feet were to slip off those metal rungs above my head.  “Should I grab him?” I wondered.  “It would be easy.  He’s little enough.  I could just grab him and carry him to safety.”  But my professional training (and common sense) prevailed: never touch a child unless you have been trained in non-violent crisis intervention.  As quickly as he had scrambled up, he dismounted and flew across the stage, hiding in the cupboard. 

“Duck-duck-goose?” I coaxed, desperately.

“No!”

“Tokens?”

“I don’t care!”

Meanwhile, back on the gym floor, “Someone kicked me and now I can’t breathe.”  “Someone said I picked my nose but I was just scratching it.”  “Someone whipped a ball at me.”  “I don’t want to play.”

Could I call for help? No.  There was too much screaming.  And I had not thought to test out the walkie-talkie on my belt (although I now understood its purpose).  Best to round up the rest of the children.  If the boy in the cupboard notices we are leaving, perhaps he will follow.  I told the rest of the class to wait in a line outside the gym door.  They did so for an entire ten seconds before taking off, leaving me stranded between them and the boy in the cupboard.  What to do?

I followed the majority, and then told the teacher there was a boy left behind.  “Didn’t you call the office?” she asked.  “Never mind.  I’ll deal with it.”  And she closed the door.  Decisively.

Back in the hall, I saw that I had left with 14 children and returned with only 12.  Many of whom had no boots or snowpants.  One of whom was about to head into the frigid winter air in thin pyjama pants with exposed ankles.  How could I tell who was missing, in addition to the boy in the cupboard? I found a class list with 20 names on it.  Not one bit helpful.  Not one bit.

The bell rang.  I told the teacher about the missing children.  “We’ll figure it out,” she said.

With that, I fled.

Consider these two very different childhoods.  What is the root of the staggering divide between them? And how is it that in our True North Strong and Free, with universally funded public education and equal opportunity for all, we have some students whose instruments of rebellion are measuring tapes, and others who quite possibly hold concealed weapons?

Go to an elementary school in the northwest of the city, and you’ll encounter a class that instantly silences itself and does its work at the slightest word.  Head southeast a few kilometres, and no one acknowledges your presence, except to insult you.  In the former, the staff go out of their way to welcome you.  In the latter, they shut the door in your face.  In the one, everyone seems naturally happy.  In the other, happiness is a gamble.

What’s the difference?

I’ve heard it said that those who are loved at home come to school to learn.  And those who are not cared for at home come to school to be loved.

Is the difference love? Surely love is a universally accessible commodity.

Or is it possible that the difference is simply money? Is it possible that money really does buy love, in the form of shoes and snowsuits?

If you look at a crime map of the city, you can see that the incidences of disorderly conduct by adults overlap neatly with my anecdotal observations of the disorderly conduct of children in schools.  More objectively, if you look at an indexed map of schools, you will see that those with the lowest test scores are located in the areas with the highest crime rates.

Why?

Because people are trying to survive.  They are doing whatever they need to do to make it through another day.  So are their children.  And so are their teachers.

In a space where one small body is fetal on the floor and another absently strokes a bunny for a good part of the morning, or where a monkey is swinging from a ladder and a bull is stampeding in frenzied circles around his oblivious peers, do you think the teachers are thinking about test scores? Do you think students are focused on their learning?

No.  Everyone in the room is simply trying to navigate from the beginning to the end of the day: some with grace and docility, others with desperation and exhaustion.  The angels in the building understand that they are there, first and foremost, to bring love and stability into the crisis-ridden lives of these traumatized souls.  The rest of us are doing the best we can to keep everybody safe and accounted for, and are trying not to feel like failures when we can’t contain the chaos.

In either case, math and language play a distant second in the hierarchy of priorities in the building (as they should).  But in either case, what we have is not enough, even for the most basic task of keeping all the children in the room. 

Contrast that with our rural classroom, where the children sit calmly in a circle, reading through their French play in fluent unison.  Two glaringly opposing realities, representing greatly varying needs; and yet all are held to the same account.  We have one curriculum document.  We have one funding formula.  We have one prescribed student-teacher ratio.  We have one standardized test.  One high school diploma.  One allocation of limited resources.  One well from which to draw.  And it’s not deep enough.

We can compare ourselves to developing countries, where adequate schooling is denied to the unpaying majority.  We can say that we live in a land of equalized plenty.  But we don’t.  We don’t. 

The poor we will always have with us.

There is need everywhere.  Appalling need.  And so much of it turns on money.  The students in the “have” areas thrive because their basic needs are met.  The rest flounder.  The cracks widen, swallowing kids up whole.

The more idealistic among us hope that our governments are doing the best they can to distribute funds judiciously.  But those on the front lines – those wondering how we might catch the dangling students before they fall – cannot get over the inequalities built into the systems that ought to raise those children up.  Our current provincial government, blind to what is really happening in schools, is taking teachers out of classrooms, slashing funding for kids with special needs, and denying parents a basic income.  We, the people, collectively voted them into office.  What were we thinking? Have we all gone mad?

Where there is more need, there must be more support.  It’s that simple.  If we cannot sustain the most vulnerable among us, how can we think that anyone will be better off in the end?

And we are all culpable.  We are all confused.  We are all at a loss.  We who live comfortably are wired to flee injustice rather than confront it.  What can we do? What can anyone do, in the face of such gross inequality?

I hope that we can learn to share.  I hope that we can learn to vote.  I hope that we can learn to advocate.  I hope that we can learn to view our crime rates and test scores with compassion rather than judgement.  I hope that we can learn to serve, rather than fear the hands rummaging through the garbage on the curb.  But I don’t know how, because I, too, am afraid.  I, too, prefer my own small village to the anarchy across town.

In Morocco, I learned to bypass the swarms of beggars on the road, because their needs just seemed too great for any one person to ever meet.  But here? The destitute exist here, too, in different garb.  They come to school.  And somehow, with what we have, we do our best to give them what they lack. 

This is what I will tell myself, next time I walk into a classroom full of hostile or indifferent faces: by being there, by stepping in, I am doing something.  I may feel baffled at their unwillingness to learn.  I may feel frustrated by their sullenness, offended by their defiance, trampled by their insolence.  But I can choose to think kind thoughts towards them.  I can choose to give them the benefit of the doubt.  I can call to mind the likelihood that their survival instincts are, by necessity, harsher than my own.  And maybe, at some point in the day, I can provide a soft moment for someone, by virtue of the very meekness I have always felt to be my frailty.  Maybe, when I cannot establish order, I can focus on the needs that I can meet in that moment.  I can smile at someone who seems lost in the tumult.  I can write a note of encouragement to someone who is feeling excluded or outnumbered.  I can breathe deeply and extend forgiveness when I feel myself to have been wronged.  I can do my best.  We all can.  If we cannot bring equality to the masses, we can at least bring a hint of love.