29 April 2004

Sometimes I wish teachers could cry in class My Year 7 lesson today was a moving experience. The subject was Abraham, and towards the end of the lesson, I made them all shut their eyes and do some deep thinking. We'd been talking about Abraham's vision, and how each one of those stars he saw in the sky represented an individual, one of the many descendants promised him by God. I asked them to think of one person in their lives who had done something special for them, who had made a difference, an individual they thought deserved to be remembered. Then they wrote the names -- some were personal, so they just wrote initials -- on the backs of little stars they had cut out. So here's this twelve-year-old boy, Thomas. He knows only one expression -- deadpan. On my first week teaching the class, I used him as a guinea pig to make a point, and scared him with a loud "bang" in the middle of the lesson. His expression went from deadpan to, um, deadpan. I was terrified I had chosen the wrong student, but I now know that's just him. So he's sitting there with his star, on which are the initials LO. I congratulate him on a neat-looking star, and assure him that just the initials are okay if it's private to him. But he looks up at me and said, "No, I'll tell you if you want." And he screws up his eyes, and with more emotion on his face than I've seen before (I thought he was going to cry, and I wanted to cry too), he starts trying to explain what LO had done for him. He struggles for the right words. LO totally changed his life. It was like he was a different person before he met LO, a "sort of uncle". Before he met LO, he was "ungenerous," but meeting him left him transformed. He can't quite get the words into a coherent order to describe it, but I get the picture -- Thomas, the prize brat, a selfish little boy until someone came along and cared for him and brought out the goodness in him. Then I move over to see what James, the class clown, is doing with his star. I find out a little more about him, and the loveable, perpetually clowning-around, unashamedly outgoing and unswervingly confident persona takes on new meaning and depths as he reveals that the important individual he wants to remember on his star is his uncle, who has been "like the Dad I never had." See, James, I discover today, is orphaned. Whether his parents are dead or simply no longer a part of his life, I am not sure. But here he is, without father or mother in the world, twelve years old, and he just gets on with life. I could never have guessed the untold depths of these young lives. I couldn't cry in class, but I'm catching up now. Dave 9:07:31 PM    comment [] An unpleasant encounter Being fat, you have to get used to taking a bit of abuse. People can be cruel. The most frequent is the cowardly motorist who only ever finds the courage to insult you when he's driving past at forty miles per hour. The biggest mistake is to be seen eating food in public, because being fat and having the nerve to eat publicly (especially if it isn't self-evidently health food) is a great sin, and guaranteed to provoke some jerk or other to a childish taunt. Most of the time, it rolls off me like water off a duck's back. Doesn't bother me a bit, and that's the honest truth. But tonight it bothered me. I was going to spare you the language, but then I thought, No. Why should I dilute the full force of the ugliness that a human being can show to a perfect stranger? The train was packed. As usual, I waited for everyone else to board, and then stood up near the doors. A stranger follows me in, and literally barges into my space. "Move over, you fucking fatty." "I beg your pardon?" "You take up half the fucking train, you do." I couldn't quite believe what I'd just heard, unprovoked, from a total stranger. What I really wanted to do at that point was get violent, or at least unleash a verbal assault. Trying hard to keep from showing my anger, I looked him right in the eye. "You are a very rude man," I said. And I moved out of the way. "So? What do I care? Fucking cunt." He repeated the comment about taking up "half the fucking train." Here's what made the situation so unbearable: I had nowhere to go. We were packed in tight. I managed to stand about a foot further away. My lip didn't stop quivering for a few minutes. First time I've felt like crying after such an assault since I was fifteen years old and had a similar experience on a bus. The stranger and his friend had a good laugh between themselves, and I stared the friend in the eye for a few seconds, too, maybe just in the vain hope that I could sting his conscience. I really don't understand people like that. It simply isn't in me to be so blatantly rude, so blatantly cruel to another human being, and I wonder what is going on inside people's minds when they feel they can do that. Do they not even feel a twinge of guilt or shame? I was going to write about something else tonight, maybe still will. Just had to get that off my chest. Dave 6:36:39 PM    comment []

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