Twenty-Three to One

Almost noon on a Thursday, and I am walking off the high school campus, coat and purse in hand, while several of my students call, "Hey, where are you going? Will you be back for fifth period?"

"No," I reply. "I told you about this yesterday. You have a sub. I'm going to a class. Be good, now!"

I always laugh when preparing the class for a substitute, placing brightly-colored labels and writing detailed notes about the lesson, the students, the classroom. It's as if I am talking to a babysitter (the babysitter that I was only a few years ago. "Now, they will want to talk during this work time, but they shouldn't. They get too loud if you let them change seats..."

While the training, held at our district headquarters, would prove to be tragically dull and redundant, falling far short of the last two exciting classes of my school day, it does afford me a reason to drive ten miles south through no traffic at all. This autumn has been full of dramatic and unpredictable weather, so cold that the leaves have turned early, but so dry that they stay on the trees, dropping delicately and hesitantly, in twos and threes, to lawns or sidewalks. Being outside or on the road in any circumstance is a treat, to witness the seasonal spectacle that we are fortunate enough to see in our city.

This day, however, I pass through two torrential rainstorms on the drive down, when I fear for the state of my broken windshield wipers. All through the training, I envision the monsoon traveling south to where we were, and dreaded the rush-hour commute home. I am stunned to silence when I instead emerged into the late afternoon to see the sky a pile of majestic white clouds.

I often, rather unreasonably, think of the sky as a flat backdrop to our world, and consider that it is probably near enough to touch, that cool blue or wooly grey. Today, however, the buildings of downtown are dwarfed in comparison to the vastness of the sky, like a dollhouse inside a cathedral. How small and fragile they look, these geometrical blocks scattered on the streets, underneath the almost supernatural vastness of the titanic clouds above. It is almost funny to think that on an ordinary cloudy day, I marvel at the height of these "skyscrapers." Today, they do not scrape the sky; the buildings are toddlers on tiptoes, and they only come up to the sky's knobby, cloudy knees.

I have been considering, lately, the balance between my place as advocate and mentor in an urban school with much more brokenness than I am often prepared to admit, and the deep and overwhelming feeling that I am a tiny block of a building spinning out in a universe of trouble. I see my students for only one out of their twenty-four hours, and I am just beginning to see and hear how they occupy the rest of their time. Some return to houses of chaos, while others while away evenings alone while parents work to support them. A few don't come to school much at all, popping in just enough for me to remember their names and faces, and be haunted by thoughts of what they do when they are not here.

Before school began, I wrote of wanting Room 120 to be a safe place, a refuge from the darkness of the world outside. I still so deeply desire this peace, for them and for me, despite the clouds looming overhead. I'm beginning to realize my size in the world, understanding the limits to what and who I can change. In the end, I know that while I can call and persuade these students to come to school, my responsibility is to the day-to-day business of loving the ones who arrive. I may never take on the clouds, may never be big enough to battle the systemic evils of humankind that find their way into my students' lives, but I strive to offer what shelter I can, in my hour a day, from the scrapes and bumps they may find in the other twenty-three.