The Ecphorizer Publishing System

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[line]My friends who aren't teachers often ask me why I stay in teaching. After all, they remind me, assembly-line workers make the money I make, and they don't have all the hassle of principals and school boards that seem to care only if your lunch [quoteright]count is in on time, and if your students are sitting quietly in straight rows of homogeneous desks. I've swallowed enough pride to light all of New York City wondering about this thing called education. There are days when growing coffee in Colombia seems like nirvana. But, somehow, even on my bad days, I find reason to go on. *** Outside, glistening snow covered the playground and spear-shaped icicles hung on the corners of the school building. Our school, constructed by the WPA forty years earlier, had a decrepit furnace that only had two settings: hot and off, which in the winter left us with no other choice but to endure the heat and hope that the open windows would circulate enough cold air to make the room bearable. This particular day, every window was opened, yet the room still seethed with the mixture of the body odors that only poor people have, a blending of the foods their bodies must take in, a smell that distinguishes them from the other students. Earlier the other teachers had warned me, as they looked up over the lips of their coffee cups, that I was to get a new student. All they would tell me was that his name was Rocky. I didn't know what to expect. When the bell rang, the children were all seated waiting for me to come in from hall duty. Some chatted, others made faces, but there before me was a new student wearing, of all things, a white scarred football helmet. "Let's get quiet now," I barked, trying to drown out the noise that stood between me and teaching. "Son," I said, "you must be Rocky." "Yes," he replied meekly, in a voice much like the slight stature of his frame. "I'm glad you're here." He didn't say anything. One of his eyes was half-hidden under the helmet. "Rocky, hadn't you better take off that helmet? I mean, recess is over and it's awfully warm in here." "He can't," another student butted in from the back of the room. My first thought was that the helmet was stuck, so I offered to help him pull it off. "No," the same student shouted, "he ain't supposed to take it off. His daddy told him not to." I'll chat with the principal later on about Rocky's helmet, I thought to myself. Class time is too valuable. The principal explained to me that when Rocky was a baby, he had come too close to a hot wood stove and burned his scalp to the point of leaving only scar tissue and no hair. The family had stubbornly refused other medical aid as unnecessary and none of anybody else's business. Each day, Rocky sat quietly, almost emotionlessly at the front of the room near my desk. As we studied the intricacies of grammar and the subtleties of literature, I often caught him looking at me while the other children read aloud. Since he probably could not read very well, I reasoned that he enjoyed listening to the stories and the class discussions designed to guide young minds down the paths of thought that the authors laid out. When I called on him, his answers were short, sometimes right, more often wrong, but always with hesitation and a soft voice that seemed to emanate from the helmet. Soon that helmet became a part of him, an extension of his personality the way Miranda's pug nose made her puckish and playful, or the way that Wayne's tousled red hair gave him his devilish demeanor. In time I ignored the helmet, and Rocky blended in with the many faces that sat before me. Tiring of literature and sensing in my students the tenseness of too much grammar, I decided that a writing exercise would be good not only for the students, but also for me. It would, in a way, help them define "who" they were so struggling to figure out. I found an old print of a lone deer standing against a wood looking woefully confident of herself and her place in the scheme of things. It was a quite simple picture, clear, plain, totally unadorned by any nuance or mystery. I asked students to tell me what they thought of when they looked at the print, and why they felt that way, hoping to glean some reactions to this deer as a thing of beauty. As I circled the room, helping students with their spelling, encouraging some others to think and react on their own, I noticed Rocky watching me with a certain look in his eyes, one eye peeping out from the helmet. His face was coursed with sweat, for the boiler on the furnace was doing double-duty, and we all seemed to be suffering. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see him watching me as he folded his paper lengthwise and gently placed it on my desk. I knew he wanted me to read what he had written. I gradually made my way to the front of the room to see the lone paper that waited for me. I had no idea what to expect. I opened it and read, "When I looked at this pitcher, I think of," and then a long line pointed down at the word all to itself in the middle of the page, "love." When I looked up, I could see the bridge of the helmet covering two dark spots where the eyes should have been, and a face broken with the slightest of smiles , one worn away by despair and doubt, but which for this moment, at least, was alive with the feeling he saw in the deer.  <figure class="image"><img src="/EPS/pictures/Image/EckE.gif" alt=""></figure>

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Issue #60