The addiction theme

I've been fighting addictions lately in these posts. I haven't given up coffee, but my intake has been severely limited given that I haven't been going to make copies much lately and therefore don't have the occasion to pick up a warming beverage. I confiscated a tennis ball in 5th period today, that took care of my manual fixations...

That said... for the past three years I've said I might leave teaching at the end of the year. Yeah I know, I've said it all before. Year one I was new and I knew that it would only get better. Which it did. At the end of year two they disbanded my team (aka community) and moved me away from my kids. I taught AP, so I still got to keep some of them... the ones that got my jokes and were pissed off that they were finger painting in English III AP to tell me "Miss, I don't want to have ten kids and work in a cereal factory the rest of my life." The ones I'm going to New York with in the spring...

I was planning on leaving at the end of last year too, but I woke up one morning and decided to stay. That was that. I was irritated and pissed, but I was going to stay.

Truth is, I think I'm addicted. I can't say that I'm addicted to the teaching, that is more of a vessel. I'm addicted to those kids. Not all of them of course, there are some jewels that really could be left behind (I'm not willing to debate the merits of NCLB with anyone on a purely intellectual level, cause I don't come off sounding very empathetic or compassionate). I'm addicted to them though. But some of them just break my heart.

I spent most of the early evening with a beautiful girl from Liberia. I've had her for a year an a half, she still writes like she is in first grade... and for the first time EVER she is passing my class. EVER. She is so sweet, but an eighteen year old with the social behaviors of a shy fourth grader. She's in my Model UN club because she wants to learn about the rest of the world, so when the rest of the kids abandoned us for some English Honor Society thing (thanks Erin) she was there. She told me she wanted me to teach her about Liberian history, something I never looked into except to know the Americans colonized it with ex-slaves and it has the unique trivia property of having one of two world capitals named for an American president.

So we looked up the history in the encyclopedia and I attempted to explain to her her history, which isn't all that different from any other country's history in the 20th Century. She told me all her presidents were evil, that she didn't trust any of them, she didn't trust any of them. War broke out in her country when she was two. She hasn't seen her parents since she was three. She doesn't know where her siblings are, she lived with a grandmother who gave her to a priest before she was four because her grandmother was too slow and couldn't protect her. The priest is now dead, and she lives in a charity home... she has no one in this world to call family. She doesn't like the United States because she doesn't have anyone to tell her secrets to and she said she won't have anyone like that until she finds her family.

Then she told me she was going to teach me how to play Connect Three, which she said is just like Connect Four. She told me it was the game she played in Ghana. She spent five minutes drawing the lines for the game on the paper. Then she cut my chalk to get pieces so we could play. Then she redrew the lines a different way. Then she showed me how to play. She was teaching me how to play tic-tac-toe on a board of Xs and squares. So I taught her how to win (or tie) every game.

So please don't tell me I can teach at a different school. I can't drink tea instead of coffee either.