Even though I knew that "The Fates" held a destiny for me much bigger than a small-sized classroom, I've always loved teachers and education, so much so, I followed my best friend and her older brother to one of the best teaching schools in the country for working class New York kids on a strict budget, which is the exact niche my friends and I fit into. Why pay out interest rates on jacked-up student loans designed to suck from our meager incomes for years, when the starting salary for a teacher in New York State was $26,000 in the 90s (https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d99/d99t080.asp)?
Suffice to say, I learned a lot about my friends and their curriculum by listening and talking with them. It served me well during my apprenticeship in publishing, which has the strongest industry ties to education, by necessity and design. Textbooks, anyone? Who do we serve more than schools? Libraries! That's why I'm typing to you from one today. Makes for an eerie kind of logic, doesn't it? And so we discussed our avid interest in changing the system from within, by shoving out the bored burned-out drones who labored in classrooms like they were slaves from "the bad man" himself, when really they were just bottom-level civil servants made for a life filled with repetition.
But, that's not the actual job of teaching. Running a classroom means you have enough juice and life-force running through your veins that you can actually transmit your passion for learning to other much smaller humans who need you to guide them through your excellently-designed curriculum. We had enough of the ennui that bad teachers hide behind. Get out, if you hate kids that much! It's like dealing with the bitch who runs your doctor's office. Oh, so you hate people? I guess tending to the sick would be at the top of your list, then.
And it wasn't because they were broke or in financial straits like we were. I've worked with plenty of people in publishing who worked because they didn't know what else to do, so they hoped to hide within low-paying jobs alongside some of the most educated people on the planet because....oh, wait. That doesn't work either. Claiming disability became some sort of signal that we "won", because crazy people think that the world is all about some intergalactic pissing contest in lieu of actually living life, like my wonderfully cool grandpapa taught me to do: have fun! Learning is like that.
So, we became focused on accurately transmitting that joyful feeling; not through some dull drama class we did by rote, but the real thing, which unfortunately requires you love what you do for a living, and that can't be faked, no matter the brand of wacky sauce poured on top for seasoning bland personalities. My friends and I felt alive. Are you? We became adept at reading children's real intellectual levels, and that's somehow another layer of threatening for the demented at heart. Here in town, we watched a sick woman smack her ADD son cringing on the floor at our community center in the middle of the day, in front of many witnesses. It was a shockingly familiar sight to anyone from this area: a stick-thin young woman with challenged kids, greasy hair, and a shitty attitude (she has a Down Syndrome girl, too) freaks out whenever she feels stress, which is all-day every day.
The gossip that circulated through us followed suit in a typically dysfunctional pattern we grew up with, too. She was in the middle of a ferocious battle with the teachers at the elementary school next door to our library/community center, because she refused to acknowledge what any two-year-old already knew: she's sick, and so are her kids. Duh. Of course he's "Special Needs"! But just like every rabid bitch we hated as kids, here she was again, haunting the very places we hold dear, like some nightmare merry-go-round in Hell. Hadn't we killed, er, pushed out all these bitches already? Birth control is practically free!
Much like a pseudo-debate over healthcare, it's not really about her kid and his needs, because we've already designed circles around it as an issue, when she finally decides to pull her head out of her own stick-figure ass. Who can tell? She pretended to almost run me over when I crossed at a corner near town, to give me the creeps (just in case I failed at her five million other warning signs that are as obvious as daylight at noontime), by pretending to search for something in her car. We have that on satellite photo, BTW. Look for it! Anywho, like any self-loathing drama queen, her weirdo displays are more about her strange lesbo displays someone has to actually notice, like when she comes into the library in her anorexic day-wear, to bend over until one of the gay women working here notices her bending over to put books into the return slot that should normally take a few seconds. Ugh...great. That's motherhood?!
Body fat is also a no-no among many "sports dykes" and the women who love/hate them. Also, you shouldn't date a closeted women who tricked some poor guy (perhaps deeply closeted, as well) into mating with her poorly, but you should know that from our lessons already, kid. It happens to us everywhere. When I moved into my new residence, I knew within minutes which neighbor was sick with what, and their children, too. It's rather easy to discern, like a physician with a tiny hammer timing your reactions from knocking your knee. The Hispanics upstairs did everything they possibly could, as backwards as possible. They made a kid without marriage, broke up, then he moved in his little girlfriend who preferred shopping to mothering (because they're barely out of their teens! Yay!), which she then telegraphed to everyone in the neighborhood by making his little girl into a pedophiles' sick delight, with outfits cut just a bit too short, so that her boyfriend's ex would suffer from her daughters' molestation that would certainly affect her throughout her life, and that was BEFORE I noticed her obvious developmental issues.
First, it was the girls obvious short attention span (easy: blame los Americanos with their sugar and fast food diet), then blame our high price of living telegraphed by obvious parental neglect (so they could leave their girl vulnerable to the house drunks downstairs by pleading poverty for their cheapo babysitting services, having the large man paw the young girl right in front of me on the houses porch, which I clearly documented), and then finally, I met the girl herself, desperate for a real adult to teach her something about life. She picked me out as a safe person quickly, ringing my bell for healthy food and drinks, which I readily had, like home-popped popcorn and seltzer water with fresh lemon slices. She loved my treats, even asking me for more, which I happily gave her in a plastic container that I never got back, in case I didn't get all the other messages transmitted to me that they could care less about me and her, what with their sulking, pouting, drinking, and active chain-smoking social lives to live.
The poor girl was also a shut-in, not leaving the house except for school, and that attendance seemed tepid and short-lived, too. As soon as the young couple could, they farmed out her daycare to babysitters and a series of shifty-looking "nannies", because that's what junior mechanics and their desk-jockey girlfriends do in this century, besides nursing a serious shoe fetish widely telegraphed in the house garbage cans (because they don't recycle, duh. They're "too busy" for that!), but one call to their friend and a Spanish woman will pick up your bottle returns, because the house drunk told me that. "Oh, yeah! We recycle here! Just let so-and-so upstairs know, and he'll call his friend. She picks through the garbage for bottles. You ain't gotta worry 'bout nuthin'. Put 'em in the two pails in the back with no lids, and they'll see it." Huh. I see. Hiding beer bottles and alcoholism, eh? Neat trick!
Their daughter also never played outside, or went to the little playground with picnic tables that are right here in the center of town, or got ice cream nearby like every kid here does in the summer with their parents, nor did she ride her bike openly in the driveway, or play in the yard like any other girl her age would do. She didn't have friends come over, either. She told me she had a sibling who didn't go out, because he "didn't feel good", so he stay inside a lot. Right! I could tell. As she sat at my kitchen table, I asked her to draw me anything she wanted. She couldn't. I asked her to spell her name for me. Nope! Did she know the letters A, B, or C? No! She fidgeted and bounced around my apartment, flitting from object to object, finally swiping them from my coffee table in anger, and then putting them back when my back was turned for a few seconds, which was the one practiced trick she had up her sleeves. When I asked her age, she told me she was six, but she didn't really know. Ah...
After new neighbors moved in, we had two families in our household with small children, and they couldn't be more different. The first time I met little Eli, he played happily in the yard while I became acquainted with his father, cheerfully picking up different stones and rocks to show me. I kept his little gifts in my hands, until his father noticed and asked him to put them down. As a symbol of recognition about their vast differences intellectually and developmentally (because everything is a big fucking secret, I guess), I lined up little Eli's rocks underneath the railing on "my side" of the porch (I don't actually own the house, which makes territorial markings doubly weird!), the same side of the house his parents kept their car parked that they drove everyday, so they would at least know that I knew. He'd sorted rocks by their size, shape, type, and color. At two. Yeah. Different. That's it, right?
