My oyster

You know how really successful people sometimes say that they put their pants on one leg at a time? The other morning, I was getting dressed using this technique. The only problem was that I put the first leg into the wrong pantleg! You may correctly surmise that I am not a really successful person from this true anecdote. Hey, if I could make stuff up, I'd be an unsuccessful novelist, instead of an unsuccessful blogger whose entire readership can be linked to me through genetic fingerprinting.

People have called me an under-achiever. “You're too smart to be doing that kind of work.” “Why don't you go back to school?” On bad days, I will join this chorus. Why do I a job that I share with some laughably and scarily unimpressive people, whose antics and failings I could put down here, but I would be opening myself up to lawsuits? Trust me, the stories I could tell... So why do I find myself in their company? Am I just lazy?

If I'm going to be absolutely honest, I do have to own up to being less than an energy powerhouse. Once I was even fired from a restaurant I worked at, not for slacking off, but for saying to someone who asked that I would never want to be the manager because it was too much work and I was too lazy. Restauranteurs are among the last supporters of the suppression of workers' rights. Which is one reason I eventually did go back to school to take a course in Child and Youth work. It has solved the problem of unethical employers for the most part. My main motivation, though, was that I wanted to do something of more significance than just preparing that meal that you didn't feel like cooking. I envisioned myself working in the mean streets, in some gritty urban environment, rescuing teens who were battling for their lives against addiction and exploitation. But here I am, many years later, finding my true joy in working with primary school students. Struggles they have in plenty, but a lot of it involves forming their letters and stringing them into words and sentences. So have I succeeded in my career?

I really liked school when I was young. I like the learning part of it anyways, and found it very easy, but I was often overwhelmed by the social situations. I was very shy when I was younger, and I didn't get a lot of positive reinforcement from my teachers. I didn't get a lot of anything, actually. A couple of times people have told me that such and such teacher thought that I was one student in a million or some kind of hyperbolic comment, but they never said it to me. Far less did any teacher I ever had make me feel liked and accepted. They never made me feel special or gifted or like anything at all. If they tried to, they weren't using any language that I was listening to. School was just another place to be unseen by the adults in my life.

The playwright Eve Ensler said “When we give the world what we want most, we save ourselves.” That's what I want to do. EI try to give every child that I work with at least a little part of me, looking right at them, and showing them that I like what I see. I will who catch Zeinab's eye when passing her in the hallway and am rewarded by the appearance of a dimple. I'll look at non-reader Toby's puzzle drawings and hears the stories of the characters he sees in them (“This guy can breathe underwater, but he didn't know he could..this guy is the father and he's sending his son to his room because he failed a test..”). I get it when Hend with a background of family trauma asks me to read Scaredy Squirrel with her for the third time in as many days (“If all else fails, play dead..”) I love it that Amelia's friendship club has rules like “Once you're in Friendship Club, you can never leave Friendship Club” (it's okay because F.C. takes Fridays off) and I spent a whole period once drawing and colouring bamboo shoots for her Panda Folder (that was during her early Panda phase).

I don't know if my students are going to remember me specifically when they get older. I don't really care. When I am with them, I show them that I see them. They are miraculous in their individuality and complexity and I try to make sure that they know it. That's not such a bad way to make a living, is it?