IMPORTANT MESSAGE TO RACHEL REGARDING NORWAY (And A First Day Analysis for Everyone Else)

Yeah, first day of school!

Kind of!

You know.

First day of being in a school to learn about teaching, instead of to learn about things.

And it was pretty great.

I think I have too many thoughts about it to write down. They're all just kind of swirling around in my head right now. I had a lot of questions I didn't get to ask my lovely host teacher (I'll just call her Mrs. S), and probably a lot of things we just didn't get to talk about. Because there's so much to talk about.

In Miyamura High School, about 80% of the students are Native Americans, 10-15% are either Mexican or Arab, and the remaining 5% are white students. It's a pretty eye-opening experience to be in the minority, even though many of the teachers themselves are white.

I did some working with kids taking Spanish One during the day. It was pretty weird to be called Ms. Stanley. I think that's probably something I'll just have to get used to. We were working on a review where the students had to fill in the blanks about their vacations. I think the question I was most asked was, "How do you spell 'vacations' in Spanish?"

When we started out the day, the students were very talkative. Mrs. S just let them go off on tangent after tangent. I was really confused, because they weren't talking about anything related to school, or Spanish, and most of the topics seemed very inappropriate for school conversations. But soon they all got settled and Mrs. S called me over to her desk.

"Do you know why I just let them talk for so long?" she asked me. I told her no, and that I honestly had no idea why she did that. She said, "It was for you. It was for you to see all the problems these kids face, that kids in high school shouldn't be facing. It was so you could see that school maybe is the most stable place these kids have."

Because what I had thought of as just inappropriate conversations were actually things that these kids deal with. Drugs and homelessness and their own children and abuse and countless other things that are mostly still stuck in the unimaginable part of my brain.

These things aren't just issues in the high school, but in the younger grades as well. Hannah, who works with the middle school told us at dinner that there was a student absent from one of her classes today, and all the other kids just blatantly told her that "he was in juvie." A middle schooler. I think Hannah summed up all of our feelings when she said, "I just wish we could all give Gallup a hug."

After school, I got a chance to talk with Mrs. S in a room not filled with students. I asked her how she deals with such rambunctious classes and students. And I guess it wouldn't be a good learning experience if the answer didn't make me cry.

She said: "You know, the kids who act out the most are usually the ones who have the hardest, least stable home lives. Break can be a stressful time for them, especially such a long one. When they act out and I respond--even by just teasing them--it gives them validation, a sort of recognition that they're still a person and that they still matter. You know [that boy]? He is physically abused at home. All the time. Constantly. And he just expects it now; it's normal to him. He just puts on that face, the one that says, "nothing can touch me" and that's why he acts out. And [that girl]? She got kicked out of her house the day before break. Where was she going to go for Christmas? She's resentful, and she acts out. These kids, they just need someone to show them that they still matter, and if acting out gets that validation for them, I'm just going to have to deal with it."

I.... I just want to do something important. Like help a kid. Or help all the kids. You can't help all the kids. This school district has so many open positions, it's crazy. All they need is more people. More people to care about these kids. All the teachers want to be in a good school, with a good area, where there are no problems, but those aren't the places that need teachers. Places like Gallup need the teachers. These kids can do so much, but they're missing the people who realize it.

So maybe instead of moving to Norway, I'll move to New Mexico. They probably need me more than Norway anyway.