Teacher Teacher
IF HOLDEN CAULFIELD WERE IN MY CLASSROOM. What a great title! I open the first few pages and am pulled into a middle school classroom, kid by kid.
Bullies who reveal they want to be loved.
Exhibitionists who reveal they miss their dad and will do anything to draw him back into their lives.
Angry kids who reveal the sadness that was born because they were separated from their birth parents.
Bernie Schein teaches in a small school -- just 750 kids. Paideia, near Atlanta. It feels like SUMMERHILL. My mother was going for her degree in Childhood Education, and I would read her books wherever she set them down. SUMMERHILL was about an experimental school, and very creative, fascinating kids. I wanted to go there. I wanted to grow up and teach there. I wanted to find a college eventually that would be like Summerhill. None of that happened.
I was also pulled into another book my mother left around -- the very dangerous THE THROWAWAY CHILDREN by Philly attorney Lisa Richette. The kids were the same age as me. They had the same pain, born of similar sexual abuse and violence. I read, and I wondered what would happen if I acted out like they did. I trapped it all down, sublimated with reading. Tears and tantrums and speaking out were absolutely forbidden to me. So I read about Lisa's kids, and I wept, and experienced at least some of the rage that really should have been expressed.
My mother got to take a lot of interesting classes. One was ceramics. She was tired of teaching school during the day, taking classes at night, and having three kids of her own. Sometimes, whether I was in elementary school, junior high or high school, she would let me come "teach" with her and in the summer, be a camp counselor. I loved those three year olds! My mother would tell me after class that one little boy -- the one who dressed up in ladies' clothes, played house and talked with a lisp -- was likely gay. One of my campers, when I was sixteen, was a little girl who had twisted bald spots in her hair. The three-year old would suck her thumb incessantly. Her father would thrust a tip into my bathing suit top between my tiny breasts. I told my mother we had to do something for her, that her father must be doing bad things to her. The little girl was tough and strong even at three. But nothing was done. I do the math sometimes, to figure out how old she would be now, and wonder if she made it.
My mother didn't have time for all her homework, and my stepfather, being a creative man, often did it for her. The ceramics class, for example. I came home from junior high one day, and there was a nude torso sitting on the kitchen counter. He had molded it out of clay. It was of my body.
I felt ill. But I didn't know until decades later when I picked up a book called WOMEN, SEX AND ADDICTION by Charlotte Kasl at one of my radio stations -- opening to a chapter about Margot, whose father painted her nude body -- that this was wrong. So very wrong.
What if I had had a teacher like Bernie Schein. I wonder...
Bullies who reveal they want to be loved.
Exhibitionists who reveal they miss their dad and will do anything to draw him back into their lives.
Angry kids who reveal the sadness that was born because they were separated from their birth parents.
Bernie Schein teaches in a small school -- just 750 kids. Paideia, near Atlanta. It feels like SUMMERHILL. My mother was going for her degree in Childhood Education, and I would read her books wherever she set them down. SUMMERHILL was about an experimental school, and very creative, fascinating kids. I wanted to go there. I wanted to grow up and teach there. I wanted to find a college eventually that would be like Summerhill. None of that happened.
I was also pulled into another book my mother left around -- the very dangerous THE THROWAWAY CHILDREN by Philly attorney Lisa Richette. The kids were the same age as me. They had the same pain, born of similar sexual abuse and violence. I read, and I wondered what would happen if I acted out like they did. I trapped it all down, sublimated with reading. Tears and tantrums and speaking out were absolutely forbidden to me. So I read about Lisa's kids, and I wept, and experienced at least some of the rage that really should have been expressed.
My mother got to take a lot of interesting classes. One was ceramics. She was tired of teaching school during the day, taking classes at night, and having three kids of her own. Sometimes, whether I was in elementary school, junior high or high school, she would let me come "teach" with her and in the summer, be a camp counselor. I loved those three year olds! My mother would tell me after class that one little boy -- the one who dressed up in ladies' clothes, played house and talked with a lisp -- was likely gay. One of my campers, when I was sixteen, was a little girl who had twisted bald spots in her hair. The three-year old would suck her thumb incessantly. Her father would thrust a tip into my bathing suit top between my tiny breasts. I told my mother we had to do something for her, that her father must be doing bad things to her. The little girl was tough and strong even at three. But nothing was done. I do the math sometimes, to figure out how old she would be now, and wonder if she made it.
My mother didn't have time for all her homework, and my stepfather, being a creative man, often did it for her. The ceramics class, for example. I came home from junior high one day, and there was a nude torso sitting on the kitchen counter. He had molded it out of clay. It was of my body.
I felt ill. But I didn't know until decades later when I picked up a book called WOMEN, SEX AND ADDICTION by Charlotte Kasl at one of my radio stations -- opening to a chapter about Margot, whose father painted her nude body -- that this was wrong. So very wrong.
What if I had had a teacher like Bernie Schein. I wonder...
Labels: Bernie Schein, camp counselor, Charlotte Kasl, classroom, Holden Caulfield, IF HOLDEN CAULFIELD WERE IN MY CLASSROOM, mothers, school, SEX AND ADDICTION, stepfather., WOMEN
posted by Diana Page Jordan @ 9:50 PM
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