art class and shooter drills
I volunteered in the art room at my son’s school yesterday. I helped 4th graders make ceramic pots and I helped 1st graders cut out and design clay fish. I know I’m great with little kids - I have the type of energy and silliness that little kids really appreciate, but I have such little experience with older kids, I wasn’t sure how it was going to go. To my surprise, the 4th graders were such a delight - all questions and giggles, but calm and studious at the same time.
I watched as one incredibly sharp neurodiverse kid started the class with absolute attention and enthusiasm, and within minutes, devolved into wandering around the classroom, unable to sit in his chair and finish the task. He kept calling me over and I helped him delve his thumb into the clay, pushing outwards to make the shape of a bowl. He kept looking at me in a pleading sort of way, like he had so many questions in his brain, just beyond his mouth, but he couldn’t get them to connect. He didn’t have the patience to decorate the clay plants inside, and wandered off to read the signs all over the room, but the girl who was sitting next to him was entranced in the assignment, laboring over the most beautiful and precise elm leaf clay etchings.
When they filed out, I helped clean off all the tables and attempted gossip with the teacher. “Tell me which are rough and which are exceptional.”
“The pots or the kids?” she clarified.
“The KIDS!” I pointed at each empty chair and told her what I loved about each of the kids who were sitting there a minute before and realized I hadn’t met a single kid that I didn’t wholeheartedly enjoy that morning - they were all so congenial! From the fella who insisted on making clay basil because his “grandmother makes her spaghetti with fresh basil” to the little guy who decorated an outrageously convincing Venus Flytrap out of clay, including menacing teeth, to the girl who kept calling me over because her clay cactus kept falling, I loved ‘em all!!!! I wondered if I were a full-time teacher if I could maintain the type of enthusiasm I had for the kids that day, or like with parenting, you get tired, and sort of disillusioned, and stop responding to every “MOMMY LOOK!!!!” with the loony, zealous spirit of Edmund Hillary cresting Everest, like the first 700 times they say it to you.
As I stood at the sink, in between classes, washing clay off of tools, a message came over the loudspeaker.
“We are now starting our practice emergency drill. Lock the classroom doors and do not open them until the drill is over.”
A security guard wearing a stuffed camel on his hat with the sign “HUMP DAY” came to the door, jiggling it hard to make sure it was locked. Hot tears sprang to my eyes as I imagined my little 1st grader hiding under his desk in his classroom mere feet away from me, teeth newly all asunder, the little guy who flies into my room at 6:45am, his morning erection pointing the way as he flops in between us for a cuddle. He gave me a million kisses when he ran into the art room and saw me there, knocking me over with hugs. I asked the art teacher how they explained these drills to the children, whether they said the horrible truth of it all.
“The 5th graders know it’s for live shooters, but the younger kids don’t. It’s the same protocol as if a live wild animal came onto our campus, so we just tell them that’s what it’s for - in case of a bear, or a coyote, wandering in.”
I imagined my son hiding at one end of the room, silently poking at his friends, giggling at the supposed silliness of the situation - a bear! just wandering around school! - and wondered how much longer I had left to keep the real and constant and true terrors of the world out of his field of vision. I remember the images a Ukrainian photographer I followed in the beginning of the war shared of the tent he and his son lived in, in the parking lot beneath their apartment building. He wrote that the kids felt it as one big adventure in the beginning - they get to scoot around their parking lot with headlamps, and sleep in a tent with their parents. It was his job to keep it fun for his kid, despite his world crumbling around his own peripheral vision. Here, in America, I have the extreme privilege of often feeling like a human set of horse tack, a pair of blinders, arms outstretched, covering the bad parts and only showing the good of the world, for now.
Preventing him from getting spooked.