“Police Department Arrests Three violent fugitives.” This post came up on my feed yesterday. I knew what it was going to be right away and I could see three mug shots but I didn’t recognize a face. This was posted by one of the few former students I have as a friend on FB and I scan up to the top of the post and see she has written: “ben :,(” I read the article and it all clicks, but not until I read the first and last name then look again at the picture. Yes, the largest picture in the photo array was a student of mine maybe only as few as two or three years ago but I didn’t recognize his face. Clearly he has been through a lot and it has changed him. And there are quite a few charges…
Ben… age 19…
…was wanted for violent crime…on 02/01/2016. …was wanted for Assault in the First Degree, Possession of Marijuana With Intent to Distribute, Possession of a Firearm and Carrying a Firearm.
The detectives found..and also seized a semi-automatic handgun under the suspects mattress. The gun was reported stolen last year in Holyoke.
charges ..
a) Fugitive From Justice
b) Receiving Stolen Firearm
c) Carrying a Firearm
d) Possession of Ammo
e) Improper Storage of Firearm
If I am going to be honest, I don’t care about the weed charge, but the rest of it leaves me not knowing how to feel.
I’m glad he’s been arrested. I don’t want anyone else hurt and I don’t want him hurt. I hope he can get some help through the system, maybe he can at least learn a lesson. I don’t condone anything he did but I also don’t want him dead. He’s not a throw away person, none of my students have been.
But I can’t help but think – what a knucklehead – ran from the law and was found at his recorded address? He just went home thinking he wouldn’t get caught? This is the disease of adolescence, thinking you can’t be touched, bad things can’t happen to you.
But I can’t help but think – how does he think it’s okay to hurt people? Who did he assault and why? Was he that cold? What were the guns for? What was his plan? This was a child I had in my classes in front of me and I remember butting heads with him, there was a time or two he was kicked out of class and I don’t remember if I passed or failed him, but he wasn’t bad in front of me. He wasn’t hurtful to his classmates, he was moderately respectful to me. I can remember at times getting him to crack a smile when I used goofy humor as my way to both redirect behavior of his and connect to him and connect him to the work. He’d have his wall up then I could get him to break into a smile and soften.
And here he is, only 19 and he’ll spend some time in jail. I don’t know what difficulties he has gone through, what anger he carried around, or fear, that caused him to make consistently bad choices. I don’t know how his life has hardened him so he cannot have the same compassion I do. I don’t wish any of it for him and I wish things could be different.
I want to reach out to the former student who posted that feed and tell her that her sadness for him, for a loosing a friend, is justified even though he hurt others and made his choices. It wasn’t her choice to loose a friend this way.
I wonder what they think. Sometimes I’m trying to get a kid “to care,” “to get invested in his future” and I know I just don’t get it. I had a safe, warm, full bellied childhood. One where, most importantly, I was told I could do anything and I saw almost no death. People around me grew up and chose a future for themselves.
Instead of what I saw growing up, they see their peers die. These kids know more dead people at their age then I know now and a lot of them were young when they died. Their friends get shot in gang wars that they are either caught up in or they are simply a random victim, sometimes they are there, at the New Year’s Eve party, or simply walking down the street, they live in the same neighborhood. Sometimes its a student’s young nephew that is murdered and she knows his life and the life of her sister who did the crime is forever ruined.
I think for them it must be hard sometimes to plan for a future they just have no faith in. The chances of them dying young or ending up in jail is pretty strong.
When I open my eyes and I really look, I see that attitude in some kids. They love “yolo” because sometimes the consequences are only going to be harsh for them no matter what they try to do with their very limited resources. But if I open my eyes I also have to see the kids that are planning on a future, damned be anything that stands in their way or they simply plod ahead, keeping their chins up, day by day. The very fact that they keep going with what they are faced with, despite their flaws, the way they still show such kindness and compassion even thought they are afraid it is a weakness that will be exploited, they wont let it be snuffed out of them.
I work where I work for the Bens and for his friends who will mourn his life wasted, for the students that will buck the system every step of the way and fail my class and maybe drop out, for the students who enter our IB program and go away to college to “do great things” and our students who face onslaught and keep going. The population I work with is beautiful and they deserve teachers who understand and respect and sometimes even revere them.
I’m writing this blog and calling it “The Last 90 Days” but I grapple endlessly and every day with the decision. Every time I’m faced with the hardest days, finding out I shared my classroom with in a gun toting criminal, or managing emotions on a day that starts with a student being in a severe car accident, or loosing it in tears in the hallway after hearing the most tragic and faith-in-humanity-loosing story from one of my students, I second guess leaving. I know these students need and deserve me. They need about fifty of me. And my breed of teacher is dying like flies.
Can I stay another year in these trenches, helping people I really care about? And help my family? And myself? And follow my writing where ever it will lead me?
I know it’s not them I want to leave. If only things were different…If being a caretaker were simpler, if I could do my job without being over swept with inane policies that don’t help my students, cause more workload and stress for me, and often are even counter productive to my students all in the name of me proving I’m a good teacher and providing data…
But it’s not. It all is what it is. Can I do another year???