Happy Friday the 13th

Ms. Güerita is beautiful.
We love her so much.
She is a wonderful teacher.

-Tara

There is very little as humbling as turning around and seeing that had been written on my blackboard when I wasn't looking. Tara is thirteen years old and in the 4th grade. She has an undiagnosed reading problem (I spent about four hours doing and redoing the paperwork last week to try and make sure that she finally getsdiagnosed and helped). If I read a selection to her and ask her questions about it orally, she does fine. If I give her a selection to read by herself and have her answer written questions on her own, well, that's another story. She slipped through the cracks. And when she is sixteen and has (maybe) just made it to the seventh grade, she will most likely drop out. Who the hell wants to graduate high school at... well, she can't graduate before age twenty at this point.

It touches me really deeply that Tara wrote that. Tara is a girl that I suppose the typical middle-class white American would see as a hardened ghetto girl. I haven't done anything out of the ordinary for this girl, except treat her with dignity. I don't want to think that treating her with respect is something out of the ordinary.

There are two other thirteen year old girls in 4th grade. One is Demetria. Demetria failed first grade twice, second grade once, and fourth grade once. I am also working on the paperwork for her special education referral. She was transitioned out of a bilingual classroom at some point in her educational career (at another school), but she still can't speak English at an academic level. Since she has transitioned, though, we are not permitted to put her back in even a transitional bilingual classroom, which is what I teach. She is with my team teacher in an English-only class. She is actively asking for help with her English and for Spanish support in her studies. She is quiet and gentle and beautiful.

Rosario is fully bilingual, fluent and unaccented in both English and Spanish, as are all her brothers and sisters. She is respectful, responsible, and engaging. She is the other thirteen year old 4th grader. Every child in her family has a reading problem that is yet undiagnosed. I am also doing her paperwork for special education services. She has, like Tara and Demetria, failed several other grades.

I don't know what to say. I really love these girls and the future I see for them includes dropping out, having babies way too young, working shitty jobs, and becoming their mothers. This shouldn't be happening. Someone should have caught this sooner. They should be going to their first middle school dances and dreaming of high school. Or sitting in the bleachers talking about what a bunch of shallow jerks the football team and cheerleading squad are. But here they are, with me, in elementary school.

Oh, yeah, they took down the razor wire from around my school because someone is filming a documentary in the area and it doesn't look nice. Not sure how I feel about that.