Brokenness

Thursday was one of the most emotionally upsetting day of my teaching career so far. In one of my classes, a girl was having so much trouble with drawing in perspective, so that was no problem. I like perspective drawings - it's sort of like math. We were working out her drawing together. Then, while I was helping her, the other students at her table started blatantly bullying her right in front of me - shoving rulers into her forehead - really ignorant stuff. They stopped temporarily with a "Seriously?" from me, but my heart just broke for this girl. What can I do to help her be accepted in her class?

In another class, one of the students had requested that I bring in some of my art to show them. So as students were making art, I went around and brought the disengaged students over one at a time to see one of my paintings. It's a painting that I did in Grade 12 - I thought there would be a better connection with something that I did in highschool than one of my more recent works. It's called Breaking the Bars of AIDS.

It's a story of a boy whose parents have passed away from AIDS, represented in bone-like shapes on the red butterfly's right wing. The bars symbolize stigma in society against children of people with AIDS - here, my high school students connected best with the painting. They understood too well the unfairness of pain faced by a child because of choices their parents made. The left wing of the butterfly shows the boys future education flying away due to these stigmas. Yet there is a hole in the bars, symbolizing a hope for a way out of this tragic situation. Most of my students were really interested in seeing some of my work. It was neat to see the wheels going around in some of their heads thinking, "Maybe I could do real art in high school?".

Then the next slap in the face moment happened. One of my students made an extremely racist and hurtful comment about the boy in my painting. I was reeling. My housemate, and one of my best friends, is black. She's lost many of her aunts and uncles to AIDS. I know that I'm likely highly sheltered, but I've never run into racism like that before - it was like I was running into a brick wall at top speed and falling flat on my back with the wind knocked out of me. I didn't know what to say. I should have taken him to the principal on the spot. I still want to find a way for him to meet my housemate and learn that the horrible things he's learned from home about black people are simple not true. I really need to prepare a list of automatic responses to things like that, because I just wasn't prepared for that.

I returned to bopping around the art class, re-engaging students who were off task. I soon found one girl staring at the floor looking like she was going to cry. So I sat down on the floor where she was looking, and asked her what was going on. The story that unfolded broke my heart. So many things messed up and going wrong, and so few solutions that I could see. After we talked for a few minutes, I was able to set her up with a bit of charcoal to work on a drawing. She made a heart and then ripped her paper up. She told me on wednesday that she was quitting the class, but I hope she stays. I've just started to get to know her, and I know there is so much she could do with art. I know it could help her work through some of these challenges in life.

After school, I went to the mall. There was sale at Le Chateau, and I was hoping to pick up a dress for a wedding on Saturday. I was hungry, so I grabbed a salad at the food court, and looked for a place to have a quick dinner. I really don't like eating alone, so my general food court strategy to find a random person who is also sitting alone and join them for dinner. I saw a sweet looking older woman, and I asked if I could join her. I was just making conversation, so I asked her why she was at the mall. She told me she had grief counselling that evening, and she didn't want to go home because she knew if she went home she wouldn't bother cooking for herself, and she'd just end up over eating on junk food. She'd just lost her husband and one of her parents, her sister has breast cancer, and she is experiencing health problems from all the stress. It was good to be able to listen and offer some encouragement to this woman, but I am emotionally worn out.

Our world is so messed up, and I feel so powerless to piece it back together. These beautiful people are as fragile as eggshells, and they have been stepped on so many times. Is there a way I can return dignity to a girl who feels stupid and unwanted by her peers? Is the a way I can show a boy who has probably never even met a black person that racism is wrong and far from the truth? Is there a way I can help a girl piece together a life that is shattered in so many relational ways? Is there a way I can help a grieving woman get by? It feels like too big of a job. I know there's small things I can do to make things a little better than they were yesterday for these beautiful but broken people. But I can't fix everything, and that's really hard to accept.