Clear channel
Field notes from an urban middle school.
Dear reader,
A writer writes to find out what he thinks about something, James Baldwin said. I’m finding that’s true about my job. During my site visits as a restorative specialist for my county’s public schools, there’s so much going on in any given moment, at so many different levels. It can feel confusing, overwhelming. Writing about it helps.
I share this piece also as a tribute: to the teachers and administrators who show up everyday to the Gordian knot we call “school,” and to the students, who are my teachers.
Also, some good news and bad news. The bad news: I’d been planning on hosting an open house Zoom on October 20, which I have to cancel. The good news: There’s a wonderful reason for this, which I’ll share here soon enough. Suffice it to say for now that with my current work/family commitments, I suddenly have less time on my hands. So I’m doing some housekeeping to account for that, which includes making a few changes here in the Courtyard, namely: I won’t be able host the October open house and have to let go of the biannual Founding Member Zooms as well. I wanted to be upfront about this to give Founding Members a chance to update their subscriptions if that feels appropriate considering this new adjustment.
As always, thank you for reading. And thank you for you.
Sincerely,
Andrew
P.S. Paying subscribers can scroll below the paywall on this piece to listen.
I am a clear channel of radiant peace.
I’ve been looking for a good mantra lately, and these words dropped in yesterday when I was stretching after a run. I’m reading a booklet on mantras right now. Yogananda. He says words can be like magic spells: if you speak them with conviction and sincerity, over and over again, they have the power to affect reality.
I think this is verifiably true. Like that day back in June when Tana and I were walking down the street and this older man asked us for money. I put up my prayer-hands and bowed my head silently “No” and he spat, with conviction, sincerity, “You’re not helping people! You don’t know what this is like! I hope something bad like this happens to you someday!”
It didn’t not affect my reality.
I am a clear channel of radiant peace.
I’d like to believe it. But what happens when we waver in our conviction and sincerity? When we speak the words but don’t actually believe them?
When I say this particular mantra, it makes me think of all the times I’ve been a channel of something other than radiant peace. Suddenly I hear a new mantra come in—I am trying to be a clear channel of radiant peace—which definitely feels less potent. Or worse, I hear another voice altogether—I am a self-deceiving fraud—which is potent, certainly, but not in the way I’m looking for.
I am a clear channel of radiant peace.
I am a clear channel of radiant peace.
Do we deceive ourselves or reveal ourselves, with words like these? Are we covering or uncovering who we are?
I do think our words can serve as the scouting party for the greater village that is the multitudinous self. Words scout out the way ahead. They lead our consciousness down a particular path of becoming. We go where they go, where they guide us.
Reminds me of a dear grandfather I met on my walk, Pat Dyea, a Laguna ceremonial dancer and community elder. He told me the story of his darkness after fighting in Vietnam, his agony and despair, and then how he met his first wife and found the light again, but when she passed away after many years of marriage it was darker than ever and he truly wanted to die.
He told his brother, “Every morning I wake up, I say, ‘One more day closer to death.’”
His brother ponders this. Raises an eyebrow. Says, “Hmm. Why don’t you say, ‘One more day closer to healing?’”
Pat starts saying this instead, every morning before he gets out of bed. One more day closer to healing. “At first I didn’t really believe what I was saying,” he told me. “I was just saying the words and they didn’t feel true. But then at some point, they started to feel real, and I started to heal.”
I am a clear channel of radiant peace.
I want to believe this. A part of me does. Part of me doesn’t. Part of me believes it’s much more complicated.
Radiant peace? Really? Get over yourself, man.
But maybe that voice is just another reason to say the words. I’m trying it on for size.
It’s a Thursday afternoon. I’m on the clock, visiting one of my county’s middle schools in my role as a restorative practices specialist for the public health department. Never been to this school before. I’m here to shadow one of the staff members. Mr. H. Find out how I might be able to help. Mr. H folds me into the flow. It’s only Day 3 of the new school year but stuff’s already popping off: the little breakdowns of communication that lead to bigger breakdowns of trust and respect that lead to behavioral breakdowns that can’t be ignored because someone could get hurt or already did.
I am a clear channel of radiant peace.
His job is not easy. That much becomes obvious right away.
What are you supposed to say to the little kid, a Black boy, who just hit a girl in the back of the head, who had just hit him, when he takes out his phone and shows you the fight he videotaped yesterday: his older brother assaulting the other guy who was threatening this kid, this scrawny, sweet-eyed 7th grader sprawled out on the couch like he doesn’t give a shit about anything but he can’t quite pull off the act because his sweetness still shines through those eyes? What do you say, when the kid is pulling up this video and you notice a picture of this very same boy holding a fat wad of cash, maybe $2,000? Mr. H says they think some boys are being used to run money around town. The boy was staying at his uncle’s house for a while, but got kicked out because he kept coming home too late. Word has it this child was sleeping under a bed at a friend’s house this summer. The boy tells Mr. H he’s staying at his dad’s now. Doesn’t say anything about mom.
So what do you say? What could you possibly offer this kid that would actually help him, given what he needs help with?
The radio in my mind starts to get staticky.
I am a clear channel of, trying to be a clear channel, I am, would like to be, radiant, something.
Then, my mind locks onto another radio station that’s coming through loud and clear.
I am a stranger to this boy.
I am a White man with positional authority in the room.
I am an adult who is getting paid to be here, who will go home as soon as the clock strikes 5.
This station is not untrue. But I try to find the mantra again.
I am a clear channel of radiant peace. I am a clear channel of radiant peace.
I bump fists with the kid when it’s time for him to go back to class. I call him by his name, which I hope counts for something.
Mr. H takes me into a different backroom. These backrooms are “the Office,” the place where kids get sent when the breakdowns start to spiral and combust. Another Black boy, slightly chubby with a frightened look on his face, is sitting at a table being questioned by three men, two White and one Black, adults in various roles at the school. The scene is uncomfortably reminiscent of an interrogation. The boy is accused of saying “Shut up” under his breath to one of the teachers. He denies this. He says that he said, “Oh my God.” He and I make eye contact for a quick second. I realize it adds another layer of vulnerability for him to have me here without his consent.
Imagine: you’re being held accountable by, say, your bosses, or your elders, for a little white lie you told, or for cutting someone off in traffic, or for ignoring the guy on the street who just asked you for help, and then a strange man walks in and starts observing your process.
“Who even is this guy?” the kid must be wondering. I try to make my eyes kind, let him know I’m not here to judge. Still, it’s awkward.
Mr. H is drawn out of the room for damage control in the hallway, another situation, and now it’s just me, the two other men, and this boy. The conversation-cum-interrogation is at an impasse. If the boy did say shut up, he can’t admit it now, or else admit also to lying.
It has to be okay, to mess up. There has to be space for that, for all of us. If there’s no space for that, no grace for it, then there’s no way to take accountability, because accountability starts by naming what we did, and why would we do that if we know we’ll be punished for it? These are delicate dynamics that I choose not to name right now. I am a guest here. This is my first visit and I want to be invited back.
So we all kind of just stall there in the room together, waiting for Mr. H to return. Finally, it just feels like common courtesy to go shake the kid’s hand, introduce myself.
I am a clear channel of radiant peace.
Sure you are.
He tells me his name when I ask, and then the awkward silence returns.
“So, besides this, how’s Day 3 going?” I try.
Suddenly he’s down to talk.
“Each day takes forever! I come in here at 8:00, and it feels like it should be 2:00 when it’s only 9:00. During the summer, it’s 8:00 and then suddenly it’s 2:00 and you don’t even notice the time passed.”
One of the teachers laughs, says he knows exactly what the kid is talking about. It seems like maybe the kid thinks the teacher is laughing at him, though.
“We understand how you feel,” I say, trying to translate the laughter, explain that he’s not alone in this struggle we call school, that we, the adults, are slogging through it as well and also kind of wish it was still summer.
The second teacher hasn’t said a word this whole time. Is just kind of there. I don’t blame him. It’s hard to find the words that can guide us through this thicket of distrust and hurt and fear back to the path of wherever it was we were going.
Where were we going again?
What is going on here? Why is there so much chaos in the schools I visit? What mantras are we telling ourselves that then determine our reality in these spaces?
In theory, school is a great idea and it should be fairly straightforward. You gather the youth together. Give them a teacher. The kids listen. The teacher teaches. The boys and girls learn what they need to know to flourish, prosper, and become the new stewards of society.
But this isn’t how it goes. Why?
I think it has to do with the mantras we choose to repeat and believe. The words that then dictate our experience of ourselves and of each other.
These kids are a pain in the ass. That mantra shapes the believer’s reality. The behaviors we see in any community are a reflection of what the people in that community believe about themselves and each other.
But I think there are other more basic reasons that can explain the chaos in schools. Such as: Little Buddy doesn’t have a place to sleep at night, and he’s embarrassed about that, and frightened at a level that he himself must not be aware of, must repress or else face the possibility of psychological collapse (wouldn’t you have a breakdown if you didn’t know where you were going to sleep tonight?) and so he’s doing everything he knows how to do to maintain some semblance of control, some shred of dignity, some assurance of safety, and if acting like a badass might make people think twice about messing with him in his vulnerable state, well, why not?
Little Buddy is a clear channel of radiant peace.
But it’s not just because of the kids that school doesn’t happen like we think it should. It’s also because Mr. ABC gets triggered when Little Buddy puts his head on the desk and pretends to snore like a badass, or talks back, or starts a fight. And who can blame Mr. ABC for getting triggered? It’s hard not to take it personally. Stay cool. And then the other kids in the class start to snicker and snort. Maybe a bunch of them start fake-snoring now, too, and it’s drowning out your lesson plan and drowning your ego, which starts to thrash. Maybe it brings back unpleasant memories of feeling disrespected when you were a kid, or maybe you were that kid once, the so-called problem child, and the way your teacher handled you was to bring the hammer down, so down your own hammer goes, onto Little Buddy, but Little Buddy’s got a hammer, too, and he slams back, and now you’re in a power struggle, and it’s not just you who Little Buddy is struggling against, it’s his father, or his uncles, or that teacher from two years ago, or the police, or the countless people over the course of generations who powered-over his ancestors, because the unresolved traumas of our past don’t just disappear, they get passed down, and they live out their longing for resolution through us, so now here you are, contending with the consequences of what hasn’t been resolved in not only your own life, and Little Buddy’s life, but in the lives that came before us, and it’s all live, right here in your classroom, and Little Buddy is not going to back down because he needs to be seen as a badass, because he’s afraid, because he doesn’t have a place to sleep at night.
Why doesn’t he have a place to sleep at night? That, too, can be traced back and back and back. To slavery. To genocide. To all the unhealed and now institutionalized wounds of Empire, which were (are) themselves the result of the mantras we tell ourselves about who we are and who the so-called “other” is, to us.
Chaos, as it manifests in the web of our relationships, doesn’t just “come out of nowhere” for “no good reason.” It doesn’t just randomly happen. It is the natural, predictable result of unresolved trauma. It is the pain, crying out for healing. For understanding. For justice, and love. Right here, right now, in the classroom with Little Buddy.
Mr. ABC is a clear channel of radiant peace. Not easy to live that mantra in a middle school these days. I think even Yogananda would struggle.
And let’s say you are a master. Great. Thank God you’re here. Still, you’re on for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, and you’ve got 25 kids in your class, 25 Little Buddies, each of them hiding the tender facts of their own humanity from a world they’ve learned by experience to fear. I mean, damn, you’d have to be a saint, to not shut down and get reactive. You’d have to be an ultra-marathoner, to not take it personally and just keep going. You’d have to be a magician, to somehow conjure out of this thin air an environment that makes every one of these kids feel safe, seen, heard, understood, and loved to the point that they can settle into the task of learning something like long division.
They exist, such teachers. Clear channels of radiant peace. I get to work with some of them. Watch them. Learn from them. Try to support them somehow, even if all I can do is say thank you.