May of 1994 I volunteered
as a teacher’s aide,
that’s what we were called then,
at a middle school
so that I could accumulate
the necessary hours working
with children with disabilities
I knew would make me
attractive to the NH State
Hospital’s child psychiatric
program, which I was told
would pay for my college
in full upon being hired
full-time.
I worked for free full-time
for about four months
in a self-contained special
needs program,
where I learned
how to implement
behavior plans
and ran group lessons,
and I even developed
an ecology program
kids could earn
with good behavior,
which was basically
just me leading a walk
in the woods
out back the school,
where we wondered about
psychological and
philosophical connections
between nature and society,
though in truth it was really
just an hour
to dump some anxiety.
Most days were a mix of
pleasantly surprised and
predictably stressful and toxic:
Students throwing work
across the room,
adults consistently being
slandered and assaulted,
staff being ignored,
most of them either talked
down to and minimized by
favored teachers and admin
with displaced aggression
and sheltered egos, or flattered
with token compliments
meant to stave off guilt
and shame, all to nobly, and
in martyr-like fashion keep
hope and success only
about the kids, while
blocking competition,
all of it salted with gossip
about how, not only did the kids
both hate and love teachers,
but of how parents couldn’t stand
educators as well, alongside
the usual education vs.
schooling debate all over media
at the time. That’s still a thing.
Only now there’s a third in play.
Now, some would say, it’s
education vs. schooling vs.
child care.
Anyway, they must have liked
what I did because they offered
me a paid position at the
elementary school I later told
myself I’d never return to, I did,
which came at just the right time,
because the state hospital
opportunity fell through
when they started hiring
only part-timers, encouraged
more unpredictable scheduling,
stopped offering health insurance
and dropped the college incentive.
I don’t remember the staff room
being overly duplicitous.
We joked and teased
one another with banter
and praised each other’s work
and were thankful to be
collaborating and visiting
each other’s unique little worlds
and sharing in each other’s goals.
It was an interdependent kind of
community. It really was.
That was a good time
to be an assistant. Sure,
you still experienced vicarious
or incident trauma every day,
and you still made a poverty wage,
but you could still afford to live
alone in a single bedroom,
and generic food at the grocery
store was still cheap at that time.
Most paras too weren’t required
to have college experience
or degrees, so to land a job
with full benefits, predictable
hours and vacations like that
with no education beyond high
school was almost luxurious,
compared to retail, restaurant
and hospitality work, and it filled
that selfless, compassionate,
humanitarian and humanistic
need to blend professionalism
with doing good and being a kind
of hero. In short, I felt lucky.
I can still see myself sitting
at the teacher’s table
in our classroom,
a shared meeting place
for staff to debrief,
and become informed
or just vent with
and get to know one another,
while we observed cherubs
with their faces in their books,
who just an hour earlier
needed to be restrained
because they were either
bashing their eggshell-thin
foreheads against a concrete wall
or biting into the forearm
of someone who tried to help them
wear a protective helmet,
each of us still wiping their loogies
and feces off our clothes, amazed,
in our shared suffering,
that we hadn’t puked yet.
That first year in 1994
I remember the crazy swings
of being a paraprofessional,
of fireman’s carrying eloping kids
by myself down the street
and back into the building,
the walk home,
turning that first loving corner
where the school disappeared,
the smell of old, wise wood
in my apartment,
sitting in safety in front of
somebody’s thrown out,
black and white TV
with rabbit ears,
practicing karate in my dojo
for hours before bed
as a way of constructively
putting myself down,
and how just before the end
of the school year I was always
so glad during the early morning
to be awoken by old man katydid
rubbing his wings outside
my bedroom window,
a reminder that summer was here,
and that I still had a nature
to come back to.