With words written on wrists

I'm 26, a student teacher.  My first semester.  I've spent time subbing in distant districts, but this is my first class in which they'll see me week in and week out.

It's Monday, 9/10/12.  Suicide awareness day.  I wasn't aware until a student walked in with words written on his wrists.  The words triggered a memory of back in college as an undergrad.  I remembered events broadcast over Facebook, and I remembered people branding profiles and pictures with the acronym TWLOHA: To Write Love On Her Arms.  I had decided that the assumption underlying the acronym was that love was too beautiful to strike through; no one would willingly redact that word if it were already written there, on someone's arms.  Or wrists.  So the pen was treated as a bandage.  Highlighters and markers became the definitive way to show support for friends, family, or peers lost to early to their own devices.  Love.  That one, simple word was all it took to stop someone from striking through that spot.  Apparently, the name of the day changed, but the sentiment had remained.  I was remembering this when my student walked in with words written on his wrists.

About his past, I had gleaned the following facts: that he had lost his father to something.  Possibly an overdose or no chair to stand on which left a broken neck or lack of air; it could have been a slickened wrist with arteries that couldn't coagulate fast enough.  Whatever the cause, I didn't want to ask.

Death is not an easy topic.  But today, we're talking about something entirely different.  Adjectives.  Modifiers.  Descriptions.  And I don't want these things to be just words for my students anymore.  I want words to become bandages for the scars I know my students hide.  I want words to become reasons for waking up, or ways they can still see the sunrise as something that's beautiful, not just 6 AM.  But many barely know how to write let alone how the pen can become a bandage, but I don't have time to teach this.  Due to budget cuts and an emphasis on lessons designed to prepare students for tests, we have little time to explore why writing is important for the long term.  For a moment, I think about today and what it means, and I wonder if writing "Love" across school budgets would stop bureaucrats from slashing them.  And, besides, we have a test coming up.  This is something I've learned already in my short time here: we always have a test coming up.

But then my student walked in on suicide awareness day with words written on his wrists.  Words like "love", like "rest in peace", like "dear dad."  The finality of it is brutal.  But we have a test coming up, and I don't have time to talk to them about how the pen can become a way to understand the world.  I don't have time to explain how I use lines and letters and words to describe and understand how this world works, and I'm afraid that many will never come to understand the joy of placing a sunset on paper or making time slow down with the sound of a pencil between their finger tips as it gently whispers across pages, but then my student walked in with "Love" written on his wrists, and I understand.

I understand that he understands loss more fully than I currently do, never having lost a father I knew.  No matter how many pages I fill, he will still feel the loss of his father every time a birth day comes and goes, and he has no dad to express how proud he's become of his growing son.  I think he understands more than our tests could ever confirm, and we shouldn't cease academics due to the absence of fathers or mothers, but I wonder how much learning will actually get done today.  After all, learning is a life long process, but this system emphasizes short turn over for answers.  It emphasizes that information is only useful for finding an answer, and that there is only one right answer.  Because of this, our system cannot understand why my student walked in with words written on his wrists.  It cannot understand that the sunrise is so much more than just 6 AM.  Even worse, this system cannot understand why its students get out of bed each morning.

But we have a test coming up.  We always have a test coming up, so there's no time to change the system.

But learning is still a lifelong process which will not end when the tests do.  My student walks in with words written on his wrists.  I think about how a lifetime isn't enough to learn everything.  I think about how I don't have time to encourage this curiosity.  I think about how 13 years seems like too few to understand what loss is but more than enough to learn it through and through.  I think about how, after 26 years, I'm still trying to describe the beauty of a sunrise on paper.

It's suicide awareness day when my student walks in.  But we have a test that he has to study for and not enough time to be able to talk about the words written on his wrists.