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Rachel Keyser Nov 2016
They call it scholar talk. It’s not better than home talk, it’s just different. It’s for school.

Like her, they start saying “goodness gracious” when things get crazy. Like someone else, they continue saying “**** ***** *****” when someone bothers them.

Do you feel like you spend a lot of your time disciplining?  
I feel like I spend all my time disciplining, she says.

One boy tries to jump out of the window of her classroom.
Later he tells her that if he doesn’t get another nice teacher he will **** himself.

But lots of kids say they are going to **** themselves. It’s the one threat that gets them one-on-one attention in a class of two dozen.
The school psychologist tells her she needs to manage her classroom better.

Her first principal is fired for abusing her disabled husband.
Her second principal admonishes her for mentioning that **** sapiens originated in Africa.
There are too many religious parents here to teach evolution.
“Where are you even getting this information?” he asks her with a straight face.

One day, in the fall, she cries amidst the chaos. The next day, one student tells another,
“Don’t you dare make my teacher cry again.”

She picks them up on the weekends and takes them to middle school basketball games as a treat. “You can even meet the coach if you behave,” she says to eager 2nd grade faces.

They read about fairytale princesses, and they ask her, “She’s like you, right Ms. Andrews?”

White ***** is hurled at her as often as chairs across the classroom. But come Friday morning they sit silent in their seats, hoping to earn lunch with Ms. Andrews. She gives out certificates, prizes, and free activities, but kids cry over not making “lunch bunch”.  How am I doing today? Am I doing good today?

There is non-profit prestige in moving to West Baltimore. Fresh fruit, new winter coats, and new laptops for every student. Within days, the new computers are slammed against desks and the dictionary covers are ripped off with bicth scribbled inside.
At least spell it right, her final plea.
New stuff doesn’t matter that much when they’re angry all the time, she says to the one school social worker.

What would be the single most helpful thing someone could do for these families?
Birth control, she answers.

Babies are celebrated, at birth. They are a temporary lighthouse.

Some of her students have multiple siblings who regularly visit Johns Hopkins for birth defects. Some of her students are heads of their households, walking their younger siblings to and from school every day. Another teacher gets in trouble for giving out free condoms to 16-year-old girls, many of whom are pregnant.

I honestly think you shouldn't get more welfare after two children, she says. I don’t think many of these babies are conceived out of love.

It’s painful for her to say that. It’s not what you learn at a prestigious liberal arts college. Not when you’re a progressive liberal aware of social constructs and institutionalized power hierarchies. Especially when you chose TFA because you really are committed to working in education policy.  

But you are beating the odds, because Baltimore has one of the highest TFA dropout rates in the country. Though 72 percent of all TFA teachers leave teaching within 5 years. The five-week training program and lack of connection with the community were not enough. Or maybe it’s because they never wanted to be teachers in the first place.

But, they ask, “No one wants those jobs anyway, so who would be there instead?”

Is that really the right question?

Another TFA friend recently quit because he started having panic attacks and losing weight. I’m pretty miserable, she says, but I know it’s for an end. Still, I go home and wonder,
Am I making a difference?
*Referenced from a conversation with a current Furman L. Templeton Preparatory Academy teacher and TFA Corps Member.
Mateuš Conrad Sep 2016
and what a difference a clock brings, two clock stand
on a shelf already, both of them with dead batteries -
a third is brought in, and it ticks,
and it Tokajs - and up rise the zemplén
mountains where Attila was laid to rest...
and after a night of drinking -
the ticking clock gives out an energy:
that makes you wake up early,
the alarm is set 15 minutes prior noon,
but you wake up earlier than that:
a nervous energy surrounds the clock
like a bomb, you actually are the bomb,
going off early - otherwise?
what Sartre said about 3 p.m., that
the day is laid to rest by that time,
and if ever from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. in
the land of Noddy you dreamt a void
of pristine calm, then after 3 p.m.
the t.n.t. in you is wet, and there's no
spark, the ultimate existential angst -
as with any synthetic approach of creating
sleep, you are sometimes powerless to
the cure, hardly any analysis of the day's
dignified toils, in biblical jargon:
to live by the sweat of the brow -
some would claim this to be an aristocratic
pastoral - and it could very well be:
a decadent with a ***** room with whips
and handcuffs - but also a decadent with
a personal library... who would have thought
the two are so akin, even with their
seismic polarity. so on a day like this,
two coffees in, four cigarettes later,
a minor literary feat, as ever a poem -
with an approach of: get me out of these
straitjackets of conformity, according
to genres and proven techniques akin to
the sigma opus (or, oeuvre) of an Agatha
Christie... or as fellow men said: eat, ****, repeat...
the true art: how to find the eye of the storm,
the centre, away from the pulverising
strobe lighting of this realm: find me a straight
line off this ****** roundabout - if to infinity
then all the better: away from the re re re re
of res (the repetition of a thing) - be is summer,
be it spring, and the countless admirers of
such idle pursuits as said: shall i compare you
to a summer's day blah blah -
or start stiff, a corpse stiff in writing: mere
warm-up - then loosen the joints (conjunctions
prepositions et al.) and let us butter those
nouns - and change a few nouns into verbs
as already stated - a real ******* moment in
writing: haphazard here, unexplained mutations
here... let us return the same frenzied favour
that this hellish carousel imposed on us;
and as ever, a day that begins prior to 3 p.m.
will usually yield a daylight poem,
the sun is to bright, a vampire like myself
cannot stand the seemingly ultra-violet tinge
to things: a real phosphorescent sheen to all
things oily, whether my lipid skin, or the aloe
of leaves - then to the massive stumbling
block of the dictionary and all principles of
a priori entitled with that fiendish book -
as with every mind: algorithms never provide
the answers, if you haven't already experienced
the word said, by someone else.
so with a day prior to 3 p.m., you wake and wait
till the "natural crumbs in eyes after sleeping"
(rheum) dissolves - the radio is turned on,
the empty bottle of coca cola is ****** into and
the waiting for the alarm to ring - but it doesn't,
you're up already, and take up dietary reading
snippets of ivan bunin's memoir about
the civil war in Russia: cursed day (some could
say, one of the most enduring books concerned
with pleasurable reading while lying in bed,
flat out) - and this poem? all because of the
following snippet from a narrative:
            the Odessa Alarm is requesting information
about the fate of these missing people:
     Valya Zloy (zloi, i.e. evil, alter. in polish?
        zło, alter. in ~english? "zwo'h");
   Misha Mrachny (mrachnyi, i.e. gloomy, alter.
in polish? mroczny, alter in ~english?
             a dried out y, a hollowed out y,
                                   cz via ch, dependent
    of the exclusiveness of independent elocution);
  Furmanchika (furman, i.e. driver...
              an etymological mirror -
           a driver who transports goods using
    a horse and carriage, this is 1918, after all);
  Muravchika (muravei, i.e. ant, alter. in polish?
   mruwka - orthography as rigid aesthetics?
welcome to the army son... but it's actually mrówka,
    i call it personal preferences sometimes,
  not necessary rules, there's no limit to this anarchism,
and there's also another word: murawa (thick grass,
akin to earth, and ants burrowing) -
but you don't see ó at the beginning there, do you?
  the aesthete says: further in, mostly when
   congested with consonants, the alter. to what
the Chinese call: the great wall - or defence against
Mongolian invaders: doubled up with ideograms
that put the Egyptian ideograms to shame,
   is that necessary classification? owl pigeon palm,
less skeletal, then necessarily not ideograms:
hieroglyphics: it gets funnier when phonetic approximates
come across meaning approximates,
   you get ~etymological something or other,
e.g. mirror, you hear shouting: misnomer!
          and you're like: well, you have surd lettering
   and i have ~thedesiredword, so ~exact -
nonetheless, intricacies of a polymer with a benzene
ring at some point.
               i was lying though: this poem actually
came from a very English peculiarity -
name the word aunt, and how i'm sometimes
tongue tied on it: not ant when the English say
auntie - i.e. antee - or how the tongue is less
tied to a Sisyphus stone with the word augment:
so i guess i have to practice augmenting
the word aunt - so it sounds similarly good as
auntie - and that's the prickly feeling there,
a syringe on the tongue and less of a tongue-tie
but more a tongue-numbing - liked to a dentist's
request: open wide and say ah - not a - ah -
                     ah choo!               and many chopstick
dances later: the sound of pain, a shortened version
of aww (which is intended for babies and puppies,
but not all things small) - as in cute -
thus this au grapheme (no Latin variation akin to
æ or œ) - which is acute in comparison to
the two examples çited - ash and eðel / eθel -
                meaningful enough to drop a unit from
the couplet - as the English already do,
                            as explained already - ouch -
and many more theories can be revelled in -
   when looking for handwriting smoothness
of wave weaving stylistics - given now the hand
no longer writes, but the digits dent in grooves onto
    a much smoother surface (in terms of fluidity).
Qualyxian Quest Mar 2023
The little way and patience
Wait for the month of May
Grateful for my neighbors
This little town to stay

Basketball in the park
Furman NCAA
Coach Brian Katz
Sacramento play

          The Cay!

— The End —