My next move was to pick Oscar up and carry him to the office.
He fought all the way.
It was like trying to hold onto a live fifty-thousand volt wire. Like a giant anaconda, Oscar twisted, turned, and slugged me in the torso. He knocked my glasses off.
When we reached the office, I called his mother.
On the way back to class, I was fortunate enough to find my glasses undamaged. Later, the principal told me that I shouldn’t have touched Oscar, and that I wasn’t ready to teach full time.
As I was finishing this post, I remembered reading the trauma of joblessness in a Blog about Education and Class. The author wrote, ” I’ve read and heard little about how school are helping children to understand what is happening to their parents, how they’re trying to articulate for children the reasons for becoming educated in uncertain times, how they are teaching children to be deeply proud of struggling parents.”
When are most Americans going to wake up and realize that the schools have been so burdened with “powerless parenting” that teachers can’t do the job of teaching reading, writing and arithmetic?
Instead, teachers spend far too much time dealing with the Oscars of the world.
Return to A ten-year old Named Oscar – Part 2 or start with Part 1
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
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janevangalen
March 12, 2011 at 16:11
Just got pinged on this, and though I’m not clear what connection you’re seeing between a post about parents experiencing economic trauma and their kids not always being able to understand what laid-off parents are going through, and parents that you understand might be indifferent about their kids, thanks for the mention.
Lloyd Lofthouse
March 12, 2011 at 16:33
Jane Evangalen,
Thank you for the comment. I wrote most of the posts on this Blog more than a year ago. I have returned and will be revising many of the posts and as I make connections, I will be linking to other sites that I feel have something valuable to say.