Asking about a kid’s parents is a loaded revolver at my school. Sam hasn’t seen his dad since he was 3 years old when his mother moved them out of state to escape his abusive behavior. He said he didn’t want a kid, and never wanted to see them again, but Sam might still want to see him someday just to tell him how much of an *** he is.

Linda’s dad is in jail for shooting someone in a bar fight when she was just 5 years old. He’s down for life, and she visits him every few years just to stay in touch. “My dad’s in jail, but I don’t miss him, ‘cuz I never knew him”, she explains on the way back from P.E. She wants to hang out with me at lunch, but I remember my teacher training and never have a female student alone in a room with the door closed.

At the I.E.P. meeting (Special Ed. ) for Jake, I remarked that his less than 50% attendance is hurting his academic progress. “Were you the one with strep throat this semester?”, his mother asked him, confusing sons. I say that he has been vomiting at school, out my back door, after coughing and gagging. His cigarette habit and probable ganja smoking, as well as extra 100 pounds at age 15 do not help. The district staff explain that they are adjusting his medication, and his mother will help him to change his soda and Doritos breakfast. Jake has been getting Language Arts credit for writing to his Dad in jail.

Assigned to write about his dreams, Mike wrote that he wanted to kick my ass because I am such a ***. I asked for advice from a veteran teacher who said, “Well, if it’s not a death threat, then I wouldn’t really worry about it”. I was shocked at the time but realize it’s impossible to have zero tolerance policies when every kid is so unique. Mike now wants to hacky sack with me, asks how he’s doing in my class, and even turned in one extra credit article. He will probably end up dropping out of our school, but I hope he’s learned something in the process.

Aaron was the smartest kid in class, and reminded me of myself in high school. Then he told a middle schooler a story about his anal sex with a “girl on the rag” and how “she likes it that way”. I have never had a parent-teacher conference like that, when the screen saver by some cosmic coincidence popped up “God punishes masturdebaters”. The poor homeschooler girl’s parents never brought her back to school again, and Aaron ended up leaving our school for vandalism and swearing at a teacher. I still liked him and was surprised to see him go.

Bob sat in the office saying he hated me and hated math class, and would not do anything that I asked him to do. The Co-Director of the Charter School explained that a student would have to take directions from any faculty member anytime, or else find another school. Months later he made me a Betty Crocker cake for my birthday. It was a microwave recipe his Grandmother had passed down to him, complete with buttery blue frosting. My former vegan attitude swallowed its pride and gave thanks for the random opportunity.

Just like the stranded Japanese fighter pilot, ignorant of his obsolescence, I thought I was a teacher. Outdated societal roles proved more powerful than my best intentions. What started as the blossoming of youthful idealism, threatened to mylenate into the wizened bark of an ancient redwood. I was a vegan McDonalds; a zafu Lazy Boy; a homeopathic surgeon; a reality T.V. that noone was watching anymore. Growing up in the ivory tower of the Bay Area’s yuppie green lawns, our hot tub was the most heated event I had to survive. Although every family has problems, it took years of teaching the children of the trailer parks to show me how lucky I really was. Multicultural atheist immigrants are not America’s popular demographic, so my whole life has been a process of transplanting my roots into foreign soil. I had no tribe, no culture, and no social identity outside of my self-induced isolation; the archetypal angst of a privileged existence. My first drive to Oregon left Babylon and returned to Eden, although I was mugged in Portland by a crack whore’s pimp. The size of the trees and the biggest road having only 4 lanes made up for the backwoods conservatism. It took years before my candy store mentality was tempered by the fires of meth houses and the oversized mufflers of Aryan Nation biker gangs. College taught me about indoor ganja growing, homebrewed beer as dark as coffee, drum circles in the Chapel, and naked slip n’ slides on the front lawn. Humanities classes perpetuated the patriarchal pomp of perceived perpetual progress. White professors espoused the dogma of tolerance while endangered Republicans and conservatives cowered in the reverie of decadence. As was my blissfully ignorant style, I thought the heroin junkies on the Student Union couches were just really stoned slackers. Before graduating, I learned how deep the system runs, and that to rebuild it, one has to understand and work with it. My first year of student teaching I broke up a fight after school only to have the principal point out the 2 gang cars that had been the true supervisors of authority. Warned not to get involved if it happened again, I took a middle school elbow to the nose in the next day’s after-school street basketball game. Barely older than many of their siblings, dreadlocks to my waist, and peach fuzz still barely covering my cheeks, I watched 8th graders stuck like chained animals in their elementary size desk chairs. I smelled bubbling hormones stronger than my hippy body odor, and weighed less than many of my intended pupils, but I possessed the passion of power. I was going to change the world, one opened mind at a time, even if my garlic breath was “kickin’ like Bruce Lee”. How then to open minds while shut in my own world of illusion? Deluded into believing we all have equal opportunity; that we are all essentially the same inside; that we can all love each other unconditionally. I was in for a rude awakening, not just to the realities of the world, but to the idyllics of my own world.