The guidance counselor at my school and I like to share cute things that little kids say. I told her that my granddaughter Taylor used to say, “My not like that” when anything displeased her. The counselor shared that her nephew used to say, “I can’t know that” whenever he didn’t understand something.
Yesterday my mother told me a story about lying to her first grade teacher and leaving school in the middle of the day to go play with a friend. It was 1932. She was five. She told the teacher that she had a headache and that her grandmother lived right down the road. The teacher let her leave, and instead of walking to Grandma Moore’s, she went to her friend Betty’s house. They played checkers. Later she saw her uncle driving around looking for her, and she hid behind a tree. Her parents were terrified.
But when they found her, it was my mother who felt terror. Evidently she received quite the reprimand, a 1932-style behavior modification that she started to describe to me. But then she stopped. “You really don’t want to know what it was like.”
“No!” I said, putting my hands over my ears. And thinking back to the counselor’s nephew: “I can’t know that!”
Thinking of the way that children were disciplined “back in the day” makes me want to cry. But when it comes to the children in our schools today, it is not acceptable, or even ethical, to look away or cover our ears when we feel that there is the possibility of abuse in a home. One year my students and I read a book about a main character who was abused by his drug-addict mother. After the last page was read, and the book closed, a student asked to see me in the hallway. “You know what was going on in that book?” she asked. “It’s happening to me.”
I immediately sent her to the school counselor with a note – I wrote exactly what she said to me. I lost a friend that day because I knew her mother well. I lost sleep over the incident, too. But whenever I toss and turn over any choices I make as a teacher, I ask myself, “Did you do what was best for a kid?” If the answer is yes, then I know I did the right thing.
One year I had a student who fell asleep in class every day. After some prodding he told me that he was up all night because his mother left him alone, and he was scared to sleep when she was gone. He was twelve years old.
I was horrified that any mother would leave a child alone all night long so I picked up the phone and called social services. They conducted an investigation and told me that he was old enough to stay by himself. They said, “We can’t do anything if there’s no abuse. We can’t do anything about bad parenting.” Man. I can’t know that either.
What I can do as a teacher is watch for those little signs. The majority of students will not take us into the hallway and tell us exactly what’s happening. But chances are if we have that feeling in our gut that something is wrong, it probably is. Seek out the people who can help – counselors, social workers, and administrators. Meanwhile, we have to communicate often with our students’ families as part of the intricate quilt of people who help children become who they’re supposed to be.
The Childhelp Foundation reports: “Every year 3.3 million reports of child abuse are made in the United States involving nearly 6 million children. The United States has the worst record in the industrialized nation – losing five children every day due to abuse-related deaths.”
As a teacher I am aware that this is not 1932, and there are more appropriate ways to shape the behaviors of our children and our students than those that were practiced then. But we still have a long way to go. 3.3 million is, well, 3.3 million too many.
Know that.