No harm on all my holy mountain

There shall be no harm or ruin on all my holy mountain

Today in religion class, it was a laid back sort of class. Students were coloring a little booklet of pictures about the story of Moses--tomorrow we will fill in the blank parts with notes about the Egyptian Captivity and Exodus. I try to balance the oppressiveness of copying notes with something easygoing, like coloring.

I was sitting at a table with four boys. They were asking each other, and me, questions like, "If you had to change your first name, what would you change it to?" which produced responses like, "I would change it back to what it was before I was adopted from Russia" and "I would just change the spelling but keep my name." We colored together, which is a meditative activity, and thoughts like these floated easy between us.

Then Joe asks me, "What was the strangest thing a student ever told you?"

In the few moments it takes for me to formulate an answer, I think of many things I could say. Tales kids tell, that's what he's thinking. I'm thinking about other things. First, about stories of death--either in Vietnam or North City or in hospitals. My father was shot outside on our front porch as my mother pushed me through the kitchen out the back. We ran to the neighbors. I never saw my father again. I think about disclosures of abuse. He took me out to an empty construction site and there was this pipe. I think about stories that refugees tell. I think about injustices.

And I think about one of the boys I'm sitting with, the reason I'm at this table instead of any other one in the room, this blank child who slips through school invisible, the kind of child I worry about more than any other because there doesn't seem to be any fire behind his eyes, and I want to be the teacher who makes it possible for him to check off the box that says "A teacher at school cares about me" because he doesn't seem to have connections with peers or adults at school. I see you baby, and you're safe in my room. There shall be no harm or ruin on all my holy mountain.

And then I realize that they're all four looking at me and I'm not going to share anything along those lines. We are coloring, damn it, and everyone but me is 12.

"People tell me lots of things," I sum up, but that's a disappointing answer and I know it the minute I say it.

"Yeah," says Joe, turning back to his coloring.

"Well," I think quickly. "There was the time Victor asked me on a date to a funeral of a person he didn't even know."

And I tell the story of the brilliant ADHD 8th grader who was supposed to serve at this funeral...and asked me, "Do you want to come with?" while all the worldly 8th grade girls around him giggled. "What?" he asked. And then Lena had to explain that he'd just asked his married, 40 year old math teacher on a date to a funeral.

The boys laugh. They know Victor just as a legend and the story fits into their collection. The one boy, next to me, tilts his head up from his coloring and smiles at me, eye contact for just a fleeting moment. Then he goes back to coloring everything on his page a bright bright red.

If I can only do one thing right this year,
Let there be no harm in my classroom.
Let there be no harm in this holy space that is ours,
For just this short time together.