2005 to 2006, Rosebud Indian Reservation, South Dakota

By Leslie Barnard

During my first week teaching second grade on the Rosebud Indian Reservation, where the unemployment rate is greater than the average life expectancy, Moses Running Bear, age 7, told me that he wanted to kill himself, his mother, and me.

I later discovered that Moses could not count past 20 or name even half the letters of the alphabet. A skinny boy covered in bug bites, Moses’ only source of pride was a tiny oval of bleached, uneven skin on the left side of his chest ─ a scar from the time his cousin got drunk and accidentally shot him.

Moses often ran away from class. He hit my aide, the school counselor, and several students. He called the other kids things like faggot, nigger, bitch, whore. He asked me what I would do if I came home one day, and my dog was dead.

When I called home, his mother said it wasn’t Moses’ fault. She said other kids teased him and made him act out. Another time, she said it was the school’s fault because the teachers at school told Moses he was stupid.

“Which teachers?” I asked. She said she didn’t know. I was surprised to see her at parent-teacher conferences in September. She was one of the few parents who came.

Moses’ mother was a hard person to look at, just as it is hard, at first, to look at people who have gone bald from chemotherapy, people with burns on their faces or hands, people you knew before they lost the use of their legs. It is hard to look because there is always the possibility that your face will give away your guilt, your sadness, your pity, your fear.

Gaunt and skittish, Moses’ mom seemed to be constantly responding to stimuli I could not perceive. She continuously winced and squinted as if surprised by a bright light or loud noise. Though most of the time, her fidgeting hands obscured her features, I did observe her cheeks ─ not continuously, but frame by stolen frame ─ and noticed that they were patchy and discolored, as if there was not enough blood in her body to color her whole face.

As we spoke, she tapped her feet under the table, zipping and unzipping her jacket again and again. When I explained to her that I thought Moses would be better served in a first-grade classroom, she snapped at me, saying it was his asthma medicine that made it hard for him to concentrate. She’d talk to a doctor about it, she said.

The problem was not Moses’ intelligence. When he tried, he learned quickly. But most of the time, he was afraid to try. Moses knew how behind he was compared to the other students, and he was ashamed. He would try to hide his work during math time, and during silent reading, he would choose books that were so far beyond his level that he could not even read their titles.

If I pulled him aside to work one-on-one, focusing on skills that were at his level, such as counting or learning letters, he was embarrassed, afraid the other students would notice that he was doing “baby stuff.” But if I tried integrating him into the group, partnering him with capable and patient students, nothing made sense to him.

Moses became lost and exploded with anger at his peers or at me. I imagined what it must have been like for him, being constantly inundated with incomprehensible information, as if everyone around him spoke a language he did not understand.

In writing, especially, Moses was immobilized. When kindergartners can’t write, their teacher simply tells them, “Yes, you can!” She congratulates them for their scribbles and ill-formed letters. She affirms that this is writing and that they are writers, just like the writers who wrote the books in the classroom library.

Moses knew what he was producing was not “real” writing and that he was not a “real” writer. He could see what “real” writing looked like. Kids to his left and to his right were vigorously compiling their memoirs from birth to age 7, while Moses’ hand hung frozen over the blank page.

He was afraid of failing, and I was as well. I was afraid that I would leave him the way I found him ─ completely powerless. But as he became more comfortable with my aide and me, Moses began to smile more often and sometimes forgot himself, inadvertently raising his hand to answer a question in class.

Slowly, even Moses’ writing began to improve. No one could read what he wrote except for my aide and me, but he was trying. He was taking a huge risk, and that’s what this whole battle was about ─ learning to believe in the possibility of success.

Moses liked to write about our classroom pet, a tarantula named Victoria, who ate crickets the kids collected during recess. The day she shed her skin, he wrote a record four pages. He also wrote about a Shetland pony his father had promised to get him.

I couldn’t tell if he had made the whole story up or if his father was really going to get him a pony. All I knew about Moses’ father was that when I called home and said Moses was having problems, his father would immediately pass the phone to Moses’ mom, mumbling something like, “That’s her job.”

I also knew that Moses’ father was the reason Moses hadn’t been held back in kindergarten or first grade. Despite the teachers’ recommendations, both years, Moses’ father insisted that he be advanced to the next grade. It was a matter of pride.

Then one day Moses wouldn’t write anything at all, and so I prompted him, saying, “What about your pony? How is he doing?” Moses said his pony was dead. For weeks, I kept him in for recess because he wouldn’t write a word. This was our classroom policy: If you didn’t finish your work during work time, you would finish it on your own time.

I believed that it was important not to make exceptions for Moses. I wanted to prove to him that he could do anything the other students could do. I wanted to show him that I expected him to work hard and accomplish great things, that he was no different from anyone else.

Every day, he sat with his head on his desk during writing time. And every day, his name went on the board. I’d eat my lunch while he sat in silence in the classroom, staring up at a clock he couldn’t read.

However, as his birthday approached, Moses started writing again, and his stories became longer and more detailed. He wrote about how his mom would be bringing treats to school for the whole class, and how everyone would sing to him.

It always amazed me how big our simple classroom tradition was for the kids. There were no prizes involved, just a birthday certificate and a snack at the end of the day. It wasn’t much. But it was all Moses would talk about or write about. I worried, though, that his mother wouldn’t come, that there would be no treats, and that he would be disappointed once again. So my aide baked a cake, and we hid it behind my desk, just in case.

The next day, Moses’ birthday, just happened to be a Friday. Officially, we were required to do head checks every Friday morning to see if any of the kids had lice. Usually, I skipped over the checks because every time we did one, at least four kids would get sent home. Often, they were the kids that were the furthest behind and most in need of classroom time.

For whatever reason, on that particular Friday, while I was in front of the class doing a lesson, I asked my aide to check the kids’ heads. I’m not sure why I did it. It was not something I thought through. But it very easily could have been that it was Friday, and I was tired, and if I had 16 students instead of 20, my day would be that much easier.

At that same moment, I had to leave the room to take a call in the office. It was Moses’ mother, assuring me that she would be at school around 3 p.m. to bring Moses’ birthday treats. She sounded different to me, very unlike the distant, sullen woman I had met at parent-teacher conferences. She told me she was bringing cupcakes with blue frosting and sprinkles.

She laughed in a way that made me picture her in a bright kitchen, her long, black hair falling down her back. She said it was a good thing she was coming in at the end of the school day, so I wouldn’t have to teach math to a bunch of kids so hopped up on sugar, they’d swear that 2 and 2 makes 9. I laughed too and smiled, thinking that this day might really turn out to be everything Moses had hoped for.

When I returned to the classroom, Moses was gone. My aide told me the nurse was going to call his mom to come get him early because he had live bugs. I asked if he couldn’t just stay for a little while so we could sing to him. My aide told me she’d already asked and that the principal said Moses couldn’t be in the classroom with a head full of lice, no matter what.

“Like you said, Moses is no different than anyone else,” my aide told me. “He’s got to follow the rules.”

Leslie Barnard is a freelance writer living in Seattle.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007 | Email This Post

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