Boys Acting Up - Yelling Fuck You And Hitting My Educational Assistant - Need More Parent Volunteers - Stress Causes Pain In Heart And Throat Chakras - Need A Different Population Of Special Needs Kids And A School District With Better Supports

Boys Acting Up - Yelling Fuck You And Hitting My Educational Assistant - Need More Parent Volunteers - Stress Causes Pain In Heart And Throat Chakras - Need A Different Population Of Special Needs Kids And A School District With Better Supports

Work / Tape Transcriptions - Olympus Voice Recorder Entry #12 and #13 - October 8, 2004

2004.10.8. Friday. (Olympus voice recorder entries #12 [4:16] and #13 [0:42].)

It's October 8 (or 9?), Friday, 2004, 7:30 a.m. I'm on my way to work. Yesterday was the hardest day I've had all year. I've got eight kids, three of whom are boys who are starting to really act up, imitating inappropriate behaviors -- a lot of out-of-the-seat during circle time, grabbing on to each other, tipping around in their chairs, etc., etc. My EA [educational assistant] can only handle maybe one or possibly two of them, and here I am trying to teach and provide guidance for all eight, meanwhile I am disciplining one or two at the same time as I'm doing that - and trying to give another kid an opportunity to come up and volunteer and help out in a particular circle time activity. It's been, uhmm, to make a long story short...between the toileting... (big sigh) This one boy I've got said "fuck you" and "shit" a couple of times -- "fuck you" to my EA and hit her on two occasions and I had to sit him on my lap and yell at him, holding him, making him look at me, till he cried and he said "sorry." At one point he threw up and he refused to back down and I put him in time out as he's kicking the door and throwing things, and he's big. He's really a big four-year-old, a big Hawaiian boy. It was just very tiring, and by 10:00 a.m. or so I felt I had burnt my candle out. I was in the red for about four hours yesterday, almost continuously for four hours. It let up a little bit about a half-hour after the kids went home. I started feeling a little bit better. But there was a knot, a knotted feeling in my thymus gland -- pain around the periphery, about an inch and a half or two inches in diameter, about the area of one of those Eisenhower dollar coins -- the circumference all around this area of my thymus gland was in pain. My thyroid was involved also. Not only was there pain stretching outward across my chest from my thymus gland and various brachial plexus nerves, but there was pain, too, in the nerves around my collar bone extending from the thyroid across the collar bone in both directions and downward to my nipples. In any event, my brachial plexus and throat chakra were inflamed yesterday. It was throbbing painfully. I felt like I had a bad flu. I am surprised that I don't have green phlegm today, but I ought to, the way I feel. But it made me feel that I can push myself so hard that I'll just collapse -- that the result of all this stress will be that it will eventually kill me. I was also having some heart pain. But it's just the stress of having to create order there without support. Then my EA went home for lunch, and if it weren't for a mother of one of my kids who volunteered to stay on there is no way I could have managed. She was there for four hours. I used her as an assistant all day (end memo #12).

(beginning memo #13) October 8, continued, 2004. So I just feel I need to get out of this job. This career is killing me. I either need to get a different line of work, or really, a different population of kids to instruct in a different school system with better supports, because I'm shot. I really am. I feel hammered today, and we have photos today -- pictures for the yearbook day. I do not feel photogenic. I've aged. I look bloated...drained...wasted. (end of memo #13)

Comment from July 6, 2013

What more can be said? LOL. I don't have green phlegm as often, and my Stradivarius-like nerve tendrils don't react with such intensity and refinement as they once did. I don't think I've adapted at all to occupational stress or EMF exposure. My bodymind is just more dead or corpse-like. Being at a high school now, my work is much more business-like, and the kids much more shut down emotionally than the three- and four-year olds I had on the Big Island. But I am a catalyst for these older kids going wild in their own ways: boys jumping on me, wrestling me; girls giving me pictures with hearts and lovey-dovey looks in their eyes. Freedom is relative, and I think I've helped to create some open space in my room where the future is indeterminate and the children co-create it.