By Hazel Kight Witham
This year has been a breathless one. Lately a clutch of lines from a poem by Stevie Smith has played like a refrain:
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.
I am, this year, much further out than I thought, and, it seems, nearly every day, I am adrift, no toe-touch in the murky depths I find myself, staring back at the shore of my life, not waving but drowning.
I spend each workday treading water in the high seas of California’s public education system. Not waving but drowning.
You might know some of the numbers. We are 46th in the nation in per-pupil spending. We are 48th in student-to-teacher ratio. Our school board got a 174% pay raise last year. The district is offering teachers a 2% raise this year. I make $16,000-20,000 less a year on average than teachers in other districts in Southern California. Corporations are doing their best to privatize public education, instead of supporting all of us here who are on the ground, doing the work already. Teachers are called to promote their traditional public schools on this new education marketplace when there are thousands of better things they could be doing with their energy.
We are not waving but drowning.
And yet, don’t get me wrong, the numbers do not tell the story of the magic inside our public schools. Magic still manages to thrive inside the gasping for breath. Every day I get up excited to go to work, to throw a poem or a prompt on the board and see what happens in the laboratory of the classroom. The place where we labor, listen, read, and write. The place I try to make a community I hope to see in our larger society. I ask my students in my English class a question, and then we write, making sense of our world, or sense of ourselves, or sense of senselessness. Sometimes we are just scribbling something that might turn into a poem, or a prayer, or a story. I ask them to write, knowing I will never look at the great majority of their work. And while part of it is because I believe having private writing space is essential to everyone’s mental health, part of it is also because there simply is not enough time.
As D.H. Lawrence wrote about his students, “I will not waste myself to embers for them,” even though I love them. I love myself too, and my family, and my friends, and the tattered excuse of a writing life I try to have.
And so, in these impossible working conditions, I am continuously confronted by all I cannot do with the time that is allotted to me. And when I look at that, if I only look at that it is hard to breathe. I am not waving but drowning when I think of all I cannot do.
So instead, I turn, again and again, to what I can.
I can be kind. I can be present. I can start each class by standing at the door and saying hello and saying each of their names and pouring I love you and you matter into my voice. I can try to read them as they walk in—how are we feeling, how are we holding up, who is having a rough day, who needs a check in, who might need a little fresh air. And once we are seated I start with one minute of mindful breathing to get us all centered in the same place at the same time. I say, “Please let go of anything you are carrying. Try to close your eyes and focus on your breath for the next minute.”
And something in those sixty seconds saves me. That minute, five times a day, when I kick to the surface and trust a roomful of fidgety, distractible, exuberant teenagers enough to close my eyes, and focus on my breath. I resist the urge to react to any excessive teenage exuberance that might bubble into the silence. Rarely do I stop us and start the timer over because someone is disrespecting the process. And one of the most important things that one minute has taught me is how to rethink the power structures in the classroom. For that one minute I let go of command, of control, of power. I let it be what it will be, and try to breathe through it. And that breathes a spaciousness into our time together that we all need. We are crowded in these waters, we are thirsty, we are tired of all the ways this machine churns us into numbers and scores and credits on a conveyor belt toward diploma, but along the way we can hold on to breath, to presence, to kindness, and try to float through together with a bit of grace.
This has gotten me through this not-waving-but-drowning year, when the to-do list towers alongside the papers and threatens to overwhelm me completely. When what I expect from myself in the time I am allotted leaves me breathless.
But what is pushing me further adrift, is that I’m not only a teacher, I am also a writer trying, in the slivers of time left to me, to figure out how to be both, and more, in a very busy world.
I focus on what I can do. I surface as a writer in the small sips of time when I wake before my family does. I slip out to the table to start my day not as mom, or Ms. Witham, but as one who begins each day with words on a page. It is small sips—fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes. Often my three-year-old teeters out and seesaws into my lap before I am ready for his warm interruption, but I have started breathing gratitude into that too. Like the minute of breathing with students, it helps ground me in what is essential, and makes space for worthy work.
It is 2018. We are all much further out than we thought, and often we are not waving but drowning in the high seas around us. But a little space, a little breath, a little time for what is essential as writers can buoy us for the waves to come.
Hazel Kight Witham is a writer, teacher, activist, and artist whose work can be found in Bellevue Literary Review, Two Hawks Quarterly, Rising Phoenix Review, Angels Flight, Zoetic Press’s NonBinary Review, Lunch Ticket and Lady/Liberty/Lit. She lives and breathes in Los Angeles with her family.