Epilogue As Prologue
When our son was a kid, it was all about Soccer Moms. Sure, Tiger Moms existed, but a much different breed from today. We live in the city, a nice neighborhood, but city schools serve the entire urban population. Which means, sadly, many succumb to the lowest common denominator. 

We wanted to support McCall, a public elementary school in our upscale neighborhood, keep it viable. We sent our son there, met with the teachers, joined the PTA, participated in every way. Lots of our friends did the same.

As a magnet school it was an amalgam of the city's population. All colors, creeds, ethnicities. You can see them in the photo above.

Our son was happy there. Loved his kindergarten and first grade teachers. Of course, he and his friends stood out, could already read before they started school. But they were well protected by their upper middle class cocoons. And by the school.

Then came 2nd grade, when students are incorporated into the main population. The kids all wore uniforms. No more separate playground. No more lunch in classrooms with their own bathrooms. Out there in the thick of it with the rest of the school.

It was eye-opening. I became increasingly uneasy watching the older kids. I urged my husband to consider private school. Soon.

Never! He'd gone to public school, turned out fine. I brought up the difficulties he'd faced, his retroactive wish for a better early education.

I got nowhere. I reminded him of my own bizarre, frightening experience as a teacher (we'll get to that in a minute). His resolve weakened. But as it turned out, he didn't need much more pursuasion.

The Last Straw
Well, two straws.

Father and son were walking down the street to a friend's house. Dad's shoe accidentally bumped into the heel of our son's sneaker. Without thinking, natural as could be, our cherubic 7-year-old sweet little Jewish boy said, "Daag! You stepped on ma fuckin' foot, man."

Right. The penny dropped.

The next week police stormed the school to break up a car theft ring among 8th graders. Who, incredibly, were driving the stolen cars to school. They didn't like the dirty, unsafe school busses. Oh, and they were giving our kids rides in the stolen cars.

A week later, our son entered private school.

I'm not proud, but I'm not sorry either. I'm grateful we had the resources to manage it. The new school's population was diverse, there were good and bad teachers, no school is nirvana. But he was safe, the focus was on education, growth, expanded horizons, intelligence, curiosity, self.

Children don't get half of that in far too many schools around the country.

Teachers or Peacekeepers?
The president gave a deserved shout-out to teachers in his SOTU speech. He acknowledged how important and undervalued they are as professionals in our society. He cited America's low educational rankings. And then he called out parents as equally responsible for their children's success ... or failure.

Many parents teach their children to learn. Mine did. Anything less than our very best effort was unacceptable. The future beckoned. College, grad school, careers.

Other parents have lower expectations, or none at all. They offer their children little, if any encouragement. Usually because no one gave them any, taught them about self-esteem, personal best, possibilities, potential. Hope.

It's a self-perpetuating cycle of poverty, violence, ignorance, despair. Homes and lives crowded not with books but with weapons, drugs, alcohol, gangs, rage, alienation.

Still, good teachers try to open new vistas for young minds. To penetrate the walls raised in self-defense from life ... from them, school, society.

That's the thankless task we count on teachers to handle. Without nearly enough support. Yes, some parents do try, despite their own desperate circumstances. They want better lives for their children.

Some suburban parents who have all the necessary resources, fight even less. Yes, they act like today's Tiger Moms but with no teeth. They expect super achievement but give no real support, only bribes and unearned rewards. They set no boundaries, enforce no reasonable discipline.

Whether underclass or upper crust, lack of true accountability and unrelenting chaos teach children to use anger, manipulation, conflict resolution through violence ... often by example.

So teachers are on the front lines everywhere, in potential danger every day. From the entitled and the disenfranchaised.

I know. I served briefly in their ranks. It almost got me killed.

My Teaching Days
The reality of today's poor education system hasn't changed. It was the same in the 1970's when I signed up to be a part time teacher while in college.

No metal detectors back then. No cops in the hallways. None of the current measures critical to keeping teachers and students safe.

Poverty, ignorance, drugs, violence, hunger and anger were just as great, if not greater. Inner city school were, in many ways, a jungle. Danger everywhere, fend for yourself.

And think about this: many of those children are the parents and grandparents of today's gang members, drug addicts, trouble-makers in our schools and streets. Maybe not PC to say so. But true.

The Schools
Keep in mind I was an Ivy League college student, mini skirted, buxom, long haired, hip, happenin' and naive. But I learned self-preservation fast in the jungle of Philadelphia's inner city school system.

I had no training as a teacher. I admit it's never been a calling for me. It was just a job I could manage while in grad school.

But somehow I managed to connect and even engage young students. And I liked it. A challenge I'd never thought to try.

I became a permanent 3rd grade substitute teacher. Weeks, months at a time. Higher pay. Supposedly in the safest geographical district. I'd later discover my husband had attended one of the two schools I liked best.

There, parents were involved, informed, active. I sent home a note one day about some class misbehavior. That night my phone started to ring, parents apologizing and putting their kids on the phone to apologize. Wow.

Why was I surprised? That's how I was raised.

The other schools, set deeper in the areas of urban decay, were much different. I soon learned how to identify the safe ones: if they had a strong PTA, a smart principal, a clean playground.

Some were over-packed dumping grounds for kids with home lives I couldn't begin to imagine. I had to learn quickly who had the greatest threat value, the principal, the vice principal or the gym teacher. To locate a strong male teacher near my classroom in case I needed help in a hurry.

There was one "safety measure" in schools back then ... a phone in every classroom which connected directly to the principal's office. In case of emergency. Right.

What did I have to fear from 8-year-olds? If you're a teacher, you already know. More than I did.

Not Bo, a local victim of gun violence. But, it could have been Bo.

The Kid(s)
I'd been at Leidy Elementary for two weeks, settling in with my class of 3rd graders. It wasn't the greatest school but it wasn't too bad. The principal was strong, had put a lot of structure in place, line them up, march them in, like that. A bit overly marine-like, but effective.

I had a good group. Except one kid. Bo. He couldn't sit still. Talked constantly. Threw things. Tapped, jiggled, kicked. Now we know ADHD when we see it. Back then I just saw a pain in the butt. Skinny, shabby, hungry. For affection as well as food.

Many of those children were starved for attention. My personal style of touching a shoulder, a back, a hand brought immediate results. The kids would light up, smile, sit straighter, try harder to please.

I remember especially the little girls holding my hands, my arms, stroking my shiny waist-long hair, huddling into me. I know now, for emotional warmth.

It hurts my heart to remember that.

Bo responded to warmth too. Unless I singled him out for discipline. He'd change in an eerie way, face contorted in a snarl, eyes holding mine in a cold stare. When he got like that, the poor skinny little kid actually scared me.

One day I'd told him over and over to sit down, stop talking, pay attention. Finally, exasperated, I put my hand on The Phone. "Do I have to call the office, Bo?" I asked. "I don't want to, but I will."

The eerie change came over him. Suddenly I was confronting the visage of an enraged adult. "I'm gonna kill you," he said in a toneless voice.

"Oh please, get serious," I joked, attempting a light tone, my heart pounding. "Just sit down for me."

"You're dead. Bitch."

The room went still. I pulled the phone off the hook and quietly told the office I had a child who needed help. My eyes never left his, I tried to keep a pleasant smile on my face, tilted my head to indicate he should sit down, hoped he'd comply.

He left the room. Just walked out. There were sounds of a small scuffle in the hall outside, then nothing. The assistant principal poked his head in the door, "Okay here?" I nodded and he left.

The kids exploded from their seats, crowding around me, grabbing my hands and arms to make sure I was okay, to make sure they were okay. I told them not to worry, Bo wouldn't, couldn't hurt me or them.

"Yes he can, Miss K!" they chorused, then one scared voice emerged, I can still hear it, "His older brother's got a knife THIS BIG."

I stopped at the principal's office after school to ask would they talk to Bo's family, get him counseling, I could help. Don't worry, I was told, he wouldn't bother me or my class, he'd been suspended.

Wha'?

Okay, maybe they didn't have many resources, but really, this child was badly troubled, couldn't they see that, couldn't they try to help? Nope.

The Attack
I came to school the next day after a restless night. As usual, I lined up my kids in our row on the playground preparing for the daily grade-by-grade march into the building to the classrooms.

My back was to the street, my eyes on my class when their eyes got huge. "Look out!" someone shouted, "He's got a knife!" another voice, "Grab him!"

I half turned to see little Bo lunging at me with a knife THIS BIG. That half-turn saved me. It was winter, I was wearing a heavy wool pea coat from the Army/Navy store. You know the kind, with epaulets down the shoulders and around the wrists.

So instead of that knife going into my back, or worse, straight through the open front of my coat, it hit one of the epaulets, penetrated just enough to draw a little blood. And a lot of fear.

Snarling, sad 8-year-old Bo was hauled off to the principal's office. I followed, refused to press charges (on a kid?), begged them to call Social Services, his family, a hospital, to get the child some help.

What did they do? Frustrated by my refusal to have him arrested, they expelled him from school. Solved the problem by throwing him out like trash.

That did it. I told them I was leaving and never coming back. I blamed them for not being proactive in helping that child, all those children.

I felt guilty for abandoning my class, all those sweet little kids who got possibly their first affirmation, maybe even their first hug, from me.

But I didn't like or trust the atmosphere at the school. The casual way they tossed that kid away without any attempt at intervention was so wrong.

Plus, something about the incident deeply frightened me. I wasn't in real danger, the knife was pretty big but the kid was very small. I wasn't badly hurt, but still, I could have been. Or worse.

Bo's brother, supposed source of the knife, might have been older, stronger, could have caused a bigger threat.

If I only knew.  

breakingnewsweek.com

The Incredible Coda, The Other Kind of Tiger Mom
The school called the next day, again asking me to return. I refused, said I was finished with teaching, needed to return to full time studying.

The day after that, my mother's aunt called, upset, crying. She lived next door, my mother and I rushed over. She was holding the newspaper, hands shaking, reaching out to me --I didn't know this yet-- making sure I was really there, and safe.

We grabbed the newspaper. The headline read, Teacher Attacked, Near Death. 

According to the story, Bo's mother was so infuriated that a teacher "got him expelled," she and her sister went to the classroom to "teach that [expletive] her own lesson."

With fists and a baseball bat they beat the new substitute teacher to a bloody pulp. They didn't know her. They thought they were attacking me.

At first I couldn't process it. But. Cold reality. If I'd gone back to school the next day, two enraged, streetwise grown women would have beaten me almost to death.

All these years later my hands shake when I say that. I feel scared. I feel responsible. Because I still feel so incredibly thankful it wasn't me.

The victim lived. Scarred for life. As am I. Not my little nick of a scar from Bo's knife, it's barely visible now. But inside, my brush with the raw power of his mother's murderous rage in defense of her cub left a scar that still cuts deep.

I wonder what she did to him, what scars he carried I never saw. But I do understand why he chose to defy me, all authority with a weapon. Actually, Bo didn't choose, he never had a chance to choose.

He had to be carefully taught. By a very different kind of Tiger Mom. Yin and yang, yes. But both think they're doing the best for their children. And both exert dangerous influenced on tender minds and sensibilities.

Thank you to all teachers. Especially the ones who try to un teach the lessons those most at risk from our country's growing culture of violence should never have to learn.

This is a true story. Bo was the child's real first name, I don't remember his last, nor would I reveal it.

Archives for newspaper articles from the 1970's aren't available online. I remember only that Bo's mother and aunt went to jail, no other details. I lived in fear for quite a while, it receded when I moved away.

I've often wondered what became of Bo, if he's even alive today. Somehow, sadly, I doubt it.