COMMENTARY: Living With the Clouds

c. 2000 Religion News Service (Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C.) UNDATED _ Halfway through “The Cat in the Hat” _ at the point where Dr. Seuss’ editor should have said, “That’s enough, Ted” _ a second-grader takes a deep breath […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C.)

UNDATED _ Halfway through “The Cat in the Hat” _ at the point where Dr. Seuss’ editor should have said, “That’s enough, Ted” _ a second-grader takes a deep breath and plows into another eternity of reading aloud.


We’re sitting in the playground on a sunny day. All around us, kids are reading aloud to grown-ups. Dr. Seuss’ birthday has become a national reading-aloud day. Most are reading books by the man himself _ well-marketed favorites with about the depth of a television sit-com.

Thanks to Dr. Seuss, the second child in our threesome doesn’t have time to finish his reading aloud. He wanders off looking disappointed as we line up to go inside for lunch.

In the lunch room, some kids form a chatty circle, and others sit alone, either by themselves surrounded by empty seats or together alone in protective, if non-interactive, groupings.

I don’t mind the noise. But my heart slowly breaks as I gaze around the cafeteria. I see the new boy whom no one will get near. I see the class clown, whose sad antics fail to mask desperate eyes. I see the bright boy who would give anything to join the chatty circle.

I watch special-needs groups file in _ children whose minds won’t ever soar to the intellectual heights of which others are capable, whose bodies won’t leap and lunge in the games others play, but who are safe for now.

I see a sprinkling of visiting grown-ups. One is a woman who outfitted her colleagues at work in matching T-shirts and brought them in as volunteer readers so kids wouldn’t have to crowd three to a grown-up.

I don’t see any unusual chaos. But I realize how draining it must be to work with these kids day after day, not only because they are children and therefore demanding, but because so many of them are lonely and so many have fallen behind and will never catch up.


I watch a girl with vacant eyes. In a world where a few sharpshooters will make millions by harvesting personal data from the Internet and selling it to predatory marketers, here is a girl who will become a woman soon. She might be lucky and escape the eye of a predatory male; she might not. For now, she has someone at home who ties bright ribbons in her hair.

I watch a boy who seems confused and perturbed. I catch a glimmer of defiance as he separates from his class and sits alone. I wonder where that defiance will lead him.

I see all that in the blink of an eye. This cloud confuses me. What happened to the sunny day? It must have wandered off disappointed, lost in that land where sing-song drivel is declared art and children grow up amid terrifying loneliness.

As I imagine how life will play out for the girl with ribbons in her hair, I see that sitting with her at the small lunch table is a teacher. A woman who made it through childhood with her mind intact and now sits with children, sharing what she has.

A teacher. Underpaid, buried in procedures, living each day by a clock that interrupts curiosity just as it starts to blossom, caring for children whose home lives get played out in her classroom but are beyond her reach. Not many of those home lives are as ugly as that of the Michigan 6-year-old who shot a classmate, but few are as sanitized as that of the boy and girl in “The Cat in the Hat” whose mother is only temporarily absent.

A teacher. She listens as politicians debate education, as religious zealots fuss over prayer in schools, as property owners lament taxes, as fast-food proprietors demand employer-friendly school hours, as malls hawk sexy clothes to 12-year-olds _ and not one of those predators cares about the actual children who file into her classroom five days a week.


I visit my wife’s classroom and meet her co-teacher. How do they remain so cheerful amid such sadness? It takes effort. It takes faith. Most of all, it takes a willingness to remain in the cloud, as others flee to sunshine.

DEA END EHRICH

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