‘Why are you still here?’ I hear his little voice and I look up from my chair. One of the smaller ones, the boy with the cocoa silk eyes stares at me questioningly. ‘Hey, why are you still here?’ I am seated on a small chair, the perch where I sit to teach this particular first grade class and the minutes of the class have ended. It’s time to move on to a waiting kindergarten group. He recognizes something is amiss in my timing.
He’s a kind one, this smallish boy. Last week he noticed the print on my canvas ‘drag around’ bag and pointed it out. ‘Hey, what do these tiny letters say?’ I looked at the picture of the bird and then gestured to the print. ‘It’s the name of a very famous book. It says ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’. It’s a very good book and I want you to promise me that you will read it when you are grown up’. He stares at me, eyes as wide as they might be. ‘Kill a Mockingbird, well…well, that’s just horrible’. He is deeply perturbed. ‘No, no we don’t want to kill a Mockingbird. They don’t hurt anyone or anything. All they do is sing’. I pat him on the back. ‘You’re kind to think about these things. I appreciate it’. I continue. ‘Do you remember how we talked about words, things we say that might not actually mean what we are saying? Those silly phrases like ‘It’s raining cats and dogs’ and ‘He’s pulling my leg’…remember?’ ‘Hmmm…yes’. He’s thinking about it. ‘Like ‘Teacher space, get out of my face’…like that? You need room for your legs but you don’t ever want us to say ‘Get out of my face’…we joke about it because the words are the same’. ‘You mean they rhyme…?’ I want him to be clear. ‘Yes…they rhyme’ he responds. ‘And we definitely don’t say ‘Get out of my face’ but we can say ‘Teacher space’…he nods his head.
I return to his original question. ‘I am still sitting here because my back is very sick this week. I am in a lot of pain. It really hurts my whole body to move and I do not want to get up out of this chair, because it hurts’. He looks at me. ‘Oh’, he smiles. I continue. ‘I’m sitting here just a little bit longer. Does it bother you that I am still here?’ He shakes his head. ‘Oh, no. I was just wondering why you are still here’.
‘Me too’ I laugh. ‘Me too’…and then with a fairly unwieldy lurching effort I rise from the chair and leave the room as he watches me from where he is seated ‘criss-cross applesauce’ on the rug.
690 Saint Paul 