There's this great series of videos by the Fine Brothers where they show kids and teens some pop culture or social item and record their honest reactions. Every time I watch one of these it makes me a little nostalgic for working with kids and I wonder if I want to go back to it in some capacity, maybe teaching again or counseling.
I still have that strange kid magnet vibe I've always had. Just the other day I had not one but two different mothers comment on how odd it was that their babies were "fascinated" by me. I've had more than a few kids walk up to me in big box stores and ask me in a calm way, as though I was a family friend, where their parents were. Kids are always walking up to me on the beach and just saying hi.
But then I think back to my teaching days. Most of the time everything went just fine. Occasionally I'd have a kid who was a "little energetic". There were the years I ran the summer camp which had many Russian Jewish kids who had just come from Soviet Russia and were boisterous to say the least. There was Alex who stole the hammers out of a piano. Let's just say the music teacher wasn't to happy when she went to play Dona Dona at the big family Shabbat gathering and couldn't make the piano work right.
There was his buddy Ruslan who threw a rock through a sliding glass window of the Temple next door that we shared space with. The Rabbi called me and Ruslan and his father to a meeting. A meeting with the Rabbi is not something to look forward to. At the meeting, the Rabbi who was not of the wise, patient variety but more of the harried, not particularly interested in dealing with small things type, asked Ruslan why he did it. Ruslan's answer "I didn't think it would do anything." Ruslan's dady said incredulous how could you "think it wouldn't do anything. It was a rock." Ruslan's answer, in his thick accent. "It was just a leetle rock."
Most of that was typical stuff. But for a couple of years I ran a very tiny daycare program for that same Agency. This was a program that had no money, no plan and pretty much no support. There was me and a youth director who might occasionally give me a break. We worked out of a portable classroom on the property of a mostly abandoned school across the street that had a few tenants. Even though this was an almost neglected program it had one very import factor. There were about 7 kids in this program one of them was the son of the director of the entire local Jewish Community Center agency, the other was the daughter of the director of my branch of the JCC and there were several board member's kids.
I've always been really bad at playing job politics and I didn't see any reason to treat these kids differently. The problems was they were a bunch of difficult kids. Jeremy, the son of the Director was an angry and spoiled kid who even at 7 seemed to know that his dad was important. He was always arguing and giving me a hard time. On this particularly day we were all playing Four Square in a distant back part of the school. It was late in the day and the administrative staff and my boss were all gone. I was the only adult around.
Jeremy was up and he got out and was angry and threw the ball so that it rolled down a walkway. I asked him to get the ball and he shouted "no." I asked him again and this time he yelled "NO". I walked over to him to try to get him to calm down and his face was red and there was real anger in his eyes.
He was inches from me; I'm about 5;11 he was a little 3.5 foot tall kid. I was about ask him to sit down on a bench and suddenly he swung out with a tiny fist. Instantly I felt a sharp pain in my crotch and in another nano second I was on the ground writhing in pain. The little brat had just punched me in the crotch. The teacher in me wanted to get up and deal with this, but my brain and nether region had different ideas. I don't know what causes a grown man to go into the fetal position but there I was completely paralyzed. When I look back now I see stars flying around like in a cartoon.To add insult to injury this kid wasn't upset, or embarrassed or apologetic, he was standing right over me laughing and taunting me like Hulk Hogan at Wrestlemania.
Finally after what seemed like 20 minutes I managed to stand up, orderered him to get the ball and then to sit down away from the group. By now I think he realized he was in serious trouble. Unfortunately his au pair came to pick him up that day and although I told her what had happened I knew she probably wouldn't explain it properly to the parents. I told my boss about it the next day and she said she'd deal with it. But I got the impression that because this was the big bosses kid not much was going to happen. I think my boss made him sit in her office for a day. Oddly enough the agency dropped the funding for that program a few months later.
I tell that story a lot and it always makes everyone laugh, but I still get a pain deep in my crotch whenever I tell it.
To be continued with more tales from my kid days.
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