Social Orphans

Years ago, friends of ours moved to Ukraine to serve children who lived in the state-run orphanage. They began by offering extracurricular programming and camp opportunities to the children. It was, essentially, respite services for state-employed caregivers.
While our friends were raising support for this endeavor, they explained they wanted to reach social orphans. This was the term they used to describe these children—kids, who, for the most part, actually had at least one living parent, but the parents were either alcoholic, abusive, unstable, etc. The biological parents had, more or less, given their children over to the state for care.

I’ve often thought about social orphans. Surely it’s a travesty—at least, I thought this over a dozen years ago when our friends left for Ukraine.

This summer we moved across the country. I left the teaching gig; we all left family and what had been normal for a couple years.

My teaching friends returned to school for active shooter training and de-escalation scenarios. I am not sorry to be there for that but I am sad we don’t get to revel in the back-to-school excitement. I guess schooling of a certain variety is very much engrained into our cells of what is right and acceptable. We began Saxon math (to my chagrin; I swore I’d never do that again—Still waiting for a Divine intervention) and even though each kid does thirty problems a day it doesn’t feel math-y enough.
I mused that teaching 360 kids elementary music is likely the same difficulty level as teaching four of my own a well-rounded curriculum.

I fought the good fight in public school, though, and was given an hour of plan time to scheme up fun music stuff—much more up my alley than your basic subjects. I have to pretend I’m not bored with Latin conjugations and IEW (sorry, Pudewa, but the magic is in the flow; I can’t be sitting and watching DVDs on how to write) and fractions. I tell Joe he has to help me have a good attitude. And also to not ever mention the H-word (homeschool). Shh!
The Venn diagram in my head works overtime debating the merits and downfalls of various schooling and I hate it. I also dislike the part of me that cannot be easy and rebels at the slightest indication that I should just go with it. I blame this character trait on my genes because I have a dad that loves to do the same. We two characters think we are presenting logic to the fools (shouldn’t they appreciate it?!) but deep down we might just looking for a way to be unique and thus patted on the head for our cleverness.

In PS (public school) what wore me down was the reliance on screens to teach (they called it asynchronous learning, but we all knew who was babysitting), the laziness that it inspired, poorly behaved children, and grownups who shrugged as if it were a cycle that couldn’t be stopped.
Students were no longer first priority. Less so in the elementary, from my vantage point.
And I hesitate to say that many educators were superb—excellent! But even our best are getting worn down by playing substitute parents for children who have no at-home training. They come to school ready to argue, to fight, to brawl. Imagine a fiery Facebook post but spoken by the mouths of eight and nine year old punks. On a small carpet, elbow to elbow. I had tiny kids announce to me on the first day that they couldn’t sit by so-and-so because, simply, they hate them.

Sorry, folks, that’s not how the world works!
More than one teaching friend from more than one PS told me it was the worst year they’d ever had teaching. When asked, they pointed at Covid and its mental and behavioral health implications. I don’t think Covid hurt the kids—I think it hurt the parents in a way that made them throw their hands up in the air and say, to heck with raising children. Why should I even try?

The nature of Covid and politics and social media at the time hit a crossroads where it felt Freedom might be lost. There was a demand by culture to place one’s stake in the sand. It beckoned—say it and say it out loud (on the internet in a public forum) or it doesn’t count:
Trump is an idiot. Let’s go Brandon! Wear a mask, you idiot! Masks are stupid. Black Lives Matter. All lives matter. (Funny how, even as I type this, my device autocorrects BLM to be capitalized. It won’t let it not be capitalized.)
The obsessing, the worry, the sickness and anger and stress reached a fever pitch, and we let it get to us.

When they weren’t distracted by their devices, our kids were watching. They were listening. They didn’t debate the merits of the conversations; they just quickly picked up that, in our culture, arguing is how we converse. People who disagree are idiots. Divisiveness is normal. Listening to the other side is stupid.
When they were distracted by their devices, they felt it natural to be entertained. Their dopamine went up, their blood pressure dropped. We created a special little addiction just for their stress issues. Little Johnny screams when I take away his tablet, so I let him stay on it. Keeps him quiet.

No wonder there was trouble brewing at school. The best a teacher can do is try to de-escalate Johnny while his blood pressure soars because his brain chemicals are out of whack. The best classroom management tool now is a federally subsidized, school-issued one-to-one device (one laptop/tablet per student). We can’t medicate them with pills, but we can do some therapeutic video games/YouTube videos and call it a Brain Break.
But it began in the home, back where social orphans first lost their parents to who-knows-what. Back when a mother or father somehow began to neglect their duty. When their own distractions began to outweigh the responsibilities of Love. To heck with intimate, familial interactions—let’s give all our children personal devices so we don’t have to make conversation at all!

It was because of the social orphans I needed my own respite. Raising my own kids takes almost all the effort and energy I can muster.
I quit teaching.

Funny how the American church sends missionaries and gushes over the saving of certain social orphans, as long as they are safely beyond our own borders. Yet the same church often vilifies American public education, where needy kiddos are just an arm’s length away.

Funny how our distractions outweigh our responsibilities.