Arnold’s favorite insect is a praying mantis. He feels that dragons aren’t cool unless they have three or more heads. If you take something away from him, regardless of whether or not he’s using it, he will demand it back. He might phrase it like this: “Give me that back now!” He’ll usually throw a rising inflection somewhere in the middle of the word “now” and punctuate this rising inflection with an over-exaggerated head bob. Arnold also doesn’t like it when people address him with, “Hey Arnold” because it reminds him of “that stupid show.” When further probed as to why the show is stupid, Arnold reserves comment.
Arnold is a fourth grader at Eisenhower elementary school, in the Mesa Unified School District. The Mesa Unified School District is the largest school district in Arizona, encompassing over forty elementary schools. Eisenhower is the poorest school in the district.
When I first came to site for the Service Learning Internship—an internship that, in a nutshell, instills the knowledge and awareness needed for “the college experience” by pairing kids with college students who become role-models and mentors by sharing such insight into the class biased culture by saying things like, “nine times three is twenty-seven” and “a possessive pronoun for the first person is ‘my’”—I sat next to a short, Hispanic child who was talking too loudly to his classmates when he should have been paying attention to the rules and regulations, as dictated from the “Supervising Intern.” Supervising Interns, by the way, are some of th—
Out of nowhere, Whap!
This kid had just punched another kid in the chest. Who is this ruffian? This scoundrel? This viral stowaway aboard my ship of perfection in the universe? Kids are not trouble makers. They do not punch each other in the chest. Kids are angels, philosophers, devoid of the bitter cacophony of our social order.
In my eloquent, softly spoken way, I simply addressed the issue at hand, saying, “Woah, woah, hey, hey, woah, hey now, woah, what, hey now woah.” Both the victim and the assailant started laughing, presumably, at me. The thought never crossed my mind that they were simply laughing at my over-reaction to their antics, until another tutor relayed the message by saying something to the effect of, “I think they’re just laughing at your over-reaction to their antics.”
We were then interrupted by the Site Manager, pouring gallons of patience onto the situation, saying, “Arnold. Sit down and be quiet, now.” There was a rising inflection somewhere in the middle of the “now.” Arnold sat next to me.
“Are you going to be my tutor?”
“I’m not really sure yet.”
“I hope so.”
“We’ll see.”
We saw. I did, eventually, become Arnold’s tutor. On the first day of our tutoring, we didn’t really like each other. “Get to work,” one of us would say, to which the other of us would respond, “I don’t want to.” Then the first one of us would say, “but you have to.” This would go on for a good ten minutes, until one of us would threaten to get the Site Manager, and the other one of us, upon being threatened, would retrieve a math book from his back pack. This became a daily ritual. We found comfort in the routine of it.
Arnold’s home life is rickety at best and, at worst, downright tragic. His mother is a poor, Spanish speaking, working class woman. She drives an old, tan, run-down car. It leaks visible carcinogens into the air. She struggles with the means by which she can allow Arnold to attain his goals. Arnold’s father is non-existent, drives no car. I drive a 1996 silver Ford Contour and am the closest thing Arnold has to a male role-model. This, I think, scares us both.
Sometimes he is willing to work, learn, play, and use his imagination. On those days, it feels like he is escaping something; using our time as an outlet for the inexhaustible burdens of his sentience. Other times, these burdens manifest themselves in bouts of plaintive taciturnity or resentful indignation. In group settings, he might punch someone in the chest or steal something out of someone’s hands. When it is just Arnold and I, he is usually more open about his feelings and resentments. “I’m with my aunt right now,” he’ll tell me.
I don’t know Arnold’s aunt. Never met the woman. But if she’s anywhere within a league radius of Arnold’s portrait of her (a portrait which consists of sentences like, “I hate her. Seriously. You don’t understand. I totally hate everything about her.”), I’d care never to grace her presence.
But Arnold’s aunt is just one of the many things Arnold must deal with. Karl Marx would probably categorize Arnold’s family as “lumpenproletariat”—those for which the ruling class has no use and has since discarded into the recesses of American tragedy. High school history books neglect to portray these people. They are olive-green, festering scars on the chest of a nation that boasts, “justice for all” and “united we stand.” And when Americans sing, “God Bless America” during the seventh inning of a Yankees game, in a pathetic display of religious segregation, the sentiment does not carry itself to Arnold’s family. God, evidently, does not bless the poor.
Arnold’s family is tired, poor, yearning to breathe free and yet our storied pomp turns away from them in disgust like a prude watching a porno. They find no solace in our statues or our slogans. They find no solace in our ideologies; none in our apathy. There is none to be found but through the hard work that will inevitably make some rich man even richer.
How do I teach around this? How do I ignore the notion that the dominant class is expecting—going so far as to root for—Arnold to fail? Do I tell him that the only way to prove these bastards wrong is to succeed? That the only way he can dent the steel of the status quo is to prove himself an exception? To shoot for Ferrari and never be content with a model more than ten years old?
The mere fact that his success would be considered an “exception” to the rules goes farther in convincing me of the system’s corruption than all the volumes of Marxist literature combined. And yet every day, I punch the time card; every year I pay the tuition; every hour I help to perpetuate the ideologies that keep Arnold’s family from having the realistic opportunity they deserve. I am as bad in my own hypocrisy as those who can’t see past the system’s failures are in their ignorance.
And it feels so fucking cliché sometimes. I go to the site, sign my name and date on the timesheet, and spend the next few hours trying to slay a dragon with a fly-swatter. For every Arnold that succeeds and becomes an “exception,” there are a hundred Arnolds that fail. And both only go on to perpetuate the same ideology.
Maybe I find comfort in this dole. Maybe it eases my conscience to believe I’m doing something.
At the end of Schindler’s List, Oscar is reflecting on all the people he has saved from certain death, a number that rounds at about 1,200. Rather than becoming boastful or content with his list, he confides in his friend that he “could have got more.” He talks about how he could have sold his car and saved ten more people. He rips the gold swastika pin from his lapel and exclaims, “This pin, two people! He would have given me two people, or at least one person for this. A whole person, Stern. I could have gotten one more person and I didn’t. I didn’t…”
In Schindler’s moment of triumph, he was still coming to grips with the ratio of his number saved to the number killed. He felt the futility of his aid. It was a band-aid on a gunshot wound. It was slaying a dragon with a fly-swatter.
Not a day goes by where I don’t look forlornly at the floor and admit that I can be doing more. I know my own hypocrisy, I just don’t know how to change it. I trust my own instincts, I just don’t know how to act upon them. I want so badly to right the wrongs, to change the horrible excuse for human conditions these people call existence. I want to tear the system into bits of confetti and throw them in the face of the rich, exploiting capitalists. But, like Schindler, I throw my Swastika pin on the ground, knowing it represents the gap between the capacity for change and the actualization of it; and not knowing how to write myself out of it.
But some days it doesn’t feel quite so cliché. It feels right. The children run out of the van, eyes like Sacagawea Dollars, hands filled with some sort of mystical trading cards, and they want to learn. Arnold comes waddling up, on account of his backpack weighing the equivalent of a cubic foot of reinforced steel, and he’s sounding out words from his reading comprehension guide, and he’s counting his math problems on his fingers, and he’s using the things I’ve taught him. And he really seems like an angel, a philosopher, devoid of the bitter cacophony of our social order.
Perhaps I won’t be able to slay the dragon with the fly swatter, but I might be able to embarrass it, humiliate it, dent its ego. Anything. Change a piece. That’s all. A scale. A toe. A fingernail. If it’s all I can do, it’s all I will do. Because at least I’m trying, aren’t I? Aren’t I trying to change something? God, I hope so. After all, this dragon of exploitation only has one head: the head of inequality. And if Arnold has taught me anything, it’s that dragons aren’t cool unless they have three or more heads.