Life in the Point

No hockey content tonight.  Although I am typing during commercial breaks of the Wings vs. Stars.  Part of the reason my job has extra stress is that I work with kids.  They are things that you can just leave at work and forget about.  They are humans and therefore you get attached to them.  It's particuarly more stressful where I work because the problems the kids face are much greater than other places (i.e. one boy was emotional in class and he told the director people were being shot outside his building and he hated Halloween because of everything that goes on).  There are things we don't openly tell our parents or significant others.  Things like how a faculty member was almost taken in a van on a night near Halloween.  Or how two of our middle school kids were jumped at the bus stop by kids who had wood with nails in it. 

Tonight I was walking to the subway with my co-teacher when we saw a rowdy group across the street.  A mob of fist fighting, cursing kids moved form one side of the street and into the street.  We started walking faster and saw they were crossing the street.  We then walked as fast as possible to the other side of the street and booked it for the subway. 

The thing was, we weren't the only ones.  Two kids who were with the group took of running away and everyone on our side of the street crossed over when they saw it coming.  We all had the exact same thought- we need to avoid this group because god only knows if they have knives or guns.  For my co-teacher and I, though, we get to the subway and hop on a train to the Upper East Side.  We go home where we know it's safe.  Our kids don't get the same chance.  It's hard to know the the 6 and 7 year olds that you spend 40 hours a week with are painfully aware of what's going on in the world around them.  And it's not like you can really explain to them why they can't go outside and play or why those women with short, tight clothes are knocking on cars or why the have to hear gunshots at night. I don't know if that's getting soap boxy.  It's just the reality of how you start to feel.