K-mas

K-mas yells Dude! in a way that's ever-so-slightly carefully enunciated, just like an extra tenth of a second holding the word for emphasis. His face is dark, burnished, with deep red on the cheek bones, and wide arcs swinging under his eyes, uncharacteristically prominent for a 16 year old. Sometimes his look is seeking. Sometimes his look is a shove. Sometimes he would put his eyes toward that ground and say Just fucking kick me out then. He says hello to me every time I see him in the hallway & you'd say he was a model of respect and warmth. In an SST meeting with him and his grandmother, discussing his failing all of his classes, he spent the entire time making paperclip sculptures on a magnetic paperweight. The students make fun of his weight and the heavy way he carries himself, they call him a gorilla. It's affectionate, I think. I'm not kidding; I'm really not sure. He's friends with a lot of the other students in SSJE. According to an SSJE mother, her son and K-mas stay on the phone all night.

Once I was going to play a pickup basketball game with him and some of the other students, but we couldn't get a court. One of the other students had to go home; I asked K-mas if he had to leave as well and a student joked, 'Ha, he never goes home. He lives at Berkeley High.' Another time, I had told him to leave my classroom, I don't remember why, and as he was walking out he said to me Why don't you go home and cry to your fucking boyfriend. Another time he made a rare comment on something we were discussing in class. He gave this beautifully thoughtful answer, unsure at first, but I coached him through it--I don't remember what we were talking about. After class I put my hand on his shoulder as he was leaving and told him that he had done a good job, that I wanted to see more of that, and he kind of half-smiled and said Thanks without really looking back, he was focused on his friends and the hallway.

K-mas is his nickname. Today he physically assaulted our math teacher, Darin. The details are unclear. The school will probably expel him. Which is ironic, because just last week--after the meeting I described in my last post--we were sitting around discussing K-mas, who we said was failing all of his classes & unreachable, and a distraction, even a threat, for other students. We were strategizing ways to get him out of our school, but we kept running into roadblocks.