It has happened, although sooner than I thought it would being that I have only taught for five years. I have encountered my first "grandchild." One of my former students has a child already. She is fifteen.
I had R as a student a little over two years ago, when we still had 6th through 8th graders in our school. That May and June she was assigned to the library to do a project and help me, as condition for graduation. Causing too much trouble in class. She wasn't a huge help in the library, but I liked having her there. I liked her. She was smart, and that goes a long way with me. She also couldn't control her urge to disrupt her classmates (attention getting?) but since they weren't there in the library it wasn't an issue. She loved to read, so that's what she spend a lot of time doing, and that was fine with me. She graduated, but the following October I passed by her in the street and she said she'd been kicked out of the high school, and was at the alternate school, which is basically the route to dropping out of high school. I felt badly. There are some kids who, whatever the issue is at home, have teachers and counselors at school who are willing to help them and work with them, but sometimes that is not enough.
R. was smart, but for whatever reason she decided that she did not want to control her urge to disrupt and stay in school. She's not like other kids you see whose IQs are barely enough to get them through elementary education, and she's not some sort of unpopular geek--she had friends. She didn't go around school like a you-know-what in training...there were some girls who'd go around school with puffed out their lips and boobs even in sixth grade, priming themselves for teen pregnancy, as if the only thing they felt they could offer (a boy) was their bodies. R didn't have the looks--acne-ridden, sallow skin, a lazy eye, straggly reddish hair--but she had the brains.
Today I was walking to my car across the street from school, slightly zoned out after a long day at work. My brain didn't even register the three teenage girls walking past me--then I heard, "Hey, hello Ms.---"
"R----" I called out. "What are you up to these days?" She pointed. "That's mine." Then I saw the baby carriage, being pushed by one of the other girls, who looked vaguely familiar. Then I looked at R and smiled, although wincing inwardly at the multiple piercings she had added to herself--on her lip, her chin, her temples. It was conceptually hard to link this pink-wrapped and unblemished infant, sleeping in the carriage protected by the visor, with her mother, pierced, squinting slightly cross-eyed in the late summer sun, her slightly chubby body squeezed into faded jeans. R, for all her physical ugliness, could smile and laugh unself-consciously among the two carefully lipsticked, doe-eyed and dark-haired girls beside her. When R talks to you she looks right at you, even though her lazy eye doesn't. So many of the teenage girls cannot, because they are too busy worrying about their self-image. It is something I admire about R. But there was nothing admirable about the scene, anyway. "Where are you living?" She replied--a wealthier town about half an hour away, but she was here because the baby's doctor was here. I asked her if she was with the father. Yeah, she smiled. "I sure know how to pick them!" she said, pride in her voice. That told me she had likely gotten pregnant on purpose--not surprisingly, since R. is too smart to get pregnant by accident. I didn't pry. It's likely I will run into her again.
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