12 Window

When my son Joel (he’s feeling better, thanks) found out I’d written a column about his accident, he said, ‘What’s that got to do with teaching?’

Nothing, I guess. I just couldn’t think about anything else at the moment. But since then, I’ve been thinking about connections between schools and hospitals. We spent ten days eating, sleeping, and hanging out in one, getting to know the nurses, meeting other families in crisis, and just generally living in the belly of the beast that is modern medicine.

Hospitals, like high schools, are big, complex institutions with lots of rules. Otherwise, there’d be chaos. If you’re lucky, as we were, you’ll be in a critical care ward, where the nurses are experienced, smart, kind, and funny. They also knew when to enforce a rule strictly and when to bend it a little to help a patient heal.

The downside is you have to be seriously injured or sick to be in critical care. After Joel’s surgery, we moved upstairs to what they call ‘a medical floor’ and the care got -- not worse, but more impersonal. We were no longer in crisis, so we got less attention.

Patients use wildly different strategies to gain the attention of nurses and doctors. We spent a lot of time getting to know them personally, learning their names and greeting them warmly whenever we saw them. When we wanted something from them, we asked for it in as respectful a way as we could manage, and it usually worked.

Not all patients and family members are so diplomatic. The nurses told us about patients and their relatives who swore at them, whined, griped, and broke big, important rules, like no smoking in the bathroom. Then there was the man the nurses called ‘12-Window,’ after the location of his bed. Now and then a high-volume string of profanities or a blood-curdling scream would echo down the hall, and a nurse would roll her eyes and say, ‘12-Window.’

There’s a medical term -- ‘triage’ -- that comes from the care of wounded in wartime. The rule is, the worst wounds get treated first. The walking wounded have to wait their turn. The only exception to that rule, on the battlefield, is when a soldier is so grievously wounded that he’s going to die no matter how much attention he gets. In those cases, the medics relieve his pain and move on to treat those who may live to fight again.

Civilian hospitals practice triage, too. They have limited resources: there are only so many hours in a day, so many doctors and nurses, so many dollars to spend on medical care. Here in America , if you’re wealthy or have good insurance, you probably won’t have to wait very long to get treatment, but in other places that’s not so. Though they may call it other things, like ‘health care rationing,’ it’s triage.

Teachers practice a form of triage, too. There aren’t enough hours in a day or week or school year to give all our students the kind of personal attention they -- and their parents -- crave. So we make choices.

Every teacher is different. Some give most of their attention to the high achievers, who are hard-working, eager to learn, and treat teachers with respect. Their families are involved, supportive, and helpful. Get a group like my honors freshmen together, and it’s astounding what they can do. You can’t wait to get to the classroom each day.

Others focus on the kids who are struggling to succeed. They’re working hard and cooperating, but for whatever reason, learning comes hard. Their families want to help, but may not have the time or resources. Still, we’ll go to absurd lengths to pull such kids through, and their achievements, if not as spectacular as others’, are equally rewarding.

But some students are 12-Windows, the kind who can undermine an entire class. Their families, if we ever see them at all, may be abusive, even threatening. Then we each have a decision to make. Will we go on trying to reach that kid, spending our precious time and energy on what may be a lost cause? Or do we pull the plug?