Oh, thank goodness, the listening center got done.

I’m going to bite off a big one, and see if it can get done. The essay from the teacher really struck a chord with me, and I hope it will with you, too:

What I have realized about teaching Southern Appalachian public high school students is that the teacher’s essential task is that of expanding the students’ horizons in order to increase their options. My students range from ninth through twelfth grade, from repeating students with foster parents and probation officers to AP English students who dream of Duke, and from descendants of Principal Chiefs of the Cherokee tribe, to Latino immigrants’ children, to descendants of the Scots-Irish straight out of Ulster. What they all have in common is that they have had little exposure to a realistic depiction of the world outside this geographically and economically isolated region. The exposure they have had is often through cable television and MTV,and this means their view of the world and themselves is skewed by the commercialism of a culture that has marginalized Native Americans and Appalachians for centuries.

By all means, read it all.

Ms. G goes on to explain that she finds herself in a perfect storm of school funding nightmares: the county has so much public land and so much land that’s part of a reservation that its tax base is minuscule. She’s in a high-poverty area to begin with. Her school’s budget, which I’m sure was, as she says, “already small,” was — wait for this — cut in half this year.

Yes, you read that correctly. Her school’s budget, combining federal and state cuts, was more than halved.

I doubt the student body was more than halved. I doubt they found a way to learn from the front half of the book, or write with the eraser end of the pencil, or only keep half the lights on. So the money comes from, it appears, everything else. EVERYTHING else. In Ms. G’s case, her immediate problem is that her students work at small individual desks that are not high-school-student-appropriate, and in order for her to operate the class properly, she needs folding tables.

That’s right. She’s a teacher in a public school, and she cannot. Get. Folding. Tables.

My school had folding tables — conference tables were how you did group work in high school, and group work is really important, especially in social studies and humanities. Did your school have folding tables? Ms. G’s kids are stuck pushing undersized desks around the room so she can operate proper high-school classes and hold discussions. Seven folding tables — that’s what she wants. It’s not as cute as baby chicks, and it’s not as much fun to take a picture of as a toy kitchen, but the fact that we have public schools that cannot afford tables absolutely makes me sick.

This one is a little bigger — she needs about a thousand bucks. But this is my new cause: folding tables for Ms. G, however long it takes. I want to be able to visualize her and her students holding discussions around those tables for a long time. Day-in, day-out, books on the tables, writing on the tables, leaning on the tables to trash-talk your friends before the teacher gets in.

And here’s to the dear hope that we can do a better job in the future of not expecting people to conduct classes without furniture, for crying out loud.