There is no liminal space in middle school.

All things are black and white. A boy in my class writes me a poem about life and death, love and hate. I tell him I like the contradictions.

In the mornings I come in tired and already sweating. I wait in line for our one working copy machine and read the note again about how the repairman has been called. I write the date at the top of the blackboard, open all the windows as wide as I'm allowed to (the opening must be smaller than the space you'd need to toss a chair out onto the sidewalk) and wonder how many grandmothers I'll have to call this afternoon.

There are excellent days, when everyone piles in from the hallway, takes out a notebook, and attempts to put pen to paper. There are terrible days, when the whole class is already screaming by the time I get them in their seats. A boy says to me, "You must be so patient." A girl has an asthma attack and EMS has to pick her up out front. Tears well in tiny brown eyes when I say I'm going to call a grandmother. I turn to write on the blackboard and somebody calls me a bitch. A twelve-year-old girl asks me to tie her shoes for her - says she forgot how. Five minutes later she claims to be fourteen - older and wiser than everybody else in the room. Kids I've never met come up to me in the cafeteria, call me by name, and ask to be moved into my class. Kids I know ask the guidance counselor to move them out.

I sing the chorus of the new Young Jeezy song and I am a God for thirty seconds. I make them wait to leave for lunch until everyone is quiet and I am Satan for the rest of the afternoon. We have spelling races on the blackboard and I am their favorite. But the next day my class is boring and we never read anything except this corny bullshit. I am the worst teacher they've ever had. I give them stickers and they love me again, until I tell them to spit out their gum and once again, they hate me. They hate everyone in this stupid school. They love it here and can't wait to go to eighth grade prom. They're not coming back for the rest of the year.

I always. I never. Everything and nothing.

A star student is absent for a week straight because his family goes on vacation during school. One girl shows up three days into the year and then disappears again. Some people never miss a day but spend them all camped out in the back row, mumbling to themselves. They do excellent work and forget to put their names at the top of the paper. They sing. They sleep. They beat on the desks. They have endless energy and can't sit still. They are tired and can't think of anything to write about. They know more than I do about everything. They have no life experiences at all - why do I ask them such stupid questions?

There are days when I get all my copies made early and scribble everything on the chalkboard the afternoon before. There are days when for twenty sweaty minutes I race around from floor to floor looking for lost lesson plans, only to find them right on my desk.

I eat alone, staring out the window. I eat in meetings nodding - copies, I can make the copies.

In the eighth grade we learn about communities and how they fall apart. We read "The Lottery" and the script of a Twilight Zone episode about townspeople turning on one another. We are learning not to shriek in class, making scrapbooks about the neighborhood's history, and prepping for a unit on the Civil War.

In the seventh grade we learn new words - posthumously, loathing, antagonist. "Why you gotta antagonize me like that?" I ask the kid who falls asleep. I pile books on his head. I explain to them that I can't mark on their essays, only make "rubric based comments" on post-it notes and then stick the post-it notes to their essays. "And whose idea is this whole post-it note thing?" I ask, opening my hands to show that everyone can call the answer out - no need to raise hands. "The man," they chant. "Who's the man again?" one kid asks another. "Could the man be a woman?" Contradictions.

Some afternoons, I stare at the map of New Orleans in last week's Time magazine (all of my reading is at least that far behind) and I cry on public transportation. Some afternoons, I smile at all of the crossing guards. But every afternoon, in a few minutes on the 3 train, I do what it takes some people in Brownsville a lifetime to accomplish, what some of them never do: I leave. In the morning I come back again. I hate this job. I love this job.