CONTROL...

I have no class to teach. I have no purpose. I have no power. I have no control.

And that’s really what this has all been about.

Control.

As a teacher, control is instilled in you as part of your training. I am expected to control the classroom, and the students within it. I am expected to control the grades that they achieve. I am expected to control the futures of my students. I am expected to control my emotions.

There was a time when I failed. When I let my emotions take hold of me, when I got caught up with the world around me. The news had been speaking about the upturn in gun crime in the capital, and as a London-based teacher I was on edge. I let what my peers said in the staff room effect me too, as they chattered over Earl Gray about which students they had heard were packing heat at school.

So when one of those students, Aaron, approached me with the shape of a gun wrapped in a plastic carrier bag and told me to give him my wallet, my brain didn’t understand that he was playing some stupid joke. My ears heard a true threat. My eyes skipped over the playful smile on his face.

I lost control over my emotions.

I hit him.

I listened to what I had been told and judged him for what others thought, not what I knew to be true. That loss of control nearly lost me my career. My livelihood was threatened. I had to leave the school but thanks to a completely selfless act from Aaron who wrote a letter admitting his part I was able to keep teaching. And bit by bit I wrestled back control.

I swore I would never lose that control again. And I was never really tested after that.

Until Wolfgang.

I have had to strive so hard to maintain composure around him, to keep calm in the face of all the adversity he has thrown my way. I’ve nearly cracked along the way, but my resolve has kept me going. Control is MINE, and I can’t sit idly by whilst he tries to take it away once more, in the most degrading way possible.

The truth is, although Wolfgang thinks he is in control, I am not the only one who is struggling for it. He is too. He is exactly like me, when I sat in that staff room surrounded by gossiping teachers. He has been raised on gossip about black men ‘like me’. He has chosen to believe the vile his predecessors spewed and in that action,  he has given them control over his life and destiny. Without that control he has no option but to be the way he is, I see that now. Without that control I can never change his mind.

So, he needs to take back control, just like I did, and throw aside those archaic views his predecessors have. Only then can he see us as equal, and only then can he be free of his past.