Epilogue.

NOTE: Please scroll back to "Part 1 of 3" to read from the beginning.

This is a meditation on education. This is an open window into a world with few options. This is unavoidable.

There are justifications for every human act because everything a human does comes from an instinct, a drive, a thought. It all has a genesis in reason, however flawed, however mired in the ebbs and flows of sanity. There is always an explanation, even if it is difficult to accept.

Those flickers of human reasoning, those choices made on instincts too much a part of us to deny, are shaped by our options. Our options are shaped by the world we encounter. The world we encounter is the puppet-master, denying us the ability to see a way out because there may not be a way out. The world we encounter is in control.

Education is important beyond math and beyond socialization. It opens a world of options that don't otherwise exist. It forces the development of critical thinking, of self-directed decisions, of a concept of alternatives. It makes us see that there are multiple solutions to each of our problems.

What we are seeing in schools is not education. We are raising whole generations of people incapable of seeing beyond the surface, incapable of understanding the heart of the matter. We are building tomorrow's world with no foundation.

Students are allowed to pass from grade to grade with no concept of how far behind they are, and no reason to improve. They are told that this is all they will ever have. They are discouraged from wanting more. Their options are limited by their stunted abilities. They hardly know the difference between a murder and a spanking.

This is unavoidable.

Part 3 of 3.

"I believe murder is acceptable in some cases. A person that lives very happy never knows how a person being mistreated Feels. When the girls parents listen to all the other kid because they are smaller, how will that make her feel. Not having enagh money to buy what she needs. All the preasure that builds up when a person is not being taken care of properly. In this case I believe that because of the way they lived and the presure that murder was acceptable." -- Amelia G., grade 10

"I think that murder is not acceptable because maybe the Daughter was abused in a unfaithful way that she just thought that what her parents did to her. She could to that to her baby brother. So she wasn't thinking at that moment or something and that's also how some hispanic way to beat their Children." -- Leo G., grade 10

"Murder is never acceptable no matter what circastances maybe. Murder is not a way out. It would have to take a lot of strength to kill a person or in this case a baby. I person wouldn't be able to kill a baby knowing that they are so innocent and cutie. If the girl did do the murder to her little brothers she should feel guilty. Knowing that her little brother died being innocent. I don't just blame it on the teen girl, but also on the parents. If they know that the girl has not patients and that she doesn't feel like taking care of her brothers why would they force her to." -- Julie G., grade 9

"I think that the baby's mother shouldn't have lefted the baby with his older sister because if the parent knew that the girl had wanted to comite murder before and had in a way mental problem. Their parents could off left the baby with someone else because there were alot of people who knew the little 3 years old kid and would had have compassion off him. The parents could off at least try. I don't think it was the girls fatl because she cant even speak well and her parents knew what situation she was in, that she had try to murder herself before." -- Aracely C., grade 9

"The choices that could saved the baby's life that the parents should not her babysit cause before she want to kill herself. Maybe the girl was tired to be living without money. Maybe she was depressed of something bad that happen to her. Maybe the kid should scream for help when she was hurting him. When she was having problems she could talk to someone else so they could give her a advice what to do." Alejandra G., grade 10

Part 2 of 3.

I kept the news on for hours. Switching between networks, I caught every evening broadcast in Chicago. They all told the same story.

The fellow who asked me for change in that alley let me pass in the sunlight, then went back to his hunt for cans in the garbage bins. Simultaneously, I entered the school and he found a dead 3-year-old boy in the trash.

The baby was wrapped in a plastic bag.

Investigation unfolded as I watched the news, dumbfounded. Five other children from the boy's family were taken into protective custody. The parents were questioned. A search party went out to find their oldest daughter, 17, who had been babysitting her siblings that afternoon.

A day later, they found her trying to break into a school building in the suburbs. She was hungry and alone. Without a translator, she couldn't be questioned. She sat in jail overnight.

And that is the last we heard of the story.

Part 1 of 3.

A week and a half ago, I was walking to work and a man asked me to spare him some change. We were in an alley, alone there in a silent sunny moment. I didn't meet his eye.

I walked into the school building, swam upstream against the throngs of students on the stairs and hit the classroom door just in time to see some of my kids making out against the back window. Her eyes were closed. His were open. He was looking outside, kissing her like she was only an excuse for him to stare out at the open world.

I wrote a lesson plan on the board and Leo broke the kiss. "Something happened outside," he said. "5-0 everywhere."

Aracely turned to look and her eyes went wide. "Don't say someone's dead," she said.

As we worked on her book report, talking about violence and heaven -- a heaven where people are not their race, class or gang affiliation -- more and more police cars gathered outside. Just below our window, an entire residential block had been cordoned off. When the helicopters started flying overhead, our faces were grim. Everyone in the classroom knew something was wrong.

We heard newsmen shouting questions, but couldn't make out the words. Leo leaned out the window and called out, "¿Qué tál?" No answer.

By the time our class was over, everything had cleared away. I walked back through the alley to my bus stop and half dreaded turning on the news when I got home.

Drink up.

Love is a cocktail of the mind, a potent mixture of thought and instinct, a biological knee-jerk intoxicant that forces us to come to terms with the limitations of the species. We do not comprehend the game, but we have strong opinions about each and every move we make.

Golden.

I want to lie on an actual bed and be quiet with you, be silent with you. I want to be still. I want to spend time like that until I can't tell if we're asleep and dreaming or not. Silent for hours and hours.

Deeper meaning.

I poured bleach on my thumb this evening. It had no effect on my hand beyond making my thumbnail smell like a freshly-scrubbed tile floor, but it seemed like the thing to do in the moment.

Earlier this afternoon, I chewed on a styrofoam peanut for a little bit. Same deal. No thought went into it at all.

When I woke up this morning, I lifted the register cover off of the heat vent and set it on the counter for a while. Then I put it back.

We all do things without thinking. We all make moves we don't plan. When we reflect on the decisions later, they seem like they were taken out of context, out of the context of the rational minds we know them to have come from.

Then again, I might be reading too much into this; maybe I'm the only person out there with a bleached thumb and styrofoam stuck in the back of my throat.