Spilled Milk

When my student’s elbow knocks her pencil box off the desk, I don’t see the pens, pencils, crayons, markers, scissors, notecards, and gluestick tumbling across the floor and clattering on the linoleum. I see myself at the kitchen table when I was her age, reaching for a napkin and knocking a glass of milk over with my elbow. I hear the clunk of the glass against the wood, the initial splash that spread so quickly across the floor, the continuous drip of milk over the table’s edge and through the cracks in its wooden slats. I hear the scrape of a chair and my mother screaming at me to go get a bunch of paper towels and didn’t I tell you not to reach across the table like that and it’s everywhere you better put water on it first and no you have to dry it or its going to rot the hardwoods and no what are you thinking clean the table first or it’s just going to keep dripping.

I don’t see the look of surprise, regret, remorse, and embarrassment that washes over my student’s face in the span of a couple seconds as she processes her error. I see myself on the floor under the kitchen table, red-faced and babbling apologies. I feel the way my skin turned hot and itchy under the vibrations of my mother’s voice, the way my own anger rose to meet hers, how we wound up screaming at each other over that big puddle of milk. I remember thinking there had to be more milk on the floor and the table and the chairs and my shirt and pants than had been in that glass initially, and where had all of the extra incriminating liquid come from? I remember my sister laughing somewhere in the background, which only compounded my rage, and I remember feeling so alone and yet so exposed under that table on my hands and knees, angry and crying and ashamed and thinking, it was just a glass of milk. It’s not that big of a deal, I’m trying to fix it. I am fixing it. Why is she so mad at me? Why is this such an affront to her? Why was I so stupid? Why is there so much freaking milk?

When the pencils and crayons and markers and notecards and gluestick and scissors find their way under the desks of half a dozen other students, I don’t think about the easily avoidable disruption to our lesson on the water cycle. I don’t think about the moment just ten minutes before when I asked the student to put her pencil box back inside her desk once she’d finished her worksheet. I don’t think of the time we’ve lost to the distraction, evidenced by the lack of eyes on the whiteboard and the quiet giggles as the flustered student crouches to pick up her mess. I think, actually, that it’s not that big of a deal. She made a mistake, and she’s trying to fix it. She is fixing it.

When the student’s eyes meet mine, I don’t frown. I don’t cross my arms and remind her of my directions earlier. I don’t sigh and tell her what she already knows about where the pencil box should have been, about how this is why I like for everyone to keep their desks clean, about the class time her mistake has wasted. Instead, I shoot a warning glance at the kids who snicker and ask the students next to her to help pick up her things.

I bend down to grab a pencil that has rolled to the front of the room and make my way down the row of desks to return it. She looks up at me, eyes wide, mouth tight. I know that look. It’s the look on my own face when my mother bends down to yell at me some more as I sop up the milk on the floor with a soggy clump of paper towels. It’s the kind of look that says I know, I messed up, I can’t undo it, I’m doing what you ask now, please just tell me it’s okay, please just tell me I’m okay, I won’t do it again. It’s the kind of look that should be reserved for executioners, not the trusted adults of children who drop things on the floor by mistake, as all children are bound to do.

I know that look, and I hope never to see it directed toward me again. I smile and, to my relief, the student smiles back. She timidly retrieves her pencil from my hand and places it back in the box. Once everything has been returned to the pencil box and the student is back in her chair and the pencil box is safely tucked away inside her desk, I walk back to the front of the room and pick up where I left off explaining precipitation.

Looking at the circle of red arrows marking the path of a water droplet through its liquid and gaseous states, I now find myself thinking about last night, when I spilled red spaghetti sauce on my shirt and screamed at myself. I remember the way the scream felt as it ripped through my throat, the way I paused afterward thinking that the scream had sounded familiar. I remember grumbling at myself all the way back to the kitchen about how stupid I was, snatching a handful of paper towels off the roll and grinding my teeth at the stubborn, red-orange stain that refused to vanish under the influence of soap and water. I think about how I hated the way that scream sounded. I think about how I don’t want to scream at myself anymore, that I don’t need to scream at myself, because it was just some sauce on a t-shirt. Just a little mistake, just an unfortunate moment of clumsiness that happens to people all the time without marking them as failures of the human race.

I continue teaching. The students don’t fail to learn the material just because we were sidetracked for a moment. They don’t berate their classmate the rest of her life for her clumsiness, and the principal doesn’t burst into the room to fire me for my lack of control over the classroom, and the world doesn’t end, because it was just a pencil box. Only a spilled pencil box.