And Blackboards Shiny shoes, sharpened pencils and brand new backpacks herald the beginning of school each year. Children enter classrooms eager to learn and anxious to be counted in as valuable members of their peer groups. Blackboards are central to that learning, and metaphorically appropriate symbols for this project. Blackboards frame issues while defining their temporality. The slate is wiped clean with the assumption that what was on the board is now firmly etched in the minds of the children.
Chronic illness is such a topic.
Mentioned occasionally in the context of children returning to school from hospitals, it is often afforded the same temporality that blackboard messages receive. Studies accumulate that attest to the danger of ignoring the complexity of issues that surround children with chronic illness and of paying only transitory attention to the ongoing covert needs of this population-needs that just can't be erased at the end of the day. All children benefit from an understanding of chronic illness. Unfortunately, too many erase from the board any reference to it, having learned that it's better to pretend that it does not exist. They all know when it's present, though, and they all know, by the silence that surrounds it, that there must be something about it that is terribly wrong.