"All children are water-striders. We skate along the top skin of the pond each day, always threatening to break through, sink, vanish beyond recall, into ourselves."
--Ray Bradbury, "I Sing the Body Electric"
Having spent the last month and a half working with urban middle and high school students this turn of phrase caught me. Too often the children I encounter skim the surface only momentarily, allowing me to glimpse who they really are for brief moments. What lies below the surface for these youths is far darker than the adolescent angst of my own childhood. For these kids it is nothing too remarkable to ruin a shirt soaking up the blood of a friend beaten half to death after school, and yet, like any eighth grader, they still manage brief moments of skating.
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