One of my favorite albums is Dave Brubeck’s 1959 classic Time Out, with probably his most famous piece, “Take Five.” The quintuple time signature (5/4) could give it a somewhat jerky feel, but Dave’s light touch smooths the piece and provides minimalistic base for Paul Desmond’s now-timeless melody.

Playing in 5/4, I would imagine, is all about self-awareness. It’s such an odd time signature and so rarely played that I would think it takes a conscious effort to stay in time.

It’s almost as if Brubeck and Desmond were writing a soundtrack for events forty-seven years in the future, a commentary on some of the difficulties the kids I work with have, and how they deal with it.

“Why don’t you just take five?” A question that comes from my lips almost daily. “Take five” means, in our program, getting up and walking to the front foyer and taking a break from a situation that is in some way upsetting. Staff can tell the kids to take five if the staff member feels things are getting out of control, and the kids can simply say, “I need to take five.”

I imagine that the circumstances leading up to those “take-five” moments feel a bit like the 5/4 time signature played badly: jerky, unpredictable, out of control.

From the outside, it often seems like the smallest thing has set a kid off.

• Sometimes, I have to ask a kid to stop talking so I can finish explaining something, and boom. “Why are you always on my back?!”
• Occasionally, a couple of kids are talking, so I stop talking and just wait for them to finish. And then wait for there to be silence so I can continue. “Man, why you just standin’ there?! I wanna get this class over with.” Usually, the one who says this is one who was talking.
• Every now and then, insisting that a kid correct his work — providing negative feedback, in other words — upsets him to the point of distraction, even if I’m sitting there working with him. Indeed, this can make it worse.

In all these situations, and many others, I find myself thinking, “What’s going on here? Why is this simple request to be quiet or to correct a wrong answer so upsetting?”

Such moments are harsh reminders of the simple fact that I see only a small portion of their lives — almost incalculably small. These behaviors didn’t appear instantaneously, and they were reinforced by events that I’ll never know about and could do nothing about even if I did.

Bottom line, the reaction doesn’t make sense, and the reason why they’re occasionally reacting in such ways is the same reason they’re in our program and not still in school.