The past two mornings, there has been a first year immature Baltimore oriole at the feeder; last week, there was an immature rose-breasted grosbeak at the feeder. Yesterday, Patty saw a pair of sandhill cranes on her run. Every time we see something the least bit unusual we get excited. We are so lucky; we live in a part of the world where we can still, for a little while longer, take these sightings for granted—more or less.
We’ve seen the cranes, not often, but fairly regularly in the Plum River bottoms near Loran Rd. for the last four or five years. They are actually, along with the eagle, one of nature’s great comeback stories. Every time we go walking, even if we just hear them, we’re thrilled. In other parts of the state, Canada Geese are considered a nuisance, out here, to hear a flock of geese calling as they fly across the sky is still amazing. When we first moved here, we had no idea that there were so many wonderful birds right outside our front door. Just one more example, we had to get out the field guide and check and double check until we finally learned that the wonderful birds, with the shrill call, which try to take over the pastures and hay fields every spring, are killdeer. We’ve learned to recognize them and seeing and hearing them every morning is a joy.
As I write this, I can look over the top of my computer screen, out the window into the yard and watch dozens of birds. We’re not knowledgeable enough to know why they come and go, hang out and disappear, appear and reappear, but we love every curtsy, bow and turn in their endless aerial dance. Some mornings, the feeders are crowded with gold finches. And then puff! they’re gone for a week or two. But the sparrows, a lone pair of nuthatches, and of course the house finches (which I stubbornly insist are purple finches) persist.
It used to be that the grosbeaks would pass through spring and fall on their way someplace else; this year, they stayed. The orioles missed a year but seem to have nested nearby again this year. The mourning doves are wonderful but their plaintive call can be a bit wearing. But, then with a touch of regret in her voice Patty comments, “You know there haven’t been any doves around lately.” But, later that same day, one will appear strutting along the roof’s ridge line. Thanks to Patty’s nest boxes, the bluebirds are regulars now well into early winter. It’s a corny, worn out old cliché, but still there is nothing quite as exciting as the unexpected flash of blue.
It’s still warm, humid, and a bit muggy and the occasional thunder shower still loudly proclaims, “This is August! It is supposed to be hot and humid with isolated thunder showers!” But it is also the beginning of fall. The kingbirds suddenly appear on the electric wires. We wonder, “Where have they been all summer?” The redwinged blackbirds, which have not only been quiet but nearly invisible since nesting ended, are just beginning to reappear. For the next couple of months, we’ll watch the blackbirds and swallows begin to gather together in preparation for their journey. But it’s early; they’re not really serious yet. Hanging out seems just right, so that’s what they’re doing.
Is bird watching exciting because we’re getting old and that’s all we’re up to? There are young birders of course, but most of us have gray hair and arthritis. We like to think that one of the benefits of maturity is a bit of wisdom. We’re finally beginning to sort out what’s important and what’s not. And waiting for the cedar waxwings to return each fall and hang out for a week in their namesake and eat the juniper like berries seems more important than ever.
T
Monday, August 22, 2011
Thursday, August 18, 2011
After nearly thirty years (1971-1999), at the time I retired, some things had changed and some things were sadly still the same.
At my first faculty meeting, on the west side in September, 1971, the principal, the assistant principals, the disciplinarian and all the teachers complained about the high rate of absenteeism, the excessive number of tardies, and the amount of traffic in the halls long after the bell. At my last faculty meeting, this time on the south side, twenty-eight years later, people were still complaining about the exact same things. They were all suggesting, demanding actually, for the umpteenth time, implementation of the same old policies that had consistently failed for thirty years.
But other things had changed. When I started teaching, most of my students had either been born in the South or their parents had been born in the South. And many of my students still went home, down south, for all or part of the summer. Actually, they sometimes didn’t get back until mid-September. Their lame excuse was that schools started later down south. When they were in the north they were busy trying to assimilate, which was more important to them than learning to be a better reader. They knew that they were “country” and they were trying desperately to become Chicagoans. The biggest insult was to call someone “country”. In the seventies, during the holidays, I often had the students talk or write about southern traditions such as food or raccoon hunting. One year I had the young women compare their mothers’ sweet potato pie recipes. One girl trumped everybody by bringing me a half of a pie. It was delicious. Of course, she got the best grade for the assignment.
When I left, nobody was from the South and the connections which had been so vibrant were literally dying off. One final irony, in the nineties, newspapers were reporting that successful northern inner city students who went back down south to go to college never came back north.
When I started teaching, students still read the daily newspaper. So in reading or English I was forced to say, “Alright put the paper away; it’s time to do some work.” The two or three in the back, who had brought the paper with them mainly as protection from boredom, quickly proceeded to go to sleep. One time, I came in a minute or two late and all the young men were gathered around the class’s best reader and he was reading the sports section to the group, but mainly to Marcus, the star of the varsity basketball team. The team had won the night before, surprising everyone, and the news had made the Sun-Times. After that, reading the sports section to Marcus became an accepted part of class. The team was on a winning streak, and because they had been perceived to be losers from the get go, the Sun-Times sports writer had labeled them the “Cinderella Team.” So twice a week, the morning after the game, we would all take ten minutes to read the paper and another ten minutes to discuss the game.
Marcus couldn’t read, but he was a phenomenal basketball player. He was short, skinny and not very aggressive, except on the court,like the rest of the team. But somehow, they were able to win most games all season right up to the finals. When the season ended, the class lost some of its pizzazz; sadly it was back to business as usual. After awhile, Marcus stopped coming to school. I later learned that even at the famous Big 10 schools, well into the sixties, it was normal for seniors not to come back to school after the last game. Word around school was that Marcus was in the park shooting baskets for quarters and then a little later, nothing.
When I left teaching the kids didn’t read the newspaper, didn’t bring it to school and didn’t steal it off their neighbor’s front stoop.
When I started teaching I had to guard my own newspaper. Not only would students who would never steal a book, steal my paper; but teachers, my friends and colleagues, who would never steal a book, would steal the crossword, the sports section, the horoscope, demand just a quick peek at Ann Landers or at Friday’s movie section. The only part of the newspaper which was safe was the actual news section. When I left teaching, nobody had wanted my newspaper for a long time.
Look at the missed opportunities. Couldn’t we have talked about the war, basketball, the daily paper and one of the most important migrations in modern history and been more successful,to boot? Wouldn’t our students have learned more?
At my first faculty meeting, on the west side in September, 1971, the principal, the assistant principals, the disciplinarian and all the teachers complained about the high rate of absenteeism, the excessive number of tardies, and the amount of traffic in the halls long after the bell. At my last faculty meeting, this time on the south side, twenty-eight years later, people were still complaining about the exact same things. They were all suggesting, demanding actually, for the umpteenth time, implementation of the same old policies that had consistently failed for thirty years.
But other things had changed. When I started teaching, most of my students had either been born in the South or their parents had been born in the South. And many of my students still went home, down south, for all or part of the summer. Actually, they sometimes didn’t get back until mid-September. Their lame excuse was that schools started later down south. When they were in the north they were busy trying to assimilate, which was more important to them than learning to be a better reader. They knew that they were “country” and they were trying desperately to become Chicagoans. The biggest insult was to call someone “country”. In the seventies, during the holidays, I often had the students talk or write about southern traditions such as food or raccoon hunting. One year I had the young women compare their mothers’ sweet potato pie recipes. One girl trumped everybody by bringing me a half of a pie. It was delicious. Of course, she got the best grade for the assignment.
When I left, nobody was from the South and the connections which had been so vibrant were literally dying off. One final irony, in the nineties, newspapers were reporting that successful northern inner city students who went back down south to go to college never came back north.
When I started teaching, students still read the daily newspaper. So in reading or English I was forced to say, “Alright put the paper away; it’s time to do some work.” The two or three in the back, who had brought the paper with them mainly as protection from boredom, quickly proceeded to go to sleep. One time, I came in a minute or two late and all the young men were gathered around the class’s best reader and he was reading the sports section to the group, but mainly to Marcus, the star of the varsity basketball team. The team had won the night before, surprising everyone, and the news had made the Sun-Times. After that, reading the sports section to Marcus became an accepted part of class. The team was on a winning streak, and because they had been perceived to be losers from the get go, the Sun-Times sports writer had labeled them the “Cinderella Team.” So twice a week, the morning after the game, we would all take ten minutes to read the paper and another ten minutes to discuss the game.
Marcus couldn’t read, but he was a phenomenal basketball player. He was short, skinny and not very aggressive, except on the court,like the rest of the team. But somehow, they were able to win most games all season right up to the finals. When the season ended, the class lost some of its pizzazz; sadly it was back to business as usual. After awhile, Marcus stopped coming to school. I later learned that even at the famous Big 10 schools, well into the sixties, it was normal for seniors not to come back to school after the last game. Word around school was that Marcus was in the park shooting baskets for quarters and then a little later, nothing.
When I left teaching the kids didn’t read the newspaper, didn’t bring it to school and didn’t steal it off their neighbor’s front stoop.
When I started teaching I had to guard my own newspaper. Not only would students who would never steal a book, steal my paper; but teachers, my friends and colleagues, who would never steal a book, would steal the crossword, the sports section, the horoscope, demand just a quick peek at Ann Landers or at Friday’s movie section. The only part of the newspaper which was safe was the actual news section. When I left teaching, nobody had wanted my newspaper for a long time.
Look at the missed opportunities. Couldn’t we have talked about the war, basketball, the daily paper and one of the most important migrations in modern history and been more successful,to boot? Wouldn’t our students have learned more?
Monday, August 8, 2011
Broadway Ave.
Uptown, Chicago 1965
I asked my friend if he could recommend a bar in Uptown, a poor neighborhood on Chicago’s north side. I didn’t want to always be drinking in a yuppie bar in Chicago’s hot new Old Town neighborhood. I was too shy around the girls and whenever anybody said, “Hey guy, what did you think of last night’s game?” I never knew what they were talking about. My immediate reaction was to ask what game. But I had learned that wasn’t the answer. And even though I took great pride (and still do) in the fact that I don’t know a hockey stick from a five iron, I didn’t want anybody to know that I didn’t follow sports, period.
So I thought that I’d go and hide out in a “country” bar.
My friend said that was a bad idea. He explained that each bar on Broadway reflected a community down south in Tennessee or Kentucky. So for example, not all of course, but most of the patrons at the Four Leaf Clover came from the same community in western Kentucky. And the last thing you want to be is an outsider in one of those places. And I’d be an outsider three times over, I didn’t live in the neighborhood, I wasn’t from Appalachia much less a particular valley and I looked like a college kid even though I was a stupid dropout.
He said, “You’ve got to understand the process. Some guy moves up here, gets a job in some factory assembling something like cameras or televisions, finds an apartment and sends for his wife and kids. In the meantime, he’s learning the facts of life.”
Maybe he works at Bell and Howell making cameras. It’s non-union, doesn’t pay very well and the foreman loves to say, “Oh by the way, if you don’t like it here, you can leave, we can replace you in a flash. Your kind are coming in here every day looking for work.” Then he finds out that Uptown is a neighborhood that’s seen better days to say the least, even though the rents are high. And when he wants to move, he finds out that people west of Western Avenue don’t want “hillbillies,” they won’t rent to them. So in the meantime, he calls his buddy or kid brother back home and says, “Hey, I can get you a job where I work and next week an apartment is coming up for rent in my building.” He doesn’t tell his buddy about all the bull; he can find that out on his own. He just misses his friends and family and besides if he can eat crap, so can they.
“But the tavern—that’s their place, no women whining about grocery money, no kids asking for money for school supplies, no landlord talking about the rent, no bosses yelling about keeping up with the line, nobody telling them you’re just a ‘hillbilly.’ So the last thing in the world they want to see is some kid coming in and gawking at them. They’d fix your clock, right quick.”
Uptown, Chicago 1965
I asked my friend if he could recommend a bar in Uptown, a poor neighborhood on Chicago’s north side. I didn’t want to always be drinking in a yuppie bar in Chicago’s hot new Old Town neighborhood. I was too shy around the girls and whenever anybody said, “Hey guy, what did you think of last night’s game?” I never knew what they were talking about. My immediate reaction was to ask what game. But I had learned that wasn’t the answer. And even though I took great pride (and still do) in the fact that I don’t know a hockey stick from a five iron, I didn’t want anybody to know that I didn’t follow sports, period.
So I thought that I’d go and hide out in a “country” bar.
My friend said that was a bad idea. He explained that each bar on Broadway reflected a community down south in Tennessee or Kentucky. So for example, not all of course, but most of the patrons at the Four Leaf Clover came from the same community in western Kentucky. And the last thing you want to be is an outsider in one of those places. And I’d be an outsider three times over, I didn’t live in the neighborhood, I wasn’t from Appalachia much less a particular valley and I looked like a college kid even though I was a stupid dropout.
He said, “You’ve got to understand the process. Some guy moves up here, gets a job in some factory assembling something like cameras or televisions, finds an apartment and sends for his wife and kids. In the meantime, he’s learning the facts of life.”
Maybe he works at Bell and Howell making cameras. It’s non-union, doesn’t pay very well and the foreman loves to say, “Oh by the way, if you don’t like it here, you can leave, we can replace you in a flash. Your kind are coming in here every day looking for work.” Then he finds out that Uptown is a neighborhood that’s seen better days to say the least, even though the rents are high. And when he wants to move, he finds out that people west of Western Avenue don’t want “hillbillies,” they won’t rent to them. So in the meantime, he calls his buddy or kid brother back home and says, “Hey, I can get you a job where I work and next week an apartment is coming up for rent in my building.” He doesn’t tell his buddy about all the bull; he can find that out on his own. He just misses his friends and family and besides if he can eat crap, so can they.
“But the tavern—that’s their place, no women whining about grocery money, no kids asking for money for school supplies, no landlord talking about the rent, no bosses yelling about keeping up with the line, nobody telling them you’re just a ‘hillbilly.’ So the last thing in the world they want to see is some kid coming in and gawking at them. They’d fix your clock, right quick.”
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
The Ubiquitous Coffee Mug
The ubiquitous coffee mug
When a couple gets married, they often receive a beautiful set of China as a wedding present and a set of everyday dishes. They now have two sets of dishes and probably twelve to eighteen pairs of cups and saucers. Like many people, they won’t use the cups and saucers except for special dinners, because they prefer coffee mugs. So next, they inadvertently start building their coffee mug collection. It starts out innocently enough. First, a couple of cute mugs from their honey moon, next a pair of mugs from their favorite restaurant and then some Holiday mugs to help celebrate the season. Now they’re on a roll. Their employer gives them a worker appreciation mug, they start bringing back one or two souvenir mug from each of their vacations and they give and receive gag mugs. Soon people realize when all else fails buy them a mug and the mugs start rolling in.
Not to worry—there is always the garage sale. And folks don’t mind weeding out their collection and unloading ten or fifteen of their least favorite mugs. The only problem with garage sales is pretty soon one begins to buy other people’s mugs. And the number of mugs again starts to grow. Again not to worry. The interior design folks have the solution. Hang a decorative mug rack on the wall and display your best mugs for the whole world to see.
I got to thinking about the abundance of mugs this morning because I was trying to find room for two new mugs myself. And I’ve been there, done that. I’ve gone through all the steps outlined above. Collecting mugs; ending up with two sets of mugs, the holiday mugs and the regular mugs; to now we “specialize” in handmade mugs.
This all started out as a reform. No more commercial mugs. Just mugs from potters, bought at their pot shop where we could watch them throw the mugs and talk to us at the same time. For a while that worked just fine. Each of us had our favorite mug. We judged them: favorite color, weight and the feel of the handle in one’s hand. We were pleased with ourselves; another successful attack on rampant materialism.
However, it dawned on me this morning as I was admiring our growing collection of handcrafted mugs that I was back in the same old place. I could drink coffee every morning for nearly two weeks and never drink out of the same handcrafted cup twice. If I drank once from all of the mugs and cups in the house including the ones that are strictly for “decoration” I could easily go over three months and never drink out of the same cup or mug twice.
Like most Americans, we’re not wealthy, but it seems that we always have ten or fifteen dollars for a couple of mugs either for ourselves or for gifts. It’s goofy.
When a couple gets married, they often receive a beautiful set of China as a wedding present and a set of everyday dishes. They now have two sets of dishes and probably twelve to eighteen pairs of cups and saucers. Like many people, they won’t use the cups and saucers except for special dinners, because they prefer coffee mugs. So next, they inadvertently start building their coffee mug collection. It starts out innocently enough. First, a couple of cute mugs from their honey moon, next a pair of mugs from their favorite restaurant and then some Holiday mugs to help celebrate the season. Now they’re on a roll. Their employer gives them a worker appreciation mug, they start bringing back one or two souvenir mug from each of their vacations and they give and receive gag mugs. Soon people realize when all else fails buy them a mug and the mugs start rolling in.
Not to worry—there is always the garage sale. And folks don’t mind weeding out their collection and unloading ten or fifteen of their least favorite mugs. The only problem with garage sales is pretty soon one begins to buy other people’s mugs. And the number of mugs again starts to grow. Again not to worry. The interior design folks have the solution. Hang a decorative mug rack on the wall and display your best mugs for the whole world to see.
I got to thinking about the abundance of mugs this morning because I was trying to find room for two new mugs myself. And I’ve been there, done that. I’ve gone through all the steps outlined above. Collecting mugs; ending up with two sets of mugs, the holiday mugs and the regular mugs; to now we “specialize” in handmade mugs.
This all started out as a reform. No more commercial mugs. Just mugs from potters, bought at their pot shop where we could watch them throw the mugs and talk to us at the same time. For a while that worked just fine. Each of us had our favorite mug. We judged them: favorite color, weight and the feel of the handle in one’s hand. We were pleased with ourselves; another successful attack on rampant materialism.
However, it dawned on me this morning as I was admiring our growing collection of handcrafted mugs that I was back in the same old place. I could drink coffee every morning for nearly two weeks and never drink out of the same handcrafted cup twice. If I drank once from all of the mugs and cups in the house including the ones that are strictly for “decoration” I could easily go over three months and never drink out of the same cup or mug twice.
Like most Americans, we’re not wealthy, but it seems that we always have ten or fifteen dollars for a couple of mugs either for ourselves or for gifts. It’s goofy.
A new school but really just the same old same old
I was young teacher on Chicago’s Westside. It was early October, the school year was a few weeks old, but already everybody, students and teachers alike, were getting into the swing of things.
Latoya use to come and visit me on my hall guard post on the school’s lower level. She was suppose to be someplace else-maybe lunch where she didn’t fit in, in study where she didn’t know how to study, or maybe in class where she’d be in over her head. I probably should have turned her in for cutting.
Our school was Orr Academy. It had just been open a few weeks, a brand new building. The previous spring, while the students were still in the old building, the administration had asked the students to vote on a new name for the new school. Their first choice—an absolutely perfect name –was Mark Clark and Fred Hampton Academy. Clark and Hampton had been two Black Panthers gunned down in their beds by the Cook County State’s Attorney police on orders from John Mitchell, US Attorney General in the Nixon Administration. And kids, being kids, their second choice was General George Patton, the hero of a recently released Hollywood movie. The school board named the school Orr after a turn of the Twentieth Century white Pennselvyian, streetcar conductor and union organizer.
The school was originally going to be build north of Chicago Ave. which at the time was the line dividing black and whites. The land had been purchased and the homes torn down. Everything was all set. Then one day the Alderman happened to visit the old school. It was nearly all black. He couldn’t have a mostly black school in a white neighborhood in his ward. The site was moved south of the line. Sound strange? No that was business as usual. A few years later the alderman, a favorite crony of the mayor would go to jail for corruption.
The school was on the corner of Chicago and Pulaski Avenues. As far as the students knew, it had always been Pulaski Ave. But in the 1930s, the street’s name had been changed from Crawford Ave. to Pulaski (to curry favored with the growing number of Polish voters) and for years people fought over the name change. Some Chicagoans were never going to accept the idea that a street was going to be named after a Polish person even though he had fought in the American Revolutionary War. For over twenty years, they fought back and forth in the courts and finally the courts upheld the name change. Ironically in a few years, when Dr. King’s birthday was made a national holiday and some whites felt that they needed another holiday, a white holiday, and Pulaski who now had a large enough following was honored with a holiday to make sure the blacks did not get one up on whites.
Latoya came to visit almost every day. I provided her with a refuge for a half hour or so. Latoya didn’t know, the other kids didn’t know, but if she ever had a future she would be beautiful. But she hadn’t bloomed yet. She was still just a kind of cute, shy, quite, awkward fifteen year old in a school where she didn’t have a clue and couldn’t possibly succeed.
The last time she came, she talked. She just didn’t answer my questions about school, home and her neighborhood. She talked because she had something on her mind. She said,” You know, this brand new building. We all looked forward to coming here, all last year and all last summer, we just couldn‘t wait for school to start in the new building.” And then she stopped and looked away and then as she looked down she continued, “You know, it’s just the same as our old school—just exactly the same—no different. Just like every other school I’ve ever gone to”
She was in pre-algebra and didn’t know her tables, she was in world geography and wasn’t sure how to get downtown. Her books were especially chosen for students like her. They were high school texts “watered down”, “dumbed down” as some of her teachers said. The teachers bragged that they had picked the perfect books, the reading level was seventh grade, but with ninth grade content. She had a fifth grade reading level, no study skills, no one had ever read to her, she had never heard of the Cat in the Hat, It was 1973, adults were just beginning to discover black lit., she probably never hear of Maya Angelou, Langston Hughes or Gordon Parks. Nobody had ever taken the time to read to her, to read with her, to help her pick books that she’d be interested in. She couldn’t possibly do regular school work or follow the regular routine.
Naively, I tried to tell her that it wasn’t all bad. I told her that there were good teachers at Orr who would be happy to work with her. She had good, well meaning teachers and she had to give them a chance, she had friends from the neighborhood, it wasn’t as bad as she thought. She could stick it out.
As I was giving my little speech, I knew it wasn’t working and it didn’t work. I never saw her again. There were a thousand freshmen in the brand new building that fall; next fall there would only be five hundred sophomores.
And—she was right; the new building was just like every other building.
Latoya use to come and visit me on my hall guard post on the school’s lower level. She was suppose to be someplace else-maybe lunch where she didn’t fit in, in study where she didn’t know how to study, or maybe in class where she’d be in over her head. I probably should have turned her in for cutting.
Our school was Orr Academy. It had just been open a few weeks, a brand new building. The previous spring, while the students were still in the old building, the administration had asked the students to vote on a new name for the new school. Their first choice—an absolutely perfect name –was Mark Clark and Fred Hampton Academy. Clark and Hampton had been two Black Panthers gunned down in their beds by the Cook County State’s Attorney police on orders from John Mitchell, US Attorney General in the Nixon Administration. And kids, being kids, their second choice was General George Patton, the hero of a recently released Hollywood movie. The school board named the school Orr after a turn of the Twentieth Century white Pennselvyian, streetcar conductor and union organizer.
The school was originally going to be build north of Chicago Ave. which at the time was the line dividing black and whites. The land had been purchased and the homes torn down. Everything was all set. Then one day the Alderman happened to visit the old school. It was nearly all black. He couldn’t have a mostly black school in a white neighborhood in his ward. The site was moved south of the line. Sound strange? No that was business as usual. A few years later the alderman, a favorite crony of the mayor would go to jail for corruption.
The school was on the corner of Chicago and Pulaski Avenues. As far as the students knew, it had always been Pulaski Ave. But in the 1930s, the street’s name had been changed from Crawford Ave. to Pulaski (to curry favored with the growing number of Polish voters) and for years people fought over the name change. Some Chicagoans were never going to accept the idea that a street was going to be named after a Polish person even though he had fought in the American Revolutionary War. For over twenty years, they fought back and forth in the courts and finally the courts upheld the name change. Ironically in a few years, when Dr. King’s birthday was made a national holiday and some whites felt that they needed another holiday, a white holiday, and Pulaski who now had a large enough following was honored with a holiday to make sure the blacks did not get one up on whites.
Latoya came to visit almost every day. I provided her with a refuge for a half hour or so. Latoya didn’t know, the other kids didn’t know, but if she ever had a future she would be beautiful. But she hadn’t bloomed yet. She was still just a kind of cute, shy, quite, awkward fifteen year old in a school where she didn’t have a clue and couldn’t possibly succeed.
The last time she came, she talked. She just didn’t answer my questions about school, home and her neighborhood. She talked because she had something on her mind. She said,” You know, this brand new building. We all looked forward to coming here, all last year and all last summer, we just couldn‘t wait for school to start in the new building.” And then she stopped and looked away and then as she looked down she continued, “You know, it’s just the same as our old school—just exactly the same—no different. Just like every other school I’ve ever gone to”
She was in pre-algebra and didn’t know her tables, she was in world geography and wasn’t sure how to get downtown. Her books were especially chosen for students like her. They were high school texts “watered down”, “dumbed down” as some of her teachers said. The teachers bragged that they had picked the perfect books, the reading level was seventh grade, but with ninth grade content. She had a fifth grade reading level, no study skills, no one had ever read to her, she had never heard of the Cat in the Hat, It was 1973, adults were just beginning to discover black lit., she probably never hear of Maya Angelou, Langston Hughes or Gordon Parks. Nobody had ever taken the time to read to her, to read with her, to help her pick books that she’d be interested in. She couldn’t possibly do regular school work or follow the regular routine.
Naively, I tried to tell her that it wasn’t all bad. I told her that there were good teachers at Orr who would be happy to work with her. She had good, well meaning teachers and she had to give them a chance, she had friends from the neighborhood, it wasn’t as bad as she thought. She could stick it out.
As I was giving my little speech, I knew it wasn’t working and it didn’t work. I never saw her again. There were a thousand freshmen in the brand new building that fall; next fall there would only be five hundred sophomores.
And—she was right; the new building was just like every other building.
The Streets of Chicago
The Streets of Chicago
I
In the early1990s, I was tutoring GED students as a volunteer on Chicago’s north side at a small non-profit community center. The young professionals were busy gentrifying the surrounding neighborhood. It wasn’t immediately noticeable. The main arterial streets still looked seedy, rundown and hopeless, but the side streets were quickly being transformed. Each of the restored turn of the century homes was a lovely little gem. The young professionals patted themselves on the back. They were urban pioneers. People wrote about them in the Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine, in the Reader, and a famous professor had even written a book about them. Little did they know about the other human dramas, the other stories which were being acted out right in their midst
That very gentrification was forcing the little community center to move. The old building had been sold and the lofts were going to become condos. The realtor was going to make a killing; the contractors and developers were going to make a bundle and IKEA, Crate and Barrel and the interior designers were going to clean up. It was explained to the staff and students that the school was only going to move four blocks north, no big deal. Some of the young men looked sick. They called me over and explained that the director didn’t understand. They couldn’t go there during the winter when it gets dark so early. The leader of the little group explained, “Some of us are in a gang, but not all of us. But, it doesn’t matter; none of us can go there. It would be asking for trouble. If the school moves we’ll have to quit.”
The school moved; the students quit, the school recruited new students (students who just weeks before couldn’t go four blocks south). And the original students? Who knows, nobody ever saw them again.
II
Back in the early seventies, the Chicago Board of Education was under immense pressure from the US Department of Justice to integrate the public schools. Of course nobody on the City Hall’s Fifth Floor or the Board of Education wanted to comply. They came up with a token gesture, Permissive Transfer, which said that a student from an overcrowded school could transfer to a school which was under enrolled. That sounded wonderful to students living on Chicago’s Southside, especially ones who lived near the old Jackson Park-Howard St. el line. All they had to do was get on the el and travel to the north side and get off the el at Bryn Mawr and either walk or take a bus to Senn High School. Which they did. At first everything was cool. And then it started. If one or two black students were by themselves they were harassed by the Thorndale-Jarvis Organization. The TJOs famous for their steel toed work boots had decided that “they” weren’t coming into their neighborhood. Eventually, the only way to get to school was for the black students to wait at the el station until there was a big enough group that nobody would bother them and then they would proceed to school in a group. Once inside the school, everything was more or less OK, but they had to eat together and they knew better than go anyplace by themselves especially the washrooms. After school, it was the same routine, round up the group and then as a group head for the el station. As you can imagine, Permissive Transfer wasn’t very successful. But then it wasn’t meant to be. The Board’s attitude, “If some dumb kids took it seriously, if some dumb kids thought they finally had a chance for a better education, too bad. Nobody ever said it was going to be about their education.”
If you think I’m just rehashing old history, read on. The TJOs had learned from their parents, from their teachers, from the Mayor, the Cardinal and the local priest that blacks meant nothing but trouble. They were only acting out what was discussed at the dinner table and everywhere else that whites gathered.
Later, the fight for dominance would be between the old TJOs and the new Asian immigrants. Again, the young professional and suburbanites who were frequenting the neighbor for the wonderful Vietnamese and French/Vietnamese Restaurants on Argyle and Broadway were oblivious to what else was going on in the neighborhood. And besides, they would have said, “Oh no, you’re mistaken. Young Asians are all hard working, driven by their parents to succeed in school and to excel in every pursuit. That can’t be true.” But it is true; all poor kids have to fight for survival on our city streets.
Everybody thinks of the west side as Chicago’s port of entry. They forget that for the last fifty years, the north side has been the port of entry for Appalachian whites, for immigrants from the old Indochina and now from the Middle East. Now adult Iraqi immigrants are trying to take back the streets from the gangs so that the streets can be safe for their children. What an irony—the Iraqis flee their own country, come to the States looking for safety and they have to fight to make their neighborhood streets safe for their own children.
III
It’s perverse. School administrators, if they have to contend with gangs, prefer a one gang school. A single gang school is relatively calm. No major fights or disruptions. If the recruiters tell a kid, “join”, the kid doesn’t have much choice and that can be a problem for him but not for the school. So there is drama and there is tragedy, but it’s all muted below the surface.
However, the school is only part of a larger community. And sometimes what goes on outside the school effects the school. Occasionally, on a Monday morning, a teacher will ask, “Does anybody know where Marcus is today? He’s was here on Friday.” Someone will quietly answer, “He was shot.” Sometimes, early in the morning, I would see small groups of students clustered together in the hall. I’d go up to them and ask what was going on. Someone would show me their friend’s obituary from previous night’s church service. I’d mumble something and remind them that they should get to class.
Big city neighborhoods surrounding a school are dynamic, in flux, always changing. An African American teacher who lived nearby in a middle class neighbor once told me, “We knew something was up. All of a sudden, here were these young white boys in good cars driving real slow down our street. I told my husband to drive around and find out what was going on. He did and he came back and told me they were dealing drugs on the corner. Now, I ask you, how did these white boys from the suburbs know what was happening, on my street before I did?”
And like my teacher friend, sometimes those of us in the school were the last to know. The neighborhood gang structure was changing. It didn’t have anything to do with kids or race; it was all about the money. A neighboring gang was moving in, trying to take over some of those street corners that sold drugs to middleclass white people. The gang fought back. Eventually the fight spilled into our school. The school did what it could to control the situation with little help from the police. A serious fight broke out which lasted almost two whole days. The police, on the second day, finally, noticed and came to the school’s help. They broke up the fight outside while the school dealt with the fights inside the building. The police made arrests and hauled people away.
However, peace wasn’t really restored in the school until the invading gang decisively won on the streets, out in the neighborhood.
IV
Big city high schools are like small towns. Their hallways are like the town’s streets, dynamic and full of life. I was a young substitute teacher in the spring of 1971. I was sent to Austin High School, on the city’s far west side. The school was still trying to recover from the horrendous transformation that follows the upheaval and chaos when a school goes from white to black. I knew one side of the story. The previous winter I had student taught at Taft H.S., an all white, far northwest side high school which had a small tightly knit group of former Austin teachers on the faculty. They never tried of complaining about how “They had ruined one of Chicago’s premier (white) schools. How the Board did nothing to help the white teachers, did nothing to help the old school. Every day they kvetched about how they had received no help from downtown. Besides what could anybody do with “them?” “They won’t read, can’t write. They can hardly speak English. They shouldn’t be in high school. They’re not even city kids; they should go back down south where they belong.”
When I got to Austin the kids seemed just fine. I got along OK and they did the small things I asked them to do in their teacher’s absence. One day, we were talking. One of the girls, a leader in the division (homeroom) started by saying, “You know what use to bug me? If there was a fight in the hall between two white boys the teachers would break it up right away, if there was a fight between two blacks they’d break it up right away, if there was a fight between a white and a black they’d wait to see who was winning. If the black boy was winning, they’d break up the fight right away, but if the white boy was winning they’d let the white boy get in a couple of more licks first.”
The white teachers, “We were glad to get out when we could”, were wrong about the students. The students were just fine. The girl in the division room may have exaggerated a bit, but basically she was right.
V
At another school, a few years later, which was also trying to recover from the transition, a teacher was complaining in the teachers’ lounge, the small town’s coffee shop, about a black student who had corrected her. Her voice was quite, but full of venom. “I called him a boy. He told me he wasn’t a boy. He said, ‘Boy was the white man’s name for slave and I’m not a slave and don’t call me a boy again.’ I ask him how old he was. He told me fourteen. I told him he was a boy and he could go look it up in the dictionary. He got up and left the room. What can you do with ‘these people?’?” Some of us looked away, but some were softly nodding their heads in agreement. They would never say it out loud, they wished that their friend wouldn’t say it out loud, but she was right.
VI
He and I were colleagues. He was a black scientist teacher and I was a white English teacher. It was summer and we were sitting on my front porch watching the last of the rush hour traffic try to beat the system by cutting down my side street. We were discussing a special project that he and I were working on for school. We got to reminiscing. I told him about washing dishes in high school to save money for college. He told me about being a door to door magazine subscription salesman to make money for college. He said, “I usually worked the black neighborhoods. But one day, I thought, “Hey what the heck I’ll try Oak Park.” (And that’s how Clarence talked. Heck not hell. His students loved him. Quite and serious.) There’s a lot more money out there than on the west side. Things were going good all morning. I made more commissions that morning than I usually made in two or three days on the west side. Then about two o’clock a squad car pulled up to the curb. They ordered me over. They asked me who I was and what I was doing in Oak Park. And didn’t I know that I didn’t belong there. And didn’t I know that I’d best leave. I told them that I had a right to be there. I showed them my identification from the company, my sales sheets, and that people must have thought it was Ok because they were ordering magazines and writing checks. They said they didn’t care and that come dark they come looking for me and if I wanted to work till then find, but be gone by dark. I never went back.
VII
I taught night school in the early 1990s on the south side and never worried about my safety. Some of my students did, however. When they found out I taught in the evening and after we had talked about my Haitian students which fascinated them, they got to the main subject. I had told them I went down the street got a couple of hotdogs and fries and went over to Wooded Island to eat my dinner. The street wise young men told me that I couldn’t do that. Sounding more like my mother than my students they told me that the Island wasn’t safe, even during the day. They apologized about their language, but they explained that the place was a meeting place and a pickup place for gays and that I was just asking for trouble if I went there. I told them I’d stopped. I lied to them just like I use to lie to my mother. I continued to go over there and eat my dinner which was more of a threat to my cardiac health than anybody looking for some fun.
VIII
Later that same year, as usual, I went to my favorite hot dog stand for dinner. And because it was cold, gray and already getting dark I headed straight back to school. On the way back, just a block from school, within sight of the building, I was startled out of my day dream. A half dozen young men had spread out across the sidewalk in front of me. They looked like an NFL scrimmage line. “Oh no,” was all I could think. Then one of them said, “He’s OK, he’s my teacher.” They parted to let me by and I walked through exchanging mumbled “Hey” and “waddup”.
Sometimes when we make pronouncements we don’t always know the whole story. It’s hard to know the whole story. It’s hard to know that young professionals are basically well meaning, that most kids regardless of labels want an education, that many teachers are in situations that they didn’t create, no one helps them and they don’t know what to do and their frustration sometimes turns to anger. And knowing so little about our own streets is not much help.
I
In the early1990s, I was tutoring GED students as a volunteer on Chicago’s north side at a small non-profit community center. The young professionals were busy gentrifying the surrounding neighborhood. It wasn’t immediately noticeable. The main arterial streets still looked seedy, rundown and hopeless, but the side streets were quickly being transformed. Each of the restored turn of the century homes was a lovely little gem. The young professionals patted themselves on the back. They were urban pioneers. People wrote about them in the Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine, in the Reader, and a famous professor had even written a book about them. Little did they know about the other human dramas, the other stories which were being acted out right in their midst
That very gentrification was forcing the little community center to move. The old building had been sold and the lofts were going to become condos. The realtor was going to make a killing; the contractors and developers were going to make a bundle and IKEA, Crate and Barrel and the interior designers were going to clean up. It was explained to the staff and students that the school was only going to move four blocks north, no big deal. Some of the young men looked sick. They called me over and explained that the director didn’t understand. They couldn’t go there during the winter when it gets dark so early. The leader of the little group explained, “Some of us are in a gang, but not all of us. But, it doesn’t matter; none of us can go there. It would be asking for trouble. If the school moves we’ll have to quit.”
The school moved; the students quit, the school recruited new students (students who just weeks before couldn’t go four blocks south). And the original students? Who knows, nobody ever saw them again.
II
Back in the early seventies, the Chicago Board of Education was under immense pressure from the US Department of Justice to integrate the public schools. Of course nobody on the City Hall’s Fifth Floor or the Board of Education wanted to comply. They came up with a token gesture, Permissive Transfer, which said that a student from an overcrowded school could transfer to a school which was under enrolled. That sounded wonderful to students living on Chicago’s Southside, especially ones who lived near the old Jackson Park-Howard St. el line. All they had to do was get on the el and travel to the north side and get off the el at Bryn Mawr and either walk or take a bus to Senn High School. Which they did. At first everything was cool. And then it started. If one or two black students were by themselves they were harassed by the Thorndale-Jarvis Organization. The TJOs famous for their steel toed work boots had decided that “they” weren’t coming into their neighborhood. Eventually, the only way to get to school was for the black students to wait at the el station until there was a big enough group that nobody would bother them and then they would proceed to school in a group. Once inside the school, everything was more or less OK, but they had to eat together and they knew better than go anyplace by themselves especially the washrooms. After school, it was the same routine, round up the group and then as a group head for the el station. As you can imagine, Permissive Transfer wasn’t very successful. But then it wasn’t meant to be. The Board’s attitude, “If some dumb kids took it seriously, if some dumb kids thought they finally had a chance for a better education, too bad. Nobody ever said it was going to be about their education.”
If you think I’m just rehashing old history, read on. The TJOs had learned from their parents, from their teachers, from the Mayor, the Cardinal and the local priest that blacks meant nothing but trouble. They were only acting out what was discussed at the dinner table and everywhere else that whites gathered.
Later, the fight for dominance would be between the old TJOs and the new Asian immigrants. Again, the young professional and suburbanites who were frequenting the neighbor for the wonderful Vietnamese and French/Vietnamese Restaurants on Argyle and Broadway were oblivious to what else was going on in the neighborhood. And besides, they would have said, “Oh no, you’re mistaken. Young Asians are all hard working, driven by their parents to succeed in school and to excel in every pursuit. That can’t be true.” But it is true; all poor kids have to fight for survival on our city streets.
Everybody thinks of the west side as Chicago’s port of entry. They forget that for the last fifty years, the north side has been the port of entry for Appalachian whites, for immigrants from the old Indochina and now from the Middle East. Now adult Iraqi immigrants are trying to take back the streets from the gangs so that the streets can be safe for their children. What an irony—the Iraqis flee their own country, come to the States looking for safety and they have to fight to make their neighborhood streets safe for their own children.
III
It’s perverse. School administrators, if they have to contend with gangs, prefer a one gang school. A single gang school is relatively calm. No major fights or disruptions. If the recruiters tell a kid, “join”, the kid doesn’t have much choice and that can be a problem for him but not for the school. So there is drama and there is tragedy, but it’s all muted below the surface.
However, the school is only part of a larger community. And sometimes what goes on outside the school effects the school. Occasionally, on a Monday morning, a teacher will ask, “Does anybody know where Marcus is today? He’s was here on Friday.” Someone will quietly answer, “He was shot.” Sometimes, early in the morning, I would see small groups of students clustered together in the hall. I’d go up to them and ask what was going on. Someone would show me their friend’s obituary from previous night’s church service. I’d mumble something and remind them that they should get to class.
Big city neighborhoods surrounding a school are dynamic, in flux, always changing. An African American teacher who lived nearby in a middle class neighbor once told me, “We knew something was up. All of a sudden, here were these young white boys in good cars driving real slow down our street. I told my husband to drive around and find out what was going on. He did and he came back and told me they were dealing drugs on the corner. Now, I ask you, how did these white boys from the suburbs know what was happening, on my street before I did?”
And like my teacher friend, sometimes those of us in the school were the last to know. The neighborhood gang structure was changing. It didn’t have anything to do with kids or race; it was all about the money. A neighboring gang was moving in, trying to take over some of those street corners that sold drugs to middleclass white people. The gang fought back. Eventually the fight spilled into our school. The school did what it could to control the situation with little help from the police. A serious fight broke out which lasted almost two whole days. The police, on the second day, finally, noticed and came to the school’s help. They broke up the fight outside while the school dealt with the fights inside the building. The police made arrests and hauled people away.
However, peace wasn’t really restored in the school until the invading gang decisively won on the streets, out in the neighborhood.
IV
Big city high schools are like small towns. Their hallways are like the town’s streets, dynamic and full of life. I was a young substitute teacher in the spring of 1971. I was sent to Austin High School, on the city’s far west side. The school was still trying to recover from the horrendous transformation that follows the upheaval and chaos when a school goes from white to black. I knew one side of the story. The previous winter I had student taught at Taft H.S., an all white, far northwest side high school which had a small tightly knit group of former Austin teachers on the faculty. They never tried of complaining about how “They had ruined one of Chicago’s premier (white) schools. How the Board did nothing to help the white teachers, did nothing to help the old school. Every day they kvetched about how they had received no help from downtown. Besides what could anybody do with “them?” “They won’t read, can’t write. They can hardly speak English. They shouldn’t be in high school. They’re not even city kids; they should go back down south where they belong.”
When I got to Austin the kids seemed just fine. I got along OK and they did the small things I asked them to do in their teacher’s absence. One day, we were talking. One of the girls, a leader in the division (homeroom) started by saying, “You know what use to bug me? If there was a fight in the hall between two white boys the teachers would break it up right away, if there was a fight between two blacks they’d break it up right away, if there was a fight between a white and a black they’d wait to see who was winning. If the black boy was winning, they’d break up the fight right away, but if the white boy was winning they’d let the white boy get in a couple of more licks first.”
The white teachers, “We were glad to get out when we could”, were wrong about the students. The students were just fine. The girl in the division room may have exaggerated a bit, but basically she was right.
V
At another school, a few years later, which was also trying to recover from the transition, a teacher was complaining in the teachers’ lounge, the small town’s coffee shop, about a black student who had corrected her. Her voice was quite, but full of venom. “I called him a boy. He told me he wasn’t a boy. He said, ‘Boy was the white man’s name for slave and I’m not a slave and don’t call me a boy again.’ I ask him how old he was. He told me fourteen. I told him he was a boy and he could go look it up in the dictionary. He got up and left the room. What can you do with ‘these people?’?” Some of us looked away, but some were softly nodding their heads in agreement. They would never say it out loud, they wished that their friend wouldn’t say it out loud, but she was right.
VI
He and I were colleagues. He was a black scientist teacher and I was a white English teacher. It was summer and we were sitting on my front porch watching the last of the rush hour traffic try to beat the system by cutting down my side street. We were discussing a special project that he and I were working on for school. We got to reminiscing. I told him about washing dishes in high school to save money for college. He told me about being a door to door magazine subscription salesman to make money for college. He said, “I usually worked the black neighborhoods. But one day, I thought, “Hey what the heck I’ll try Oak Park.” (And that’s how Clarence talked. Heck not hell. His students loved him. Quite and serious.) There’s a lot more money out there than on the west side. Things were going good all morning. I made more commissions that morning than I usually made in two or three days on the west side. Then about two o’clock a squad car pulled up to the curb. They ordered me over. They asked me who I was and what I was doing in Oak Park. And didn’t I know that I didn’t belong there. And didn’t I know that I’d best leave. I told them that I had a right to be there. I showed them my identification from the company, my sales sheets, and that people must have thought it was Ok because they were ordering magazines and writing checks. They said they didn’t care and that come dark they come looking for me and if I wanted to work till then find, but be gone by dark. I never went back.
VII
I taught night school in the early 1990s on the south side and never worried about my safety. Some of my students did, however. When they found out I taught in the evening and after we had talked about my Haitian students which fascinated them, they got to the main subject. I had told them I went down the street got a couple of hotdogs and fries and went over to Wooded Island to eat my dinner. The street wise young men told me that I couldn’t do that. Sounding more like my mother than my students they told me that the Island wasn’t safe, even during the day. They apologized about their language, but they explained that the place was a meeting place and a pickup place for gays and that I was just asking for trouble if I went there. I told them I’d stopped. I lied to them just like I use to lie to my mother. I continued to go over there and eat my dinner which was more of a threat to my cardiac health than anybody looking for some fun.
VIII
Later that same year, as usual, I went to my favorite hot dog stand for dinner. And because it was cold, gray and already getting dark I headed straight back to school. On the way back, just a block from school, within sight of the building, I was startled out of my day dream. A half dozen young men had spread out across the sidewalk in front of me. They looked like an NFL scrimmage line. “Oh no,” was all I could think. Then one of them said, “He’s OK, he’s my teacher.” They parted to let me by and I walked through exchanging mumbled “Hey” and “waddup”.
Sometimes when we make pronouncements we don’t always know the whole story. It’s hard to know the whole story. It’s hard to know that young professionals are basically well meaning, that most kids regardless of labels want an education, that many teachers are in situations that they didn’t create, no one helps them and they don’t know what to do and their frustration sometimes turns to anger. And knowing so little about our own streets is not much help.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)