The students came and went. Sometimes, the students were there in the morning and gone forever by the afternoon. Sometimes, a parent dropped them off at the front door and they skedaddled out the back door. Sometimes, they had planned to just skip out early to catch Oprah and then come back the next day. But for some reason they never did. Sometimes their mother went back to work and they had to stay home and babysit. Sometimes they lost their own babysitter. Sometimes they got pregnant and decided to use that as an excuse to quit school. Sometimes they moved. Sometimes the gang alliances changed and it was harder to get to school, to have to go through hostile territory. Some did get shot, some were even killed. They would be there on Friday, and on Monday the other students would be passing around the obit from church. Sometimes, if they were cut from a team, they slowly stopped coming.
Sometimes it wasn’t the Gangster Disciples; it was the gangs of dogs. It was 1973, cold snowy, the L was running, but not the bus. It was only three or four blocks from the L to school. I could easily walk that, even in the snow. I started out and there were dogs everywhere—packs of dogs, blocking the sidewalk, snarling and hissing. Let’s face it; dogs scare the shit out of me. The only think I could do was walk down the middle of the street. I was less afraid of a driver who couldn’t see me in the blinding snow, who had no brakes on the ice and no warning that I was wandering down the middle of the street than I was of the dogs.
One time I told that story in class and that got the whole class going. They all had stories about trying to come to school or to go home at night, especially in the dark. Terrance, tall, skinny and with no coordination, had the class in stitches. He described the time he was attacked. He said, “I got away by just jumping up on a car and then I just jumped from car to car to get away. Lucky for me, the dogs got tired before I ran out of cars. I did leave some dents in the cars, but just on the hoods, maybe on the roof or trunk but nothing too bad, honest.” He smiled, they all laughed and I had to play the teacher and point out that the destruction to personal property was not funny. They all laughed again. They had all heard Terrance’s story before. They loved the embellishments, the pack of dogs got bigger with every telling; the number of cars grew. They all loved a good story and they all love the storyteller’s ability to make the story better with every telling. The first time Terrance told the story he climbed up on a car and simply waited for the dogs to go away. His audience asked, “Is that it?” And they all love being able to tease their teacher about being afraid of a few dogs. (And yes, they did enjoy those same qualities in the stories they read).
Sometimes there was no bus money, no money for clothes, or no money for all the extra fees that the school and even the individual teachers wanted. School should be free, no locker fees, no towel or gym fees, no musical instrument rental fees and no student purchases of so-called extra books. No fees, period. No free or reduced lunch forms. Simply free breakfast and lunch—maybe even a snack or two for everybody.
For a long time sweat suits were in style. Students would get a couple of imitation knock-offs of famous brands in late August at the ‘back to school sales’. And they did look cool in their new clothes. They didn’t look so cool after a couple of washing, however, when everybody realized that there had been more starch than fabric in those outfits and then because that was about all they had, they got pretty old pretty fast.
The system tried to enforce a rule: “no coats in the class room.” And of course, there were all the reasonable reasons. If the student keeps his or her coat on, it’s like they’re getting ready to leave at any moment; they’re not really settling down, not really getting ready to get to work. And besides, who knows what they may have inside those coats? Truth be told, some of the students wore their coats everyday because they did not have much under the coat except their same old worn-out tops. It was less embarrassing to wear the same coat every day than to wear the same old shirt or blouse every day.
In the seventies and eighties, the only institutes left in many city neighborhoods were public institutes, the post office and the fire station. Some days all you’d see was the bulldozer tearing down another abandoned, burned-out wreck of a house and a squad car cruising the neighborhood “keeping the lid on”. I often thought that “if the school is it,” that means that the school has to do everything and it should. America lost a whole generation of young people across the country because it would not accept that challenge. The attitude was, “They’re not my kids, screw em.”
The system is nuts. A student is cold and hungry. So he does the sensible thing, he comes to school early. But if he comes too early, the system won’t let him in. He has to stand outside in the cold, sometimes in the rain. Sometimes we’ll let them in, but not past the foyer. “We can’t have them wandering around the building before school. God knows what kind of trouble they’d get into. Do you want them breaking into your classroom?” the disciplinarian calmly warns us.
So we’d suggest, “How about the library?”
“O, yeah, we’re going to let kids who don’t read and who hate books into the library for an hour, just to tear up the place.” He quietly and professionally replies.
On the other hand, lots of teachers came to school early. We came for some of the same reasons. To see our colleagues, have a second cup of coffee, read the paper and catch up on the gossip. All very normal, very human but we couldn’t extend the same privilege to our students.
At the end of the day, it’s the same thing;” Clear the building. Make sure that only people with a good reason are in the building and in their designated areas and supervised. We just can’t have people…”
So I said to myself. What a happy coincidence. We have students who need academic help and want to come to school early or stay late—to get warm, to eat and socialize. Let’s do it. Let’s create a program for early birds or those who don’t kick into high gear until three o’clock. Let’s feed them, allow them to organize their own group, let them pick something they want to learn more about, something brand new perhaps, anything they want to learn. Let’s hire the teachers, pay the kitchen staff overtime and provide the resources. It may be the “good kids” who want to do more of what they’re already doing. It may be fifteen-year-olds who want to really learn how to read or it may be kids who want to shoot baskets, not good enough for the team but still they love b-ball. If the neighborhood is in chaos, let’s provide the stability.
I add, smirking to myself, “Isn’t stability one of the prerequisites of learning? Isn’t it a necessary part of the learning environment?” And the system answers me, “We tried something just like that and it worked just fine, but it was too expensive and it was like running a whole other program. It’s a nice idea, but just not feasible, it’s not practical.
So we do and we don’t want the students in school. We only want them on our terms. Here’s another bright idea, not very original, day care for the students’ children and other neighbor kids. The student parent spends half a day upstairs in school and the other half in the nursery helping and learning how to take care of the kids, including their own kids. And maybe there’s time for a bit of talk about women’s health. Maybe there’s bit of time to have a soda with other moms. Maybe there’s a bit of time for the dads to drop in and help. It worked somewhere, it was hailed as a model for the future, but it was dropped, because it was too expensive
But of course, when it comes to helping single moms, especially teenagers of color, there is always an underlying nastiness that goes along with the refusal to help. You can almost hear, “Let’s not reward them for their immoral behavior; and let’s punish them by making their life more miserable, more difficult.” Or, “You know that will only encourage them to have more and more kids.” But we know it works. We know it will reap enormous benefits and we know that even though it will be expensive up front, we know it will save money down the road. And we even know that it is the right thing to do. And still we won’t do it. We wouldn’t do it in the 1970s or 80s, or 90s and we still won’t do it in 2011. It used to make me mad, but now just thinking about it, it just saps my energy—sucks the life out of me.
It always amazes me. Every September, the students show up. Every September, we disappoint them, not the first day, or the first week, but sooner or later we’re going to let them down. We’re always preaching, “Go the extra mile, work harder, apply a little elbow grease, ‘no pain, no gain’.” We preach all that good stuff, but the system consistently, without fail, lets them down. And teachers in turn blame themselves; internalize the pain, swallow the guilt and show up next September, believing that we can make a difference, that things will be different. The kids can’t buck the system and ironically the teachers can’t either. We’re all trapped in a system that was not designed for either kids or adults. We’re both victims.
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