While walking my anarchist gal down thirteenth street, a car drives by, “Hey, Mr. Baker!” shouts the head disappearing down the block in fast moving traffic, into the gayborhood.
“See, it can’t have been all that bad,” she says, my little anarchist Pollyanna, seeing the good in all situations, people and animals.
She wasn’t there as I slogged through a dozen years in the heart of North Philly. The school reformer. The agent of change. The enthusiastic purveyor of literacy in a mighty battle with the forces of apathy, aggression and street culture. I fought the good fight for as long as I could, setting blood pressure records, assaulting and being assaulted, self medicating, and finally disgracing myself by repeating a phrase I had heard fifty times a day in the ghetto ass school I was trying to bring words to.
The kid in the car was one of the cool ones. Raised right. Respectful. The kind you worry about as you shepherd him through, knowing in your heart he is way, way, way behind his suburban peers in educational achievement, yet the cream of the crop in the human arena. You hope he wins the lottery and gets into one of the magnet schools in the city. That would give him a shot at college. That would give him the chance that every kid in catholic schools gets. The chances that most suburban kids get. The chance to fuck up his schooling on his own terms. Instead he must survive a fucked up school system and get lucky and then maybe catch up in one of the few good high schools in the city.
In the kind of schools I worked in at the end of my career, the Principals could have been charged with criminal neglect. Assuming a litigious parent, and careful accumulation of evidence. When I started there the staff would have to lock their doors in order to keep the visitors out. Visitors who were cutting class, roaming the hallways, getting high and engaging in prostitution in the gym. Kids having the kind of great time that I only stumbled across in my college years. Kids living the thugged out lifestyle.
So you try to hit them where they live. You parse raps for similies and metaphors, when they find them all you will play the song.
When Biggie raps “Girlies play me like butter plays toast” he is using what literary device? Did you know that he was on the honor roll up until sixth grade? Do you know who else was always on the honor roll before he attended the creative and performing arts school in Baltimore? Do you know what kind of school record you need to get into one of the elite magnet type schools like CAPA? Tupac, Biggie and billionaire Oprah Winfrey on the honor roll.
Gimmicks. You buy peace and sanity for a few hours when you find the right gimmick. Pollyanna, on the other hand, has the luxury of paying customers. She knows about the defeaning silence, when you put it out there, when you speak from the heart. Then you gotta dumb it down a bit, build some bridges and maybe a handful will get it. Exposure to ideas. Maybe the second time they hear it they will remember what you were saying. Like advertising on a low budget.
The teacher in your Master’s course always is going on and on about extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation. Pop quiz hotshot. You have thirty kids of widely varying educational levels and needs. You are required by the state to teach each one on his or her grade level. They all have short attention spans from that demon box TV. Is a dollars worth of candy such a bad price to pay for relative peace and quiet?
I think it’s a bargain. In some form or other it’s only bribery that gets these little extortionists attention at all. They train you as they have been trained by years of sticker bearing teachers in elementary schools.
The stakes are higher in seventh and eighth grade, and the kids are harder to buy off. You need leverage.
And for the true hardcore kids you have none. Some sit in your class, counting out hundreds of dollars, and that’s not against the rules and they don’t want your fucking candy. Or they were already kicked out of the disciplinary school and by law must be returned to the neighborhood school and there is nothing the administration can do about it because, legally, they have already been suspended too many times already this year.
So you sit in the after school sessions on what constitutes sexual abuse and finally catch one, dead to rights, and report it confidently to the assistant Principal. Behavior that would end a job in the square world of laws and other nonsense. The AP confers with the children in the hallway and offers this report to you, “Mr. Baker the kids say they were just playing.” Floored. So “playing” is apparently permitted in your classroom. The heck with education, plus the paperwork on the abuse claim would be both time-consuming and nightmarish. This AP is such a strong advocate for the rights of children that even in the midst of a wave of fires in the building, your word that you saw a lighter in a child’s hand is not enough to go on, because when the school policeman searched the child he had no lighter and “what do you want me to do, Mr. Baker?” Protecting kids from teachers with different visions of what a school is supposed to be like. And they wonder why I drink myself to sleep….