The last Kozol I read was Amazing Grace. I carried it with me while I was going through the district hiring process, which, much like a DMV appointment, can involve hours of patiently waiting in flourescent-lit rooms full of the irate unemployed. A colleague glanced at my book and, spying its subtitle -The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation - told me it was an appropriate choice. This subtitle is dead-on for what we do in The Program: it's about education, yes, but moreover, it's about realizing that in our society as it is currently structured, education can determine the rest of your life - and about having the conscience to act on that realization. My colleague asked if it was worth reading. I told her yes, and also that I read Kozol when I have trouble getting mad. Because really, it's amazing how quickly we become inured to the injustices of society. Those of us from Berkeley are familiar with the cycle: at first you're shocked by the amount of homelessness you see, and you want to help, but you soon start to feel powerless. As time passes, that apathy changes to avoidance, and you shift your eyes away from their gaze; you tell yourself you need your change as much or more than they do. Eventually you become irritated with them - begging all the time, smelling so foul, sitting in your way when you're trying to get to class. You can fight these feelings, but if you don't, they can sneak up on you and catch you unawares.
I have been at my school for just two weeks, and already I am used to it: the lack of bathrooms, the shortage of teachers, the complete absence of keys, the library closed to the students, the "Tardy Sweep" that forces any student late to class to spend the entire period rotting in detention, the track system that robs them of 21 educational days per year - over the course of a K-12 education placing them one full year behind students on traditional calendars. I don't like these things - I outright despise them - but I am not surprised by them anymore. They have become the status quo.
And then, the other day, I looked in my box in the main office and found a copy of an excerpt from Kozol's new book, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. The book comes out in two weeks, but Harper's Magazine is running a long essay adapted from the text as its September Report. The book was researched over five years, with Kozol visiting 60 schools in 11 states. The Harper's excerpt focuses heavily on mine.
Is this what you call "coming full circle?" Or is it called "getting what you asked for"? I read Kozol and I wanted to teach in those schools, the ones he talked about. So here I am, suddenly free of any doubt that this is indeed the kind of place he was talking about. He came here, and he talked to our students. And this is what he has to say about our school:
All of these things are true.
We have fifteen fewer bathrooms than the number required by law.
Bathrooms are so rarely open and operational that students often must go the whole day without using them.
Many rooms lack air conditioners and become so hot that students become sick and cannot focus.
The only vocational classes we offer prepare students for low-paying jobs: cosmetology, sewing, hairdressing.
We in fact offer two levels of hairdressing: hairstyling and braiding.
We force students into these classes, even those who request high-level and AP courses, because academic classes are overcrowded and few.
We force students into classes like "Life Skills," which teach things like the names and locations of the continents.
Rats have been documented in 11 classrooms and the kitchen.
Attending my school teaches students that they are not wanted by society.
So here I sit, pissed off at myself, because it is somehow so much easier to get angry about these things when you see them on the page than when you see them every day. Moreover, it is easy to get angry in theory, but to take absolutely no action. I am realizing how many times, already, I have told my students, "I'm sorry, that's just how it is," or, "I don't like it either, but you'll have to bear with me." They come to class hungry as their breaks aren't long enough to purchase food and eat it, and I am instructed not to let them eat; they spend their brief passing periods in line for the bathroom but never make it in, and I can't send them out because they'll get caught in the infernal Tardy Sweep, regardless of whether I write them a pass. My school is a bit militaristic this way, and completely illogical; they believe that students should be in class learning at all times, a proposition I agree with wholeheartedly until the student I have sent out for three minutes, to return much happier and more able to focus in my class, is detained and denied the right to return to the classroom for the remainder of the hour.
I remember Program veterans telling me, early on, that you have to decide if your loyalty is to The Program or to your school. I'm realizing that this is something of a false choice. Everyone involved is ostensibly trying to help my students, and "choosing a side" doesn't necessarily do much for me or them one way or the other. In the end, I think, I need to remember (as I always try to) that my loyalty is to my students. Crucially, though, I must act on it. I have students in classes like fashion, cosmetology, and the ubiquitous "Life Skills" (which one of my Program colleagues, interestingly, has been assigned to teach.) I have students taking "soccer" as part of their academic day, and also "filmmaking," which might be great, although I'm not entirely certain we own any kind of filmmaking equipment, and I'm certain students wouldn't be able to take it off-campus. I don't know what I can do about these things, especially in my first year. I do know, though, that I can be the teacher who makes my kids read a few young adult novels in addition to their ESL program, and who pushes my seniors to read tough novels and write long essays no matter what I'm told about what they are and are not capable of. I can start investigating the AP situation, how many we have and what I would have to do to start one up in the coming year and on my track. Our school has some AP classes, but in a school of 5,000 with three separate tracks, there can really never be enough.
Anyhow. The question for me is mostly how to hang on to my anger, and then how to turn that anger into a better life for my students. It would help me, though, if other people would get angry, too, so they might scream at me when it seems like I'm accepting my situation. So, if you can, go to the newsstand or the library and read that Harper's piece. If you are out of country, it may take awhile for the expat bookstores to get this month's issue, if they stock Harper's at all, and I certainly don't expect you to buy the thing at import cost - but maybe you could keep an eye out, too, and read the thing on the sly. I could even mail photocopies, if people were interested. As for me, I'll be buying the book when it comes out. The reality is that sometimes it's easier for me to believe what's in black and white than what's all around me every day. No one wants to believe they're surrounded by misery.
8 comments:
jasmine,
excellent post, but i have to disagree with one thing- i remember pushing Savage Inequalities on you because it affected me so much i wanted to share it. anyway start an a.p. class if you can. anything that you can do to improve the situation will help.
i dont think that classes teaching life skills are necessarily evil. my typing class in high school helped me to get better employment than i would have otherwise. but it has to be paired with more challenging classes as well. i mean, it would be bad enough if kids weren't motivated to try for AP, but to turn away those who WANT to take them is failing them as an institution.
and i definitely am interested to read the piece if possible.
p.s. do you remember that episode of Invader Zim where the teacher makes him take the radiator as the hall pass? I'm surprised your school hasn't tried that yet.
Yeah...we have a NO PASS policy, radiator or otherwise, due to the large number of kids who will very convincingly plead that they didn't have a chance to use the bathroom at break, swear on their mother's grave to come back in 3 minutes or less, and then go hang out on the quad, find their friends, and wander the campus until the next class period. This used to be a huge problem. Now it's only a big problem, as they sometimes get caught in The Sweep. No one seems to mind much, though - sometimes kids will walk out of your class specifically to go to The Sweep. The result, as ever, is that the good kids get punished along with the rest.
(Also, if our kids get head-pigeons, they are on their own, as our nurse has taken to not showing up. If it is an emergency case of head-pigeons, we can call the middle school a few blocks away and have them send their nurse, when he has a spare minute.)
There's an interesting line in the Kozol article (which I can get to you), in which one of our students says that my school "provides solutions that don't work." She's dead-on.
The problem with these vocational classes isn't inherent - it's that students who want (and desperately need) real classes are forced into them. And I'd be much happier if they were typing rather than hair-braiding classes - then at least we could argue that we're preparing them for work in an office, which might come with things like health insurance and the potential to move up the ladder. The fear is that they're being prepared for dead-end jobs.
Also, the "Life Skills" class, in particular, is a joke. It's an insult to our students' intelligence - or else a testament to the failings of our other classes. Maybe both.
Did you lend me the book in the first place? I remember just kind of stumbling on to it, but your version sounds just as likely, maybe even moreso. Know, though, that this makes you partly responsible for my fate as a teacher, whatever it may be.
yeah i did but don't feel bad if you dont remember, if you remembered every book that got me worked up about the state of the world that would be a lot of books.
i do remember one point about Kozol though. you say that his books largely state things we know already. this is true for the most part-they are a list of all the problems we already know our schools have, only stated in a way that makes you angry and want to change things.
but what was new to me was Kozol's ultimate argument: that the only thing that will turn the schools around is qualified, talented, and dedicated teachers, and the ONLY way to attract and retain these teachers is by paying them more money. he then goes on to point out the unfairness of our method of paying for schools. due to the fact that the money comes from property taxes, those schools in richer districts are better funded. he suggests a fundamental restructuring of the system so that a portion of the money from the richer districts is actually SENT to the poorer ones, as these students need services such as counseling and support at a much higher rate than richer students. he argues that rich parents won't let their children attend schools that are not good, suggesting that they will kick in the monetary difference themselves if they have to.
to me, this is the most radical part of kozol's thinking- one that i agree with, but that is unlikely to gain wide acceptance in this society, with its fear of anything that smacks of Communism or Socialism in the popular imagination.
as one of the most interesting hippie professors at Berkeley, Laura Nader, said (roughly..): One of the mistakes of this society is the tendency to see problems as individual rather than structural.'
this is not to say that individuals can't make a difference..i'm proud of you!
First off, the observation/complaint (whether yours or someone else's) that too many unmotivated kids are going to college at the bachelor's level is fundamentally incompatible with the complaint that there are not enough jobs in academia. Supply and demand, you know.
On to the rest:
While the world does not technically need hairdressers (they are, in fact, one of the groups targeted as a drain on society and shipped off into the cold recesses of space in HHGTTG), I somehow suspect there would be a good deal of grumbling if they went away, and that the profession would be quickly reinstated. So I will, for the sake of argument, accept the proposition that hairdressers are a "necessity" in our society.
The world does not technically need theoretical linguists at all. Not even one. If they were to all drop dead tomorrow and never be replaced, the world would continue on just fine. If hairdressers are a necessity, I would contend that academics are a luxury. It's a luxury for a society to have them and it's absolutely a luxury to be one, whether or not you find employment in your given field. I'm absolutely pro-luxury in this sense: the more linguists, the better. The question, here, is of choice: who gets to make choices about their life, and who gets those choices made for them.
Everyone who becomes an academic has already had their choice among a) doing something practical and mundane without any real chance for growth or mobility, b) pursuing a strong intellectual interest and potentially adding to the world's understanding of their subject area, at the risk of not finding a job in said subject area/field (which, I should point out, is a risk taken at all levels), and c) pursing any number of relatively stable, rewarding, and decently-salaried jobs in between (research, design, engineering, computers/information systems, teaching, publishing, finance, admin, social/nonprofit work, business, accounting...)
I should also point out that even if you are in the 90% of the b)s who do not become university professors, you are qualified for jobs a hell of a lot better than standing on your feet all day touching up someone's highlights.
My point is, even if I accept your terms (per "need") and your numbers, you're first of all ignoring any number of life prospects in between academia and Supercuts, and you're second of all completely ignoring this country's de facto caste system. I would ask you to think about how many hairdressers are produced by your school (where everyone who can afford to goes to college), compared to how many are produced by my school (where only a tiny percentage of students are given the courses to prepare and qualify them for college, could they afford to go.) Then ask how many theoretical linguists are being produced. My school: zero. Yours: well, at least one.
Per "incompetent and uninterested": maybe, but they still have the piece of paper to get them in the door. I've met some students here in LA who are razor-sharp, as competent and interested as anyone I met at Berkeley. The only differences are: they are Hispanic and black, they are on government aid, and they are not being taught the skills and information necessary to make choices about their own lives. There is a 100% correlation among these facts.
It is true, yes, that the world needs garbagemen and construction workers. That's what the first president Bush told students at Garfield, the high school where Jaime Escalante, over the past few decades, has taught 1/3 of the country's Hispanic students to pass the AP Calculus exam. Garfield is right down the street from us - we played football against them last Friday. This is the place to go for menial labor, it would seem. Perhaps you would like to be the one who comes down here and tells my kids - the ones who are literally petitioning for more AP classes - that we really need hairdressers, so it's OK that they're never even offered the chance to try for something better?
I have so much to say about this, but I sometimes feel like I'm beating a completely different horse that's being passed off as the same as Jasmine's. Not a better horse, not a worse horse, just a different, equally dead, horse.
Paying huge taxes would never work for my school. It would be nice, it would probably make things better, but it would never get smart, talented people out here. Maybe the bathroom would get fixed (yes, there is one bathroom for 500 kids), maybe the kids would be allowed to take home a textbook, but things wouldn't really change.
Why? Because I live in goddamn poverty. Smart, talented outsiders (there are plenty of smart, talented Indians from Kyle working at the school) don't want to live in poverty because it is extremely, extremely uncomfortable. I never realized how materialistic I was until the day I sat in my car, crying, because my car was the most comfortable thing in my life. I have never felt so trapped in my whole life. There was no place that I wanted to be that I could get to. I had never had that feeling before.
I don't see the disparity that Jasmine sees everyday. I don't see the rich white kids at the school across the street clutching handfuls of books as they hop into Mom's Lexus. Like Jasmine, that makes me so mad. Out here in Shannon County, winner of Poorest County in America for probably the 30th year in a row, my anger is not as strong as my sadness.
I think I remember one part of Savage Inequalities in which he basically suggests that, because this disparity does not exist in rural locations, the inequalities are not quite as savage. At the time I read this, long before I even thought of joining TFA, that seemed to make sense. Now I think that is a pretty damned immoral thing to say. "Ok, so they're off on a reservation. We'll deal with them later because they don't know how screwed they're getting."
I also don't like how he quotes some statistic that something like a third of my kids have problems because their mothers drank while pregnant. That comment itself shows that he's never been out here. I used to worry about FAS, too. Now I realize that the effect of alcohol exposure before birth pales in comparison to the effect of alcohol exposure after birth. My kids aren't damaged goods. They just keep getting damaged.
...
All of that said, I love being here now. I really do. It is lonely like you wouldn't believe, boring like you wouldn't believe, and completely different than any other part of the country. Honestly, sometimes I don't even feel like I am in the US.
But I am looking out my trailer right now and there is a line of clouds right above the HUD housing. The clouds are blue, and the sky is white, just like how you drew it as a kid. Some kids are playing basketball, and a little girl keeps running and running around the track. Despite everything, I am in the right place.
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