Fuck White People

So the feeling of God’s little acknowledgement of solace and reprieve went away before the students even arrived back from a long weekend this morning…..Shit.

The classroom next door to ours is a Language Arts/English class that also has two teachers-one male, one female-both of whom happen to be white. When the teacher opened the door to the class, it had been pretty badly vandalized. All the books on the shelves had been thrown onto the floor. All the filing cabinets had been rooted through and folders were everywhere. The back chalkboard had many savory quotes on it, including “Fuck all white people” and “Suck my big fat dick.” How lovely. The white screen that they use as an overhead projector had another quote that read “Fuck dat fat white lady” and “Bitch-suck my dick” written on it in permanent marker. It was written in huge letters-enough to render the screen unusable.

Disturbing and traumatic for sure, but that really only scratches the surface. A few minutes later, the male teacher and I were in the office getting our copies for the morning when the grade principal (who had been to the class and seen the vandalism) came in. Here is the conversation that ensued:

Teacher: “Do you think I should say something to the students and see if I can find the culprit?”

Principal: “No. Since we have no way of proving who did it, just let it be. No point in trying to find out who did it.”

Teacher: “Ummm…okay.”

This is the question that I posited to the teacher after the principal left:

“If the race of the people written in such deragatory terms had been reversed, what might have been the reaction?”

I dare say the answer to that question is a rhetorical one. All I can muster to articulate in written response having stewed over it all day is that these children do NOT HAVE A FUCKING CLUE WHAT RACISM IS. As I have waxed about in other posts, racism is wholly and completely cheapened when it is perpetrated by anyone-white, black, brown, yellow or red. These students realize that they can say something like that and it goes unpunished so therefore they have no reason to rise above the irrational ignorance they harbor. Racism has become their excuse for insolence, laziness, and ignorance and it goes unpunished.

The town I went to elementary and the beginning of middle school in was void of any real racial diversity, but if someone wrote something offensive to a group that did NOT even exist at the school, there would have been hell to pay. This type of behavior is only allowed to perpetuate itself by the inaction of adults and others in power.

And that was only the first incident of the day.

Our grade goes to lunch after their class ends at 12:35. No more than thirty seconds after our students had left the class, a whole WALL of lockers got pulled out of the wall and crashed down onto the leg of one of our students just leaving the class. He got himself out from the lockers but his shin had split into two different pieces. All the while, students rushed to the scene and mayhem ensued. Students were jumping up and down on the lockers that were now laying on the floor, laughing, and thinking it was the funniest thing they ever saw. As we tried to clear the scene and get the student who was hurt of the chaos, we called 911 for an ambulance and tried our best to re-direct traffic to another stairwell.

The paramedics, police, and fire departments all responded-at least FIFTEEN minutes before any administrator in the building cared to show up and see what was going on. The students ended up having to stay in lunch for almost a full hour before the paramedics could stabilize this students leg and get him out the building on a stretcher. Our last period ended up lasting 45 minutes instead of the normal 90.

Trying to find WHO pulled this wall of lockers out was a futile task. These students are way more concerned about not snitching on anyone than the safety and well-being of one of their fellow students.

What do these two incidents highlight….

1. Crumbling facilities with no maintenance upkeeps.

2. Absent and unconcerned administrators who are about to get their asses smeared all over the bureaucratic wall-AND RIGHTFULLY SO.

3. Students utter lack of respect for one another and the adults-both the black and white ones.

I smell a lawsuit. If if were my kid, the lawyers would already be at the school banging down the fucking door of everyone there…..

Sad, sad day.

School and Political Stew

One of the realities of teaching in a chronically low-performing school is that you have lots of outside forces that have the ability to shape the direction of the school. One of those pesky little things is political intervention.

Every time a new election cycle rolls around, somebody has a grand vision-most assuredly a new one-about how to revamp urban public education. The reality of these pithy slogans/initiatives is that the schools carry the burden of implementation. Now if anyone has had a class on public policy, implementation is everything. If it works, great…If not….well its YOUR (ie school/teacher/administrators) fault. The politicians are not really concerned with this step….

Why go here?

I am sitting in a content department meeting yesterday (And yes, I was text messaging and doodling-not really paying attention) when my ears perked to the words selected response and BCR in a discussion of creating assessments.

Okay…three things here. One is that selected response is actually multiple choice and assessment is really a test/exam. BCR-Brief Constructed Response-is simply a short answer/paragraph.

So the vernacular of the district now includes these terms. Let me hypothesize that they paid some uptight educational consultant gobs of money to come in and think about how to deal with the failings of this system. What do they get?

Educational Consultant: “Instead of dealing with the real systemic issues here, or ignoring all the social factors involved, lets come up with new terms for words that were not really impacting low levels of achievement in the first place, but hey, at least it looks like I did something.”

This kind of wasted resource allocation of Ivy League windbags looks to me like a systemic problem in and of itself, but dude, I am just a first year teacher.

At the end of the meeting, I looked at one of my colleagues and he says,

“You gotta understand dude…its like African-Americans used to be called Negroes and colored people, but the language has evolved. What was once a multiple choice test with short answers is now a selected response assessment with BCR’s.”

Thankfully, he was laughing the whole time saying this.

Me, Im just thankful its Friday….Off to forget about being an adult for a while and drink.