youth, development

So: progress reports dropped, and our staff were collectively shocked, both by the crappiness of kids' progress reports and by the total indifference to said crappiness, and we've got the kids on a kind of academic lockdown. And what. fresh. hells. are these?

The thing about working with large groups of middle school students is that, after awhile, they just become this mass of hopelessness. How many times can you possibly say the same thing to the same child and get the same response -- which is to say, none, unless you count "running in the other direction" or "blatantly ignoring" as responses? Or, alternately, some sort of muttered mean girl joke under their breath, to their friends, behind their eyes?

(The plural pronoun above is intentional; should it happen that, on one glorious day, I speak to a child and he or she responds like a human individual and not some kind of genetic object correlative for my anxiety disorder, well, I'll be writing a different sort of blog entry. That is, provided I can find my way to the computer keyboard through the shimmering aftereffects of the entire bottle of Champagne that I will drink, from a paper bag, on the way home. It's a long commute.)

I don't know, these days, how to respond to this population of middle school kids. I've got a serious case of culture shock, when I thought I was immune. Why can't the kids just hate themselves, quietly, and allow that hate to render every surpassing grade and piece of negative feedback an existential crisis, rather than hate me, loudly, every time they don't get exactly what they want? Who is telling these children that I am the enemy because I want them to learn to read instead of posting rumors about who sucked the dik (sic) of whom on Facebook? Why can't they be more like I was? 

Ugh.

It'd be great if my impassioned internal monologues could take a more circuitous route back to the glaring specter of my own privilege. Middle class white girls have the luxury of devaluing themselves, maybe, because their privileges affords them a kind of value and safety even when they personally are (feel) worthless. I get that there is probably a need to resist self-criticism when you are enmeshed in a system that systematically devalues you before you've even really entered into it, and that I don't really know a damn thing about that.

And of course, regardless of whose fault this is, the privilege that I experienced is intertwined with the reality that I read better at seven years old than my most advanced sixth grader. In one sense, I could afford to be self-reflective and self-critical -- no one with any real power was calling me stupid.

But once, I thought of those differences as smaller than the things I had to offer our kids. I thought I could tell them what saved me: if your life isn't what you want, if you don't like the way you feel, you have options. Instead of demanding an iPhone or a blow job or laying on the floor and screaming (which: why?) or jumping another child or posting something on Facebook about her vagina, you can: learn what a quark is, memorize Edna St. Vincent Millay, write a novel featuring you, in the circumstances you want, doing the things you'd be doing if everyone would get off your back.

You can get out of the place you are. You can do that right now, because the world is full of things and places other than this one, and you can access those things at any time, once you take them in and make them yours. A unique freedom of the public school system, in Brooklyn as in Chester County, is that it's a relatively passive learning experience. Shitty for actual learning, maybe, but excellent for daydreaming.

And you can do it permanently, too: if you can pry open your desperate little mind-fingers and release this shitty moment, you'll have a hand free to reach for a moment you like better. And the amazing thing is that that response to your malaise actually benefits you, instead of just shoving all your anger and frustration onto someone else, who may or may not have anything to do with why you are actually angry.

I really believe(d) that what makes these kids run out of class and scream and swear is not actually my refusal to let them text one another during homework time or wander the halls aimlessly or threaten one another in the bathroom, but a larger frustration that just happens to make every single act of redirection into the last straw. Once upon I time, I believed that these stupid things they cling to like baubles, these petty grievances and imaginary slights and rubbernecking with respect to the social misfortunes of one another, were not actually more interesting to them than the possibility of becoming a doctor or the amazing feeling of really getting algebra or the mind-blowing nature of the world: its expansiveness and diversity and intricacy and unknowableness, the almost infinite things to think about that aren't this thing and aren't this place. I believed that really, these kids are amazing and they just need to be directed to that reality and away from the various lame and petty things that distract them from it.

This week, though, I just think: these kids. Either they just suck, and I'm a chump for trying to get them to see anything beyond this asinine "reality" show of irrelevant drama and tantrums and trivia -- or, worse, the things that I think are inherently valuable and life-affirming (imagination, reading, language, mastery, learning -- the things that saved my life), are, in fact, just a self-deluded, self-important way of saying that my (white, newly middle class) middle school experience was better than theirs is.

Is it racist to be a white person trying to change black kids? To say: actually, learning to read is a better way to spend one's time than twerking? Pushing through Algebra I is a bigger accomplishment than owning an iPhone?

I'm not conflating these things with white kids, but with myself: I think those things are true. I suspect eleven year olds of all races might disagree -- but I actually have very little experience with white kids, compared to the experiences I have with people insinuating I am racist for pushing "my" culture onto urban youth. What I know is: I say yes, x is better than y, and a bunch of kids and "stakeholders" and HuffPo articles insinuate (or, you know, come out and say) that my saying that is some kind of cultural imperialism.

I feel like it is more racist to say that these particular kids' bad behavior is a "cultural phenomenon" rather than the total developmental and disciplinary crisis that I perceive it as -- to say that sitting still, reading, not buying your sixth grader an iPhone, not judging people by the stuff they have, are somehow "white" or "middle class" values. I'm not the one writing articles justifying why a child living in poverty has a iPhone or sneakers that cost more than my wedding dress as something other than poor judgment. But I know those articles are written, and that I'm not in the best position to say: well, that's bullshit.

And I worry that, because the rationale I offer these kids for why they can't have a day off from homework to watch the basketball game is informed by own experience, in a society that normalizes it at the expense of other peoples' experience, I am somehow in the wrong for saying: this is unacceptable; do it this way.

When it comes down to it, though, what I have to offer is this: regardless of the systems that privilege me and don't privilege my students, we do all live in the same world. For essentially apolitical reasons, I have this found world really challenging -- I don't know anyone who believes their life is easy, even when they can concede that their lives have been privileged -- and I survived it. And the things that got me through are the things that got me through, and my life is better now, and it would not be if I hadn't done the work of learning to read and write and finish what I start and shut up and deal, however ungracefully I do it.

So, yeah, I believe kids need to learn those things, however pink-faced and old and square and privileged the medium through which they learn. Because YOLO and Facebook and cliches never saved any lives that I know of. But being able to think and imagine and pursue a goal and exercise self-restraint - to imagine something different and then seek out the tools to make that different thing actual -- those skills saved mine.