fredrick is nine years old. he loves his mom, and reading, and when he plays basketball with his friends, he's more often than not the only one who makes a basket. he gets good grades in school, is well-liked by his peers, and is generally a good kid. he's also in love with his t.a., that lucky girl being me, and he likes to show it by taking her stuff and running away, and kissing her hand after pretending he's going to bite her. this basic description, infatuation aside, works for pretty much all my kids, give or take some love of reading or mad basketball skillz.
this week we've just started parent conferences, and i must admit that it's all got me quite worried. because i think ahead, and i can't help but fast forward to three and four years from now when my kids enter their preteens and middle school... and eventually high school, and all the madness that entails. and ok, so i'm not their parents or even their actual teacher, but i do spend several hours a day with them and am involved in the primary activity of their lives right now, that being going to school. and even then, it goes beyond them and what i worry about is all kids going to school now and all the kids i went to school with and just everything, because what can i say, i'm a virgo and worrying is what i do.
it struck me today, when i was tickling him in order to get my badge back, the way he was giggling, openly and like a child, and the way he talked to me after the tickling was done, like a playful but mature little person, which is what he is- it struck me that depending on circumstances entirely beyond his and my control, in a few years he could be a very different person with a very different attitude and on a very different track from the one he's on now. our school is a good school, fairly small and run with an orderliness and insularity that make it feel like the tiny village schools of old (or so i imagine, never having lived in a tiny village of old). when they leave our school, or even next year, when they go into fourth grade and are stuck in much larger classes, budget cuts being what they are, what effect is that going to have on these kids? i think f is lucky because his mother is very involved in his schooling, but at the same time he has another set of circumstances stacked against him, the worst one being that he doesn't live in the same district as the rest of the kids, he lives in what is colloquially known as "the jungle" or compton. and compton is bad. compton is like, gang central, where drive-bys and drug busts are as commonplace as farmer's markets and neighborhood watch in other cities.
so every year, his mom applies for a permit from compton school district so that he can keep going to ramona, because she works nearby and it's a better fit all around. and eventually, she's going to have trouble getting that permit, as compton becomes loathe to lose students from their (seriously overcrowded, seriously underfunded) public schools, the main problems being the middle and high school. and ok, stereotypes are not reality, but they do have a basis in some reality, but what i can't help imagine is this: he has to go to middle or high school in compton. he becomes aware that being a good student and loving your mom are not what make a 12 year old black boy "cool" at cms. he ceases to be a good student, or if he doesn't, he has a hard time socially. he wouldn't even necessarily have to go to school in compton to have problems: ramona is in the same district as one of the worst high schools in the south bay. do kids succeed at these schools, somehow? yeah, they can. but for the most part, and i can say this because i saw it happen to kids i went to elementary and middle school with, going to a bad school is usually bad news. ok, somehow this discussion with myself has become derailed.
our first conference of the week today was with the mother of one of our language students- she's part of a program for children who started school as non-english speakers. her mother, sweet woman, doesn't speak a damn word of english. but she's a good mom, and she does what she can within her limitations. because s is having trouble with reading comprehension, mom reads to her and with her in spanish every night, and works out questions with her on the stories they're reading. ok. so right now, s is in a small class, with kids she's known since kinder, and her class is lucky enough to have an aide, so that the ratio of teacher to student can be 2-1. she's also signed up for extra language help for next year, which she'll need just to keep up because her main class will be almost twice the size of the one she's got now. she has certain things stacked against her, and she's got other things to her favor- things mainly due to the quality of our school. when she goes to middle school, she certainly will not receive nearly as much individual attention and help, and if her mom doesn't pick up some english quick, well that won't help either. it's like a race, almost, to give her the skills she needs now, before we send her out into an indifferent and puzzling world. again, i know there's a point somewhere.
the point is: kids today have a lot of chips stacked against them. good kids, with loving parents, can still get lost in the ridiculous excess of factors influencing their survival, their success, in our school system. well, duh. but working these conferences makes it heartbreakingly apparent, and that's without my elaborate projections into the future. it makes me want to do an obama and get up in front of our class and remind them of their civic and moral imperative to succeed, as blacks and latinos and students in california, nay, LOS ANGELES, the world capital of bad schools. i see it at work with f sometimes, that peer pressure to act like a little jerk who doesn't care about the rules or civility, and it makes me crazy because he's such a smart little guy and he totally knows better, but who the hell can resist peer pressure from time to time? it's a pervasive evil, and it'll be worse when they get to a school where the teachers don't care to or can't correct that behavior. not that i'm the picture of rule-following and tractability, but my rebellions didn't get in the way of learning or even of my education, extra-curricular though the main of it might have been.
another thing that strikes me up and down every time i see it are parents who don't speak one damn word of english! and if we are to be holistic about it, i know why that happens of course: you are a recent immigrant, you and your partner, if you aren't a single parent, are working long hours at shitty jobs just to keep your family afloat. if your community offers esl classes, you either can't make them because you're working or because you're overworked and you've still got a home to order. also consider that english is a damn hard language if you're not a kid, even if you are but everyone knows it's harder for adults to learn a new language than a child, something about mental flexibility or whatnot. but still. that sucks! your kid is disadvantaged one, because she's going into school without speaking the primary language of her educators and her peers, and two, because she needs to in order to move up, get her basics down, and survive! not only will school be harder because she can't communicate as easily as she should, but she also can't really count on your help at home, with homework or language development or anything. it's absolutely, one hundred percent essential that you speak english, if you've got school-age kids- and even if you don't. period. i don't understand all the pseudo-political bullshit uproar about it, people talking about "preserving cultures" or whatever the fuck. you can take it up the ass and refuse, or you fucking do what you need to do to survive and help your kids to thrive in this new world you've found for them. s's mom wants to learn, she told me so herself today, but finds it hard and embarrassing because, well, it is hard and embarrassing. some of the other parents are perfectly content to speak spanish and watch their kids flounder in school, not understanding that the whole "a better life for my family" thing pretty much goes down the drain when the kids can't do well in school.
i worry that i'm not expressing my point as well as i could. but if that is so, it's because my worries, such as they are, are vague and undefined and all-encompassing. i want these kids to do well, and i want to work with people who want these kids to do well, and i want to live in a country where education is important, and schools get more money than prisons and bullshit, and i just want a whole lot of things that aren't going to happen in the forseeable future because it would take a massive, ridiculous paradigm shift to even set the momentous changes they would require to function, over a very long term, in motion. and now i have a headache.
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