Digging out of the rabbit hole

What a week. I needed the weekend and some good news to get my head together after this week. Co-teaching went very well, but larger issues at the school simultaneously broke my heart and pissed me off. 

For class, we have split things more clearly between working on Romeo and Juliet and the justice project. One of the teachers came up with a cool idea to have students text each other in the roles of Romeo and Juliet during the balcony scene, screen capture the exchanges, and send them to his cell phone. Today (a new week) we read the texts as the characters and everyone had a great time. They did a nice job of using poetic language and emojis to capture the nature and purpose of the balcony scene. 

The justice project work began with reviewing and discussing Rochester youth data (homicide as the #1 killer of youth and teen suicide as #3), followed by looking at websites where youth have done projects that are shared globally. We looked at Do Something, the Public Science Project, Youth Speaks, and Kiva. We planned on forming groups last Friday, but we had a circle instead to talk about Thursday’s incident and lockdown. It may be that that conversation deepened our relationships just enough to open them up for today’s work. 

Today went very well! We changed plans again at the last minute (seems the norm) because of an activity one of the teachers had done in another class that nicely scaffolded students’ understanding of topics that are global and local (Rochester and East). They listed ideas important to them and that seemed to get them excited to do something. We watched Lunch is Gross so they could see an action local Rochester third grade students produced that helped change of the food vendor for the school district (the food at East is their number one issue). It feels like we are primed for picking topics and forming groups on Thursday.

Back to last week’s sobering events. Two events catalyzed my emotions. There were two fights, not that unusual in a secondary school I suppose, but one brought outside gang tensions into the building. While Rochester is not LA, we do have gangs that fight over territory and neighborhoods. We sometimes see these tensions play out at school. I was just finishing up an observation as part of my research at East when a lockdown was called so that administrators could get the students who were fighting safely out of the building. It was right at a class transition and a few students stopped by to say hello to the teacher and got stuck. We were there maybe an hour. I had interesting conversations with a few of them and with the teacher. It was those conversations, some conversations with other teachers afterward, and the circle in the class I am co-teaching that headed me down the rabbit hole. 

“We are used to this.” “This is normal.” “You can’t change the violence.” “Parents don’t care.” “It’s just the way it is.” These comments outraged me and sank me into sadness at the same time. Turning numb to injustice and violence seems like a maladaptive reaction that needs to be processed so that people can move out of numbness. Arguments that we can’t change the situation means nothing changes. Someone has to start! That some teachers and students accept this all as “normal” is unacceptable to me. No one should have to accept violence, poverty, and under education as normal. When I mentioned to the students in our Friday circle that the kids in local suburbs don’t have to deal with this, one young woman said, “Because they’re white.”  There you go.

Settling in

I’ve decided to shift to a weekly post about my co-teaching at East. Posting after every session made me more impatient than I need to be. I was feeling a bit demoralized going into Thursday’s class because I thought the students didn’t seem to be connecting what we are doing in terms of justice work to their own lives. I worried that we were making critical literacy just another “thing” they had to do or that we were re-oppressing in unintended ways.

But … then we had class. The teachers shifted our plans around a bit so that there was more of a focus on Romeo and Juliet. They also suggested moving the desks from a circle to small groups of three. Since they know this class better, I figured what the heck. Truth is, just because it’s a circle doesn’t mean more authentic classroom discourse. And, some kids talk more in a small group than in a full circle. It was good for me to remember that we need flexibility in all we do and that changing the desk organization to different formations for different purposes is a good idea. We planned to look through some youth profile data from Rochester, hoping this would help them connect some of the larger issues we were talking about and the social issues in Romeo and Juliet (teen suicide and gang violence) to what we see in Rochester. We ran out of time though so will have to do that work next week.

We showed TURF FEINZ RIPRichD Dancing in the Rain Oakland Street from YAK FILMS and the kids really seemed to like it. They were a little surprised to know that these dancers are doing a political action to take back the streets of Oakland, but it prompted them to put together that all the social actions we’ve been showing them and talking about are “trying to make a point.” Yes! Then one young man said, “this stuff makes me angry” and another said, “I feel sad.” Yes! Yes! These comments led to a discussion about how to take those feelings to actions that would lead to change. Exhale.

Taking baby steps and checking my impatience.