Friday, May 23: The students were spellbound today with the next installment of Makes Me Wanna Holler; silence reigned for 90 minutes as they took turns reading it aloud. When we read this book, with its occasional "F" word and other ghetto talk interspersed with high level vocabulary, I always glance nervously at the door; I expect any minute for some administrator to burst through, discover what we're reading, and fire me on the spot. But it's unrealistic to worry that we're corrupting the students' innocence by reading a book that uses strong language---you should see what THEY write on the restroom walls and the desks. Yesterday, another teacher was complaining about her students' hyperactivity, so I gave her one chapter of the book to read in her class. She told me after school today that her room was about as quiet as she'd ever seen it.
Said another teacher, hearing this, it's little wonder they like the book; the students can relate so well to that prison culture. She teaches business and technology, so she has a room full of computers, and she constantly has to tell the girls to get OFF of those prison websites, where they endlessly surf looking for hot guys in jail and compare notes excitedly on what the guys are in for and how long. I've had several students who have been in for armed robbery. At the beginning of the year, I had a student named "F" who was a fifth year senior. Unfortunately, just months before graduation last spring, he and a few homies were booked on an armed robbery charge. But "F" was allegedly at the wrong place with the wrong crowd, and the charge didn't stick for him. And the school granted him an attendance waiver for his days missed while in jail, so he completed the senior year, and came back in the fall to repeat his 12th Grade Comp/Lit course. He was transferred out of my class into another one and I haven't seen him since. "M", another guy who started out in my class last fall, seemed like a quiet, polite young man. In class, at least. Then one day he stopped coming. I overheard one of the girls saying, "...."M" held up the Mexican restuarant on Highway 80 and now he's locked up." He was also expelled from school. This new administration has a zero tolerance policy. Recently, I ran into "M" at Wal-Mart. He was with a friend and looked happy as the day is long. He remembered me and acted friendly and commenced with the high-fiving. I assume he's out on parole now.
If the following wasn't so sad, it would be funny: I used to assign the TAPP girls to do a portfolio of their lives. One topic was "Significant Others," and in many a portfolio, a CrimeStopper clipping from the Savannah Morning News would be pasted onto the page to serve as the picture of the boyfriend or the baby daddy, who were not necessarily one and the same. In low-income black culture, many girls seem to accept it as inevitable that some teenage guy will get them pregnant and become their baby daddy, and later in life they'll look for a man who is husband material. Leonard Pitts one of my favorite columnists who also happens to be African-American, has written about this phenomenon. He asked, in these approximate words, "When are teenage African American girls going to stop lying down with any junk yard dog and letting these losers get them pregnant? Why do they think of their baby daddy as a separate guy from their husband?"
I was telling someone recently that what seems so odd to me is how girls in my class who turn up pregnant seem so "boyfriend-less." Prior to the pregnancy, you never observed them walking down the halls snuggled up to some guy, you never overheard them telling girlfriends about Him, never saw his smiling picture on a notebook, never saw any of the signs that you see with the established teenage couples who have been going together for "two months, one week and three days!" Sure, maybe the guy is someone from the neighborhood who doesn't go to our school, but still, I would think that there'd be signs of being attached or being in love.
Ah well, it's Friday night, so it's time to relax my mind and lose myself in some movie. Oh, the two David's are going to be on Larry King Live tonight, a fact P. has reminded me of once or twice or a dozen times today. And contrary to what my friend Sharon says, LITTLE DAVID IS NOT WOODEN! I'm also reading The Ten Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer, which is wonderful escape material. It's about the post women's liberation generation, women my daughter-in-law's age, who have left the workplace and now have conflicted feelings about being at home with children, just their mothers' generation did, except that this generation actively sought a retreat back home, while their mothers had actively sought a niche in the workplace but couldn't always get it.
I'm so happy that there's the "end of the school year" feeling in the air, as the Media Center sends an email reminding teachers to return their t.v.s on carts and department chairs tell teachers to get textbooks signed back in. I know three teachers on my hallway who aren't coming back next year, who "couldn't take it anymore." And those are just the ones I know about. There'll be so many vacancies that they'll have to import all of Manila by next year.
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