A conversation in 3 parts
I.
Tuesday, December 20 2022
A gathering of students, a school out in Queens, our last session before the holiday break. The conversation shifted from the usual angst of school drama to musing about family, as we all focused on the puppets we were making, the table a kaleidoscope of colored paper and googly eyes.
The student next to me, often outspoken in a thoughtful way - mentioned being mad at her mother. In the same breathe also acknowledged that was a natural part of loving people, that she wasn't worried about it lasting forever. Went on to describe how her immigrant mother became valedictorian, graduated with honors, was her inspiration - this 10th grade student growing up in a quiet part of New York City. Another student offered up in response the awe she felt that her immigrant father had been accepted into Columbia University back in his youth, and earlier on the street she had announced to me her best friend had been offered $120,000 scholarship to her second choice college in NYC.
I usually am a witness here, available to share my experience or opinion when asked of me - but today the outspoken student, without looking up as she calmly struggled to make a chicken puppet with golden skin - asked me about my parents. Here is a tender spot of discomfort, in a group of students in varying shades of brown, with parents who fought incredible systemic and cultural odds to provide their children a middle class lifestyle and opportunities - to reveal how pitifully ill equipped my white mother was to do anything, how sad and inept all of my white caregivers were. I answered her questions, all of the students continued to focus their gaze on their individual puppet processes, so I couldn't gauge how knowing those things about my childhood might be landing on them. The outspoken student after a small pause wished for me to meet someone I trusted enough to love one day, so I could have children - because she thought I would be a really good mother. Hard to name what I felt, shame maybe, but also awe that these young people already had skills that I'm desperately trying to learn as I approach the age of 40.
The only thing in my fridge when I got home was leftovers from a cultural food festival another one of my schools had the day prior - they begged everyone to take some home because there was so much. Tamales, jerk chicken falling off the bone, rice and beans, homemade flan, nourishing my body in more ways then one, invisible hands transmuting love into flesh, effort into meaning. Bright bursts of shame and gratefulness moving through me, tears and satisfaction like waves lapping at sand.
II.
Wednesday, December 21 2022
1st period, a school in the Bronx. I'm lucky if I have more then a handful of students before the rest show up half an hour into class. Here I have to keep moving, keep trying to sneak moments of connection, student engagement falling like a handful of sand slipping between my fingers.
I showed a few of them the mural design my Queens crew had created together. I think they should be seeing and responding to each others work in general, but maybe I was hoping to inspire something by sharing this particular piece. Evidence that everyone's work is getting seen, experienced outside of that room maybe. Proof their efforts matter. One of them, a student that was particularly intense for me to figure out how to meet the needs of during the summer program but has decided I'm safe enough to be connected to now - appraised it quickly and frankly asked if the students who designed the mural were white. She looked me in the eyes waiting for my answer. No, I responded, only one or two of them were white. I didn't acknowledge out loud what she was picking up on - there is a clear difference in resources and sense of life possibilities, something I perceive as a class difference. I know there are many more layers to this exchange I just had, a clue worth holding on to.
We've been working on what I'm calling Fractured Self Portraits, an exploration where students show multiple aspects of themselves in one piece, those different parts winking at us through cracks like looking into a broken mirror. The week before, one of her friends actually made a lot of effort in developing her version of the assignment - and quietly told me about the locket she wears, that will go in the portrait - it holds her mother's ashes. Another student who has only shown up 3 times and looks at me with wary suprise because I am always so glad to see him - showed me a sketch of this assignment, and in one of the fractures was a tornado with words like 'Family' caught in the storm. These things are shared with the acceptance that they are normal, because they are. In a different environment, where these kinds of realities are less so, or when expectations of student expression or involvement aren't taking these realities into account - what can any of us feel but shame? I could keep going, there are so many moments and real things that get shared with me that hit like an arrow in this room, and each smile, each moment of eye contact is a bridge we are building, that may one day take them anywhere they want to go - but they need us to believe in them no matter what side they show of their many layered selves.
This is not just me as witness, since there is more effort needed for trust to build, and patience required for walls to soften. This is a more active exchange, but also the components in the room are more familiar to me, so I feel myself differently here.
III.
Thursday, December 22 2022
I came across an article written back in October. The headline reads: NYC Schools Chief Criticized for Saying Some Kids Deserve Top Schools More Than Others.
In it David Banks is quoted as saying: Students who work "really hard" should have priority access compared with "the child you have to throw water on their face to get them to go to school every day".
Something that is shown to me really quickly doing the murals, and as I develop more sophisticated artmaking projects - is how students are learning to learn. How adults have set students up to be and engage with material in relationship to themselves. Student disengagement is the fault of the adults involved in developing children's relationships with learning. Penalizing children for adult failure is perpetuating existing class structures and intergenerational trauma, by instilling shame as a baseline experience of themselves in the world. I don't understand how there is any confusion about this - it isn't about opinions or pedagogy, it's as real and documentable as the laws of physics.
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