Author Archives: decollins1969

The Beatdown

05 Saturday Nov 2011

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Ironing out balled up paper, a bullying symbol, November 4, 2011. (Donald Earl Collins)

An anti-bullying video’s been trending in the social media sphere this week, in which a teacher demonstrates to her class the effects of bullying on a student’s psyche. All courtesy of balled up, stomped on and unfolded yet crumpled pieces of paper. It’s a good, though incomplete description, because it doesn’t address the great feeling of superiority that those dispensing the verbal, physical and psychological abuse get from bullying their classmates.

Though I seldom have thought of myself as someone who was bullied, by today’s definition, that’s exactly what happened to me for the better part of five months of seventh grade, from November ’81 through February ’82 and late-May to early June ’82 (see my post “The Legend of Captain Zimbabwe” from May ’09 for much more). I guess I’d been called so many names by so many people in 7S so first few months — and, to be truthful, did the same in response to a fair number of classmates myself — that I didn’t think too much of it as November ’81 began.

About two weeks after my fight with Brandie (see “Adverbs and A-Holes” post from last month), I experienced a serious physical bullying altercation (there were one or two attempts by neighborhood kids while I went to Nathan Hale and Holmes Elementary, and a couple of attempts in high school). The best way to describe it is that I got jumped and then beat-down after the end of the school day on the first Friday in November ’81.

It wasn’t a random jumping or beat-down, and not one that involved Davis’ Black or Latino students, who were always described to us super-nerds as “dangerous.” No, the perps in this case were from what I euphemistically called the “Italian Club,” a full two years before we had an official Italian Club in high school. They’d been on me in 7S homeroom and in Italian class with nearly constant verbal abuse for the two weeks or so since my scuffle with Brandie. Apparently, my decision to ignore them didn’t work well enough.

The leader of this pack of uncouth Italian or White working-class preteen Humanities boys was “A,” who presented himself as between John Travolta’s character on Welcome Back, Kotter and Arthur Fonzerelli from Happy Days. A’s favorite move those Humanities middle school years was to walk into our homeroom and belt out The Police’s “Roxanne” refrain, as if he were Eddie Murphy in 48 Hours. The way his band of Italian or Italian-esque brothers hung around him, you would’ve thought he was a rock star, someone like his fave, Mr. “White Wedding” himself, Billy Idol.

A Christmas Story (1982) screen shot of bunny suit kid, December 11, 2009. (http://myhealthypassion.wordpress.com). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright laws, between low resolution, cropping, and intent of use.

Led by A, about ten 7S classmates attacked me after school as I was on my way out the school’s side door closest to the Humanities wing to walk home. They grabbed, punched, and kicked me, and called me everything but a child of God. A, of course, wasn’t actually involved in any of the dirty work of beating on me. Like a about half a dozen other 7S classmates, A watched as he directed his gang.

That was my third A Christmas Story moment. Except I’d been better off wearing the pink bunny suit over my kufi! Bullying is a funny thing, even when you’re one being bullied.

But unlike the piece of trampled, stomped, balled up paper, I wasn’t scarred in the sense that my self-esteem was shattered. Far from it, my self-absorption and delusions of academic grandeur shielded me, made it possible for me to iron out most of the wrinkles in my psyche from being jumped that day. It took my grades, a crush, and events that played out at home, at 616, to shatter my childhood.

Of course, being called a “dumb ass” as if it were my nickname, or “Captain Zimbabwe,” as a proxy for “Negro” or the N-word, wasn’t exactly besides the point. Nor was the idea that a bunch of White kids could decide that they could gang up on me essentially because I was an enigma to them. Like me being weird, uncool and smart was too much for their pubervescent heads to handle.

The best revenge, though, was going through puberty myself, to find myself growing ten inches in twenty months, between March ’82 and December ’83. That, and taking care of my body, mind and spirit over the past thirty years. Not that I have a dart board of my tormentors or anything, but I think it would be hilarious if any of them attempted to bully the 225-pound me today. Of course, I’d probably laugh so hard that they’d get a couple of licks in, at least before my sense of righteous rage would kick in.

The moral here, I guess, is to have a sense of how to deal with bullying if and when it does occur, to not shrug it off as “boys just being boys” or, for that matter, “cliquish girls being cliquish girls.” By middle school, though, it’s not just about reporting it to teachers or parents. It’s about other students stepping in, and students the subject of bullies’ discontent defending themselves. And that is what I’m instilling in my son. Of course, I’ll step in when necessary, too.

Flexing muscles, as in too bad I didn't have these 30 years ago, November 4, 2011 (Donald Earl Collins).

Holes in Foundation Shield of Education Funding

03 Thursday Nov 2011

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Leather knight shield with holes, November 2, 2011. (http://paulssupplies.com)

As an educator and someone who has worked in the nonprofit world on education reform issues for slightly less than half of my life (I turn forty-two next month), it’s curious and disappointing to continue to see a scatter-shot and tweaking approach to education reform. An approach that often gets the bulk of the funding from private and corporate foundations.

If what Bill Gates said at the National Education Summit in Washington, DC in February 2005 is correct, that “American high schools are obsolete in their current form” — and I believe he is — then why does his foundation and others fund mostly small-scale projects? Especially ones that have few, if any, possibilities for replication or for making American high school more relevant to the twenty-first century?

But let me not pick on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as being neglectful of seeing the big, panoramic picture on K-12, K-16 or even P-20 education. Below, in general, are the parts of education process the big foundations have tended to fund over the past five to ten years:

Preschool, Pre-K Education = Annie E. Casey Foundation, Pew Trusts

K-12 Education = Gates Foundation, Hewlett Foundation

Higher Education, Education Research = Spencer Foundation (most $$$ now via AERA/NAE), Mellon Foundation

Higher Education Access/Success = Lumina Foundation for Education, Ford Foundation, Gates Foundation, Jack Kent Cooke Foundation

Student Financial Aid = Lumina Foundation for Education, Gates Foundation

Teacher Effectiveness = Gates Foundation, Hewlett Foundation, Ford Foundation

Poverty, Community Development, Race = W.K. Kellogg Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Pew Trusts, Ford Foundation, Annie E. Casey Foundation, Gates Foundation.

They have funded and still do fund everything from early childhood education programming, credentials for early childhood educators, small schools, research for curriculum realignment, online education options for K-12, leadership programs for principals and school superintendents, to student and teacher incentive programs, fiscal and human resources allocation, early and middle college high schools, and assessments for teacher effectiveness. (By the way, that is the longest sentence I’ve ever written, at least without editing into

Ed Harris as Jackson Pollock in Pollock (2000), spreading and throwing paint, August 6, 2009. (http://www.totalfilm.com).

smaller sentences).

Seems like everything in the P-20 education universe is covered, right? Except, I’d defy anyone in or out of the education field to try to add all of this up into a comprehensive overhaul of early childhood and K-12 education that would then force reform in higher education.

The reason that we can’t assume that all of this adds up to real reform is simple. A dozen or so foundations pouring billions of dollars into a quarter-trillion dollar a year system through tens of thousands of grants, each working on a separate problem? By definition, a comprehensive overhaul isn’t possible. It’s as unlikely as Wall Street disengaging itself from American politics without a decade of Occupy Wall Street.

We could start, conceivably, with the idea of early and middle college high schools. One where school districts and the colleges and universities adopting these high schools collaborate on creating a system that would leave high school graduates with the equivalent of two years of college training or an associate’s degree. Or in the case of students who made plans to not go to college, two years of training that would make them employable in the twenty-first century workforce.

Only, these early and middle college high schools would be without the additional burden of providing remediation to ninth graders not ready for what we now call high school. Bottom line: we need a single-track college/career ready system that begins its work in preschool and pre-K programs, one in which these programs are tied to elementary schools, so that it doesn’t take the poorest of students three years to catch up. We need linkages between elementary and middle schools — or as many researchers suggest, K-8 schools — where the work to make students ready for algebra, critical thinking through writing and the arts could take shape in a more supportive and coherent environment.

More direct linkages between schools and community organizations and services — health clinics, psychological services, nonprofit organizations focused on the arts, writing, sports, science and math — are

Crane removing part of Berlin Wall at Brandenburg Gate, December 21, 1989. (SSGT F. Lee Corkran/US Dept of Defense). In public domain.

necessity to build communities that are committed to large-scale education reform. For if these organizations and systems continue to work in parallel series rather than in collaboration, all these attempts at reform are for naught.

But foundations have always been leery to link their work, to fund for the long-term, to think in ways that encourage collaboration — kind of like corporations, Wall Street bankers and the GOP. They also tend not to hire deep thinkers on issues like education. Or at least, the linkages between education, race, class, gender, community and the workforce.

Though they are doing a better job these days, especially in the case of the Kellogg Foundation on race, we need a more solid shield. One that is truly about transforming P-20 education, and not just tweak it with data and pilot programs. Funding programs without a grander vision might as well be a “make it rain” party at a strip club.

Herman Cain’s Greatest Hits

01 Tuesday Nov 2011

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Mr. Herman "Get A Job!" Cain, at Republican Party of Florida Presidency 5 Convention, Orlando, FL , September 24, 2011. (AP).

Since the allegedly sexually harassing, racism and classism denying, Republican presidential candidate leader of the moment Herman Cain likes to sing, I decided to make a short list of Cain’s greatest hits. Trust me, they’re all doozies. They draw on the experiences of a man about as in touch with average Americans as Marie Antoinette was with French peasants on the eve of the French Revolution.

1. “The Way It Is” (1986) — Bruce Hornsby and The Range: Here, he puts special emphasis on the line, “Just for fun he says, ‘Get a job!,” not out of sarcasm, but out of sincerity.

2. “Another Day In Paradise” (1989) — Phil Collins: Cain tries to get a bit of social consciousness, at least, in emphathizing with “the man on the street,” the poor guy subjected to a worn-out homeless women begging for help.

She calls out to the man on the street
“Sir, can you help me?
It’s cold and I’ve nowhere to sleep
Is there somewhere you can tell me?”

He walks on, doesn’t look back
He pretends he can’t hear her
He starts to whistle as he crosses the street
She’s embarrassed to be there

The real test with this song would be whether Cain’s whistling is as good as his crooning.

3. “O.P.P.” (1991) — Naughty By Nature: Here Cain would need help from ex-RNC head Michael Steele to get his rap game together, as well as from Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in interpreting the sexual laden lyrics. But in light of the accusations — and in Justice Thomas’ case, evidence — of sexual harassment and general insensitivity of Cain, Steele and Thomas, figuring out “who’s down with O.P.P.?” is an appropriate question in their bubble.

4. “Cigarettes And Coffee” (1966) — Otis Redding: Cain’s tribute to his campaign manager in his recent commercial as he slows down the pace a bit. “And please, darling, help me smoke this one more cigarette,” Cain baritones to Mark Block.

5. “Ain’t That A Kick In The Head” (1960) — Dean Martin: Cain’s theme song for his campaign. The main lyrical refrain for him would be as much about his rise to the top of the Republican heap as it would be about the people he’s stereotyped, vilified, denigrated and ultimately exploited over the course of his career and campaign.

My head keeps spinning;
I go to sleep and keep grinning;
If this is just the beginning,
My life’s gonna be beautiful.
I’ve sun- shine enough to spread;
It’s like the fella said…

“Ain’t [I] like a kick in the head?” And the 99 percent of us say, “Hell, yeah, where’s the aspirin?”

Trick or Trick

31 Monday Oct 2011

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Charlie Brown fooled by Lucy and the football, again, October 30, 2011. (http://www.flickr.com).

I’ve never really liked Halloween. Probably because most of my Octobers growing up in Mount Vernon, New York were pretty horrible ones. The worst of those late Octobers were in the early 80s, starting in ’81.

That year, Halloween was a forbidden holiday in my life anyway. But the trick was on me. On a day just before Halloween, my day’s meal consisted of an ice cream sandwich as hard as a rock. The lunch at A.B. Davis Middle School that Friday — as it was most Fridays back then — was a grilled ham and cheese sandwich with fries, not exactly a Hebrew-Israelite’s diet. It was also about thirty degrees outside and partly cloudy, unusually cold for early fall in New York. So I stood near the steps leading down to the back of Davis, which led to the athletic field below. The field had turned a dirty yellow-green, the color of mid-fall. It matched how I felt about my life on that day.

The only reason I even had a rock-hard ice cream sandwich for lunch was because I’d won one of our seventh grade social studies teacher Mr. Court’s bets. He’d made an incorrect historical assertion in class, and I caught it, collecting a quarter from him that morning. Still, I learned, fully and truly for the first time, how

A Single Vanilla Ice Cream Sandwich, 1994. (Renee Comet/National Cancer Institute). In public domain.

poor me and my family had become, all while bitterly jamming the ice cream sandwich down my throat. So much for discovering my inner Hebrew-Israelite self through fasting and eating kosher foods!

I very quickly grew to hate hearing the words Hebrew-Israelite, especially since I’d never been to a traditional synagogue, much less Israel, Palestine, or even Ethiopia. Our Hebrew-Israelite ways had left us with little to eat when I was at home. There was a benefit to all of this. It made the fasting part of fasting and prayer easier. Not easy, just easier. My first Yom Kippur ceremony was difficult. We fasted on fruit for three days, and I barely made it through school each of those days. I almost passed out from the lack of food.

My older brother Darren, meanwhile, had decided that “the day of atonement” and all things Torah didn’t include his stomach. By the end of October, I would watch him take his kufi off as he boarded his bus for The Clear View School (see “About My Brother” from December ’07). I caught Darren walking near our apartment building with the last of a Hostess’ Apple Pie and its wrapper during Yom Kipper. He had snuck around the building to eat his contraband. What made this transgression worse was that Hostess used lard to create its desserts. And Darren, once caught, just stared at me and smiled.

My Mom was too busy and tired for me to think about complaining to her about this or about the issues I faced during my first days of Humanities. For more than three years, my Mom’s income had dropped so much compared to rising food and energy prices that we didn’t have food in the house for the last ten days of every month. Sometimes we didn’t have heat either, because we were usually two or three weeks behind on

Anthracite coal (like the lump of coal that was my life in '81), March 7, 2007. (United States Geological Survey). In public domain.

the Con Edison bill. I also knew that we were consistently behind on rent. I felt as isolated as a kidnapped tweener chained to a radiator in a walled-off-window basement.

Lack of food and heat at home weren’t the only problems. My Mom had popped out two of my younger brothers in the previous three years. We lived at 616 in a 1,200 square-foot, two bedroom and one bathroom apartment, so overcrowding had become an issue. Me and Darren were sharing a bedroom with our two siblings.

Not only did I start to believe that my then idiot stepfather Maurice Washington — oops, Judah ben Israel — had colluded with his version of God to play a cruel trick on my mother and my family. Not only did it finally dawn on me that we had slid into poverty somewhere between beginning on ’79 and Halloween ’81. But I knew that we were in a family crisis, financial, material and spiritual. And there was nothing, absolutely nothing, I knew to do about it. Not even asking for candy would’ve helped.

When Will Apple Come Out With Its iCollege App?

27 Thursday Oct 2011

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Modified image of Apple iPad 2 with college cap, tassle and diploma, October 27, 2011. (http://digitaltrends.com/Donald Earl Collins). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because of the low resolution, alterations and subject of this blog post.

When I attended the Center for American Progress’ two-hour conference on Anya Kamenetz’s Gates Foundation-funded ebook The Edupunks Guide to a DIY Credential last month (see my recent post “Education Incorporated“), there was one thing that the experts on the panel kept bringing up. All of them agreed that the Information Age and the possibilities of online education are so great that the days of the traditional university are numbered. Like the dismantling of the traditional newsroom model of newspapers and magazines over the past fifteen years, the traditional university model was within ten years of becoming obsolete, at least according to this not-so-objective group of commentators.

Student loan debt the equivalent of an American house in 1980, questions about the usefulness of a four-year degree in the world of work, and the relevance of academic coursework to the “real world” will be the biggest reasons for why hundreds of higher education institutions could be out of business by the 2020s.

Despite my background, I am not some apologist for the state of American higher education today. There are quite a few things wrong with the current model, especially for standard state and regional public institutions, historically-Black colleges and universities, and most two- and four-year community colleges. But, for a variety of reasons, I’m not completely sold on the brave-new world of online education, currently dominated by for-profit colleges and technical postsecondary schools either. Like University of Phoenix, most charge as much for tuition as traditional four-year institutions, minus the academic and social supports necessary to retain and graduate students.

Still, this doesn’t mean that there won’t be a new kind of higher education for those millions of us who won’t have the grades and/or can’t afford to attend an elite or near elite institution. You know, somewhere between

Apple iPhone 3G, January 13, 2009. (Apple via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use via Creative Commons 3.0.

Harvard, UC Berkeley and the University of Pittsburgh. I think, ultimately, that ten years from now, going to college will be as simple as clicking on the iCollege or iUniversity app on your iPhone, iPad, iTV, or whatever Apple, Inc. comes up with next.

Of University of Phoenix, DeVry Institute, Kaplan University, Capella University and ITT Technical Institute, and I picked Apple? Why, pray tell? Because, believe it or not, Apple has the history of collaboration, technical expertise, and innovative vision — even without the great Steve Jobs — to pull off the moving of the higher education platform to an accredited application that even Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Oxford couldn’t thumb their noses at (though they may have to hold their noses, at least at first). After all, Apple has moved into the mainstream music arena and into the land of Hollywood and made it work to their advantage. Not to mention, to our advantage as consumers. Why not higher education?

How would this work? For starters, Apple could work with a slew of professors and teachers in fields as varied as astronomy, construction engineering, history, medicine, psychology and theater arts to put together adaptive virtual classrooms. The key word here is adaptive. It would be like EA Sports’ Madden NFL ’12,where each teacher or professor would be put in a lab with sensors attached to them and a classroom full of students asking every possible question and providing every possible answer to a given topic or series of topics that would add up to a course. And Apple would do this over and over again for, say, the 3,000 or so possible courses that an undergraduate student would take, not only in the US, but anywhere in the world.

That alone would make this a decent idea. But combining it with Apple’s ability to negotiate contracts and agreements — in this case, with accrediting agencies and with major universities across the country — will make iCollege or iUniversity a great idea. Because of these deals, iCollege or iUniversity students could transfer their credits to a UC Berkeley, Harvard or University of Maryland if they so chose. More

Star Trek: TNG Holodeck Screen Shot, October 26, 2011. The ultimate expression of a virtual classroom (Donald Earl Collins).

importantly, since acting in a play, shooting film projects or doing a laser light show can’t necessarily be done online, deals with schools, technical institutes and even major corporations would make it possible for any student’s iCollege or iUniversity experience to be well-rounded and tailored to their needs.

What’s more, once Apple makes the $100 or $200 million investment to set this up, they can put up reasonable prices for postsecondary credentials. For an industry or job-related certificate: $5,000. For a two-year or associate’s degree: $10,000. For a four-year degree: $30,000. The extra costs for the degrees would cover technical changes, the consulting fees for using professors and teachers as part of the iCollege or iUniversity app, and to cover the costs of students taking face-to-face courses as part of the process. But with five million, ten million, even a hundred million students enrolled around the world, Apple could make $50 billion in profits from such an app. Every single year.

Yet I know there are numerous faculty and administrators in academia who’d throw a fit upon reading this (or any similar) idea. The fact is, we’ve had a corporatized sort of education at the college level for at least fifty years now. Our scientific and engineering communities are fully entrenched in the military-industrial complex. Even history professors fight for endowed chairs. Between capital campaigns, as well as corporations and dying CEOs investing in schools and having buildings named after them, we’re past the point of no return. We in higher education need to get ahead of the tide before being drowned by it. For once.

Fans of Delusion

25 Tuesday Oct 2011

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Redskins Country Stop Sign display, October 25, 2011. (http://www.amazon.com).

In the past couple of years, in my down time between teaching and occasional consulting, I sometimes listen to ESPN 980 Washington, DC. I get a perverse pleasure out of it, especially this time of the year. With football season on, there’s nothing better than hearing Washington Redskins (hereafter known in this blog as Deadskins) fans whine and complain and kvetch after a loss. It’s not just because I became a New York Giants fan when I was a teenager. Nor is it because I’m also a Pittsburgh Steelers fan. No, there’s something different about these Deadskins fans, something that might be related to the personality of this area.

To those who don’t read my blog regularly, I’ve only been a DC/Maryland resident consistently since August ’99 (I did live in DC briefly in ’95 while doing my doctoral thesis research). I grew up in Mount Vernon, New York — the greater NYC metropolitan area, not upstate, just in case — for the first seventeen years and eight months of my life. I went to school and lived and taught in Pittsburgh for twelve other years. Not to mention spent the equivalent of five weeks in the Bay Area, three weeks in Atlanta, and two weeks apiece in Chicago and Boston. From a sports perspective, none of these areas and cities have fans as delusional as Deadskins fans, at least, not on a game-by-game or week-to-week basis.

The best way to show the difference is to take the same scenario and apply it to each city or area in which I’ve lived. The hometown team has just lost a game, in the ugliest possible way. Tune into a sports talk show or read the headlines for each team in their respective cities/areas, and this is what you’d read or see:

After a Giants loss:

“They suck! They suck! Did you see what Eli did with that throw! I’m tired of these guys screwin’ up! I want Coughlin’s head on a f–ing pike!”

That would go on for a day, maybe two, and if it’s really bad, maybe for three or four days. Then eventually, the Giants fan base settles down to, “What do we have to do to win this week?”

After a Steelers loss:

“My God, man, what happened out there today? Maybe we’re gettin’ too old, maybe Ben’s still playin’ hurt. You know, maybe this just ain’t our year.”

This would go on for a couple of days. Then, like the little engine building up momentum, the Stiller’s talk would turn to, “What do we have to do to win this week?”

After a Deadskins loss:

And this goes on all week long, every week they lose, and through every off-season. Until talk show hosts like the great former Georgetown coach John Thompson literally cuts callers off due to their “high levels of ignorance.”

It’s not as if the other places I’ve lived and the teams I’ve rooted for haven’t seen any hardship. Heck, the Steelers went through a twelve-year decline between their fourth Super Bowl win in ’80 and the hiring of Bill Cowher in January ’92, the last five seasons I witnessed first-hand. Not a single fan jumped off a bridge because of a loss, or took a rocket up to the moon over a victory. Maybe the realism that Pittsburgh as a city had to live with, including the loss of their industrial base for jobs, had something to do with their realism around the Steelers.

As a Giants fan, I appreciated their realism, and it helped make me a Stillers fan, too. Coming from an area where my team had one their first Super Bowl in ’87, only three years removed from a 3-12-1 season in ’83, I thought that some Johnny-Come-Lately types expected too much in a strike/scab-shortened season. But, even with that, the cycle of Jackie Gleason-esque fits of rage, followed by calm rationalism, were a reflection of the New York City I knew in the ’80s, sometimes ugly, but usually manageable. Even in troubled times.

This cycle also made the Giants fans of the ’80s more psychologically stable than the average Deadskins fan, then and now. Yes, it’s a reflection of an area of the nation that is also out of touch, as the worst effects of the Great Recession aren’t equally felt. As the expectations of Deadskins fans are as realistic as it was to believe that Mayor Vincent Gray could move DC government in the same way as Adrian Fenty, only without the ruffled feathers.

This form of delusion, though, otherwise known as bipolar disorder, where the highs are euphoric and lows can make you suicidal, may be catching on. For it shows our expectations of the economy and our politics.

Adverbs and A-Holes

22 Saturday Oct 2011

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Good or well cartoon, January 24, 2009. (Gaurav: http://mbatutes.com). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because of lower quality resolution with purpose for describing a part of speech.

Puberty is such a strange time in life, whether you’re male or female. It’s even worse when you don’t have the maturity to deal with the changes, physical, social and emotional. Add to that no real guidance from parents, teachers or other adult figures about how to deal, and you have a recipe for disaster, even social suicide. That became the case for me thirty years ago, in a fight with a history, with my late ex-classmate, Brandie Weston.

But I planted the seeds for it almost a year and a half before, the second Saturday in May ’80, the very first time I met Brandie. My father Jimme had taken me and Darren to his “girlfriend’s” two-bedroom apartment on Mount Vernon’s South Side. His alleged girlfriend — drinking buddy, really — turned out to be Brandie’s mother. When Brandie walked through the apartment door an hour into the visit, I greeted her with the words, “Wow, she’s fat!,” as if I’d complimented her on her great beauty (for full story, see “First Impressions and Brandie” post from May ’10).

Irony, of course, has been one of the ways I’ve come to be sure that there is a God. Why else would I have ended up in Humanities and in the same classroom with Brandie in September ’81? I had no doubt that Brandie told her Pennington-Grimes friends about the incident as soon as she saw me in class on the first day of seventh grade.  Every time I saw them, my shy “Hi’s” were greeted with grunts, names like “dumb ass” and “idiot,” or just plain ignored.

My cold war with Brandie became a fight only weeks into seventh grade. It wasn’t much of a fight, though. It was in Mrs. Sesay’s classroom, our 7S homeroom where we started the day, ended the day, and had our first-period English class. At the end of this day in October, Brandie was clearing out of room from the back, passing by my seat on the left side of the classroom toward the door.

“Dumb ass,” Brandie said out of nowhere, as usual.

“You’re stupid,” I said, not even bothering to look up as I put my plastic Mead, three-ring and five-subject notebook in my book bag.

Mike Tyson laying out Larry Holmes, January 22, 1988.

Within a couple of seconds, I got pushed from behind. I turned, and Brandie threw a punch into my chest. I threw one back into her right arm as she recoiled from landing her first punch. We were fighting in the back of the classroom.

It was two semi-nerds in a fight of words, lots of shoves, and a flurry of half-hearted punches. It was an ugly display, like watching a Larry Holmes fight or Muhammad Ali in his last days before his retirement. In one corner, at five-foot-two and 120 pounds was me, in the other, at five-foot-seven and about 150 pounds was Brandie. I certainly didn’t want to fight a girl. Brandie seemed to think that she could pound me into the ground, hitting me on top of the head a few times.

At one point I punched Brandie in the chest, only to find that her chest felt spongy. It dawned on me that Brandie had breasts. I stopped pushing and punching her right then and there, somewhat in shock from the revelation.

“You’re a pervert!,” Brandie yelled while two of her friends pulled her away from me.

I didn’t know what “pervert” meant — not that I would’ve admitted such a thing, since I was the “smartest kid in the whole world.”

“Well, you’re an adverb!” I yelled in response. Someone I pulled that out of my brain to call Brandie in response.

Of all the words — adverb? That ended our fight in horrific laughter from Brandie and the classmates who witnessed it. It was another About A Boy moment. It was a weird moment, even for me. I was embarrassed, all but sure that my classmates thought that I was incredibly dumb.

My fight with Brandie had awakened some sleeping wolves, what I called the Italian Club long before we actually formed one for our Italian class. And these preteens had social adjustment issues that made me, Hebrew-Israelite and all, look like a model preteen by comparison — a story for another post. But, still, on the next to last Friday in October three decades ago, I made myself into the adverb greater, as in an asshole to a greater degree. Seriously.