My Alex and America’s 45, Bullies with Fan Boys on the March

05 Monday Aug 2019

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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45, A.B. Davis Middle School, Alex, American Narcissism, Bullies, Bullying, Captain Zimbabwe, Dayton, Demagogue, El Paso, Fascism, Humanities, Italian Club, Mass Murder, Mass Violence, Misogyny, President Donald J. Trump, Racism, Xenophobia

45’s fans at campaign rally, Greenville, North Carolina, July 17, 2019. (Carolyn Kaster/AP; https:/usatoday.com).

At least one person will undoubtedly find my latest post unfair and offensive this time around. My Humanities classmate Alex, whom I interviewed as part of my book Boy @ The Window, will likely not be too happy with me this week. So Alex, if you do find yourself feeling this is unfair and my post offensive, I apologize in advance.

But either way, that’s okay, because the comparison between the person he once was and the person who is 45, America’s usurper-in-chief, is apt. Not because Alex was ever a malignant narcissist in need of constant adulation from his entourage. But because even small-d demagoguery around putting down so-called others out of insecurity, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, religion, a sense of superiority, and/or willful ignorance will still lead to violence and bullying. On a societal level, that is mass violence, that is fascism within a democracy, and nation-state sanctioned. No matter what the College Board and ETS says.

The thing I didn’t really allow myself to understand, even after I interviewed Alex in 2007, even after writing my first eight drafts of Boy @ The Window regarding Alex and the “Italian Club,” was this. That people like having leaders, folks they can relate to, even as preteens. In our times, that means someone who’s cool, or at least, pulls off the cool aesthetic well. Alex did. Whether you liked him or despised him at A. B. Davis Middle School in Humanities in seventh or eighth grade, Alex had a certain prepubescent charm. He was playful, goofy, corny, and fully engaged in pop culture as an up-with-everything 12 and 13-year-old.

And that attracted a specific group of folks into Alex’s solar system. Some of them knew him from their mutual time together at Columbus ES, but several in his entourage were from other schools prior to Davis. All of them were disaffected boys in some way or another, mostly Italian (or at least in one case, half-Italian), but almost to a person, not comfortable with the multicultural pressure cooker of relative uncoolness that was our magnet middle school program.

Alex led his “Italian Club” in acting out. Like a wolf pack, they looked for prey in the classroom to pick on, to call the wittiest names, to occasionally get physical with. Many times, they messed around with corny lines for girls like Sandra and Marianna. But I ended up on their radar early on. Between my kufi, my big but slow-talking mouth, and my fight with Brandie, I was ripe for Alex and his band of predators.

On November 2, 1981, the bullying started in earnest, as Alex and his band jumped me after school in the area near the side door exit from Davis. About a third of my classmates watched as the “Italian Club” knocked me to the ground, punched and kicked me until I began to cry. Alex himself never put his hands on me, but watched with glee as his fanboys did the dirty work.

But that wasn’t all. I had to endure seven months of being “dumb,” “stupid,” and a “monkey” from Alex’s band of brothers. It was topped off by a month of “Captain Zimbabwe” chants in May and June 1982, typically in Mrs. Sesay’s homeroom, but after counter-protests from other classmates, it moved to Ms. Fleming’s Italian class.

Eighth grade was nowhere near as bad, partly because I grew four inches over the summer, and partly because they likely sensed my rage from my summer of abuse with my idiot stepfather. Still, this didn’t stop Alex from messing with me or other vulnerable classmates that year or in ninth grade. I remember him greeting Josh a couple of times with the refrain from The Beatles “Hey Jude,” except it was, “Na, Na, Na, Na-Na-Na-Na, Na-Na-Na-Na, Hey Jew.” I remember him and his entourage calling my other classmates “monkey.” He once went after our class’ eventual valedictorian, “she’s a brainiac, a brainiac,” adapting a song from the Flashdance soundtrack.

This was the Alex I knew between the ages of 12 and 15. Comparing him to a 73-year-old who has the impulse control of a nine-year-old hopped up on crystal meth is somewhat unfair, as Alex isn’t that teenager anymore. Still, what 45 has done on a far larger stage than Davis’ Humanities program is essentially the same thing. Except that there are millions of folks — especially White men — attracted to his intersectional message of “this is our [read, ‘A White Man’s’] country.” And anyone not for White men first, second, and always needs to get out, or at least, get out of the way.

There’s a video clip making its social media rounds via Bloomberg editor Tim O’Brien from 45’s rally in Panama City, Florida on May 9. In it, you have 45 and many in his audience laughing at the idea of shooting “illegals” coming in from Mexico as a solution for stemming the tide of “invasion” from Central America.

This is hardly the only blunt signal 45 has sent to his anti-Black, anti-Muslim, and anti-Latinx fanboys and footsoldiers-for-the-patriarchy (thank you for the truth, Mona Eltahawy) fangirls over the years that their intersectional -isms are justified. But it is one direct example that those who really believe a race war is coming can use to take up arms and shoot to kill Black and Brown folks for existing in the US. That’s what Patrick Crusius and Connor Betts did this weekend in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio to their dozens of dead and injured victims. That’s what 45’s entourage has been doing with increasing frequency over the past decade. This is what demagogue bullies do. They build a following. They jizz their racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and homophobia all over their followers. Those most predisposed to lap up such vitriol and act on it then do the not-so-subtle calls for violent action and take it out on truly random marginalized people.

For a variety of reasons, not the least of which, attending a majority-Black-and-Brown high school and perhaps recognizing his own racism and misogyny, Alex wasn’t the same Billy Idol-worshipper I’d known in eighth grade. By our senior year, he even seemed like-able, and spend way more time with a group of Black and Latino friends than he did with his one-time entourage. I assumed he matured. Good for him. Really.

But it’s way too late for 45 to grow out of his -isms. It’s way too late for millions in his entourage to grow out of their violent fantasies for mastery over vulnerable others. We have to disarm them, with the repeal of the 2nd Amendment. We have to disarm them, by calling them out for the bullies and intersectional terrorists they are. We have to, if we’re going to survive them.

Lit on Moonlight

16 Monday Jan 2017

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Movies, My Father, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Sports, Youth

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A.B. Davis Middle School, Barry Jenkins, Black Males, Black Masculinity, Bullying, Chiron, Coming-of-Age, Faggot, Hypermasculinity, Italian Club, Mahershala Ali, Manhood, Moonlight (2016), Mount Vernon High School, MVHS, Rage, Sexual Orientation

Moonlight (2016) poster, October 2016. (Film Fan via Wikipedia; orig. A24). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright law as illustration of subject/review of film.

I finally, finally saw Moonlight with the wife and son at AFI Silver Spring yesterday, months after the in-crowd had already seen it and attempted to spoil it for the rest of us. It was excellent. The cinematography, the loud and incredible silences, the small moments, when actors just being in the moment with their facial expressions did more than any dialogue could to move me and anyone else watching. Mahershala Ali was only in five scenes. But his first scene set the tone for the whole movie. As Juan, Ali channeled both the need for hard hypermasculinity and the vulnerable fragility of such in just one scene. His time with the youngest version of Chiron made me laugh, cry, sad, and angry, and left me wondering if I’ve seen this much intimacy between Black man and Black boy on screen before. I know I have (Antwone Fisher, The Wire, even Roots comes to mind), but on-screen doesn’t reflect this anti-stereotypical slice of truth nearly as often as it should.

Moonlight snap shot (cropped), Mahershala Ali and Alex Hibbert, October 23, 2015. (http://variety.com).

Yet I was also not as impressed as I expected to be. Not because I didn’t like the performances — I loved them. I thought every actor in the film was legit, every scene was moving in some way. Naomie Harris I’ve been fond of for years, André Holland and Janelle Monáe’s work I already knew, and Trevante Rhodes and Barry Jenkins, well, the two need bigger platforms for doing more great work. Moonlight wasn’t a film. It was a collage, a kaleidoscope of precious moments, blood-churning episodes, and tender images. Jenkins’ treatment of coming-of-age, Black boyhood into manhood, and Black masculinity, hypermasculinity, and vulnerability was avant-garde.

Still, I felt like I’d seen Moonlight before. Or, really, lived parts of Moonlight in my own past. No, I did not befriend an older, Afro-Cuban crack dealer in 1990s Miami, have a drug-addicted, abusive mother, or have a group of kids chase me around and beat me up off and on for ten years. But I didn’t look at the world the same way as my peers. I didn’t sound like a Noo Yawker, walk and talk and code switch like Denzel Washington, or try to fit in like so many of my 616 neighbors and my Mount Vernon school mates during my growing up years. And I paid for it, dearly, with few friends before I turned eleven, and no friends in the six years before I went off to the University of Pittsburgh.

But on Chiron and that most pernicious issue of hypermasculinity, the need to be hard all the time, I’ve been there too. I’d been called “faggot” (or in my father’s case, “faggat”) enough times to occasionally question my own sexual orientation growing up. My senior year at MVHS one day, I hit a three-run homer during a softball game in gym class. It wasn’t the first time I’d done that. But for one Jamaican dude, me drilling a ball 350 feet off his slow fastball was an affront. He called me a “faggot” after the game, and threatened to wait for me after school with a machete to chop me, adding “bumbaclot mon” at the end of his threat. I left school as normal and waited for him. He was lucky he didn’t show up that day.

Me at 16, Mount Vernon High School ID, Mount Vernon, New York, November 1985, March 21, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins).

You see, my rage didn’t need years to build up. All before I’d finally lose it one day, and take out a bully with a wooden chair and break it across his back, like the way Chiron did at the end of II of Moonlight. I didn’t have bullies at school per se. There were a couple I dealt with at 616, but they weren’t regular. Many folks would make a crack, but generally left me along. Any bullying I faced in high school was completely random and momentary, because I stood up for myself. Because if I could face down a six-foot-one, Isshin-ryn black belt of an abuser in my idiot stepfather Maurice, a stupid football player was gonna get hurt trying to hurt me.

No, the bullying I faced was in middle school, from a bunch of overwhelmed and racist Italian classmates in Humanities. I’ve named them in Boy @ The Window and here in this blog before. Alex, Anthony N., Andrew, Anthony Z., etc, the Italian Club. That things were much, much worse at home meant that I saw them as background noise. There was always a part of me, though, that had enough rage, even in seventh grade, to take a desk and smash Anthony N.’s head in with it until his fuckin’ Italian brains spread out all over the floor and walls!

I ended up beating up a wannabe bully in JD that year instead. I won kufi battles in eighth and ninth grade. I wore a blank face that most of my more dumb ass classmates interpreted as a smile. I made plans to get out, because I never wanted to fit in. I was already awake, coping with the day-to-day, but in it for the long-term. I had that President Barack Obama, audacity-of-hope-beyond-failure, beyond reality thing goin’. When I saw Chiron as played by Ashton Sanders, I wanted to hug him, beat up his bullies for him, and tell him that you can love who you want to love, even if they never love you back. And to always, always be your best self, and not some “I don’t want to feel pain again” version.

Fife and Shalom

12 Tuesday Jul 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon New York, music, New York City, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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A.B. Davis Middle School, Black Male Identity, Black Masculinity, Chorus, Domestic Violence, Fife, Judah ben Israel, Manhood, Maurice Eugene Washington, Mentoring, Music Lessons, Oppression, Poverty, Pulaski Day Parade, Summer of Abuse, Tamrin, Trombone, Type 2 Diabetes, William H. Holmes Elementary

Civil War-era wooden fife, May 19, 2004. (Kevin Saff/National Parks Service via Wikipedia). In public domain.

One thing I never discussed here or in Boy @ The Window were the handful of “leisure” activities I had during the Hebrew-Israelite years. The world in which we lived back in the ’81-to-’84 period had precious few resources and even less room for things like summer camps, overseas travel, baseball games, amusement parks, or even a free impromptu rap battle at Van Cortlandt or Hartley Park. Heck, the Kool cigarettes’ music series that sponsored “Teddy Pendergast” or “Rufus and Chaka Khan” in those days might as well have been a trip to see the World Cup in France compared to our pitiful roach-and-belt circumstances.

One of my idiot stepfather Maurice’s Hebrew-Israelite friends, though, did provide a free service for us males in ’81 and ’82. His name was Tamrin. He was a heavy-set dude, probably about five-foot-eight, maybe 120 or 125 kilos (between 245-260 pounds), and likely in his late-thirties. Unlike so many of the Hebrew-Israelite men I had the curse to meet in those naiveté-shattering years, Tamrin had a lighter touch. His idea was to put together a boy’s band of fifes, drums, bugles, and other marching instruments to lead us Hebrew-Israelites in marches through the street of Mount Vernon, as well as temple sites in the Bronx, in Harlem, and in Brooklyn (specifically, Bed-Stuy and Flatbush, if memory serves). Even at twelve, I knew how ridiculously uncool that idea sounded.

That was his plan, anyway. So off and on, between August ’81 through the second week in July ’82, Tamrin gave me and other kids music lessons to play overly bombastic marching band music. These were the kind of joyless songs which one was mostly likely to hear at Moscow’s May Day parade of soldiers and nuclear missiles than hear anywhere in ancient Israel. I was picked out because I had musical training in my immediate pass. I played the trombone in fifth grade. Or rather, I had six months of trombone-playing lessons at William H. Holmes ES before my music teacher had a heart attack and died in March ’80. I sang in chorus all through sixth, seven, and eventually, eighth grade. I could read music, though I struggled in transition between half-notes and quarter-notes.

Pulaski Day Parade on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, October 6, 2013. (http://www.posteaglenewspaper.com).

So Tamrin would come over about twice a month, usually on Saturday afternoons, and spend a couple of hours with me playing the fife. (Can you imagine that? A twelve-year-old, kufi-wearing Donald playing such a small and delicate reed instrument? Really? Really!) Tamrin took us to the Pulaski Day Parade down in Manhattan the first Sunday in October ’81 to see how the pros do the fife-and-drum thing. The costumes I found fascinating, but I dreamed of food, not of marching around with fife.

Once Mom’s already pitiful funds got down to a disposal income of $5 per day — that was in December ’81 — Tamrin didn’t come around as much. Though he wasn’t getting paid much, I think he still expected $10 per lesson. Still, he came around even when he wasn’t getting paid, though it was only once a month during the ’81-’82 winter. That’s when I noticed, though just barely, that Tamrin had diabetes. His fingers had swelled during the winter, and he moved slower, too.

From mid-April to the beginning of July, Tamrin was around nearly every Saturday for an hour at a time, working with me on marching while playing fife, polishing up fife-ful flourishes, and getting me to learn more bombastic music. There were a couple of times I played with the other preteen and teenage Hebrew-Israelite kids. They seemed about as cool with this fife-and-drum band as I was with having an abusive stepfather.

And that’s who stopped my participation in Tamrin’s pet project. After my summer of abuse began in earnest on July 6, ’82, Tamrin came around that Saturday, July 10. I played my fife to some music, but the knot on my head, the bruises to my left cheek and jaw, and my busted lip would’ve been obvious to any observer in the week after Maurice tried to beat me into submission. I kept playing my music, but I knew that Tamrin and Maurice were jawing at each other about something or other, hopefully not me. All I know was, that was Tamrin’s last time working with me to play the fife. I’d continue to see Tamrin at temple. But that second Saturday in July ’82 would be the last he’d come over to 616 to teach me terrible music for the fife.

Oppression graffiti, January 15, 2013. (Students for Liberty via http://genderlitutopiadystopia.wikia.com).

Did I play a good fife? Tamrin thought so. Compared to my Hebrew-Israelite comrades, I’m pretty sure I did. But like with so many things Hebrew-Israelite during those years, it was a bitter march to nowhere. The fife was part of a Hebrew-Israelite physical and spiritual gulag that put me into more chains, rather than freeing me to be me. Despite Tamrin’s intentions, the idea of molding me and others into men in conditions that would make most “men” contemplate homelessness or running away was a ridiculous pipe-dream.

That Tamrin was likely the only adult male in the Hebrew-Israelite camp who saw Maurice for the lying, abusive, womanizing asshole he was made me realize not everyone in this world was against me. But in a religion that when practiced helped oppress me and others more than the outside world, what was any Tamrin to do?

Middle School Teachers, Middle School Memories

14 Thursday May 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Mount Vernon New York, music, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

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A.B. Davis Middle School, Algebra, Bad Teaching Habits, Duquesne University College of Education, Good Teaching Habits, Humanities, Humanities Program, Life Lessons, MCPS, Middle Schools, Montgomery County MD, Montgomery County Public Schools, Mrs. Mignone, Ms. Jeanne Longerano, Research, Science, Silver Spring Maryland, Sligo Middle School, Teacher Expectations, Teaching and Learning

A.B. Davis Middle School, Mount Vernon, NY, November 21, 2006. (Donald Earl Collins). Built in 19226, it used to be Mount Vernon High School before Black migration, the Brown decision and ending some discriminatory ability grouping practices forced the school board to build a new high school after 1954.

A.B. Davis Middle School, Mount Vernon, NY, November 21, 2006. (Donald Earl Collins). Built in 1926, it used to be Mount Vernon High School before Black migration, the Brown decision and ending some discriminatory ability grouping practices forced the school board to build a new high school after 1954.

There’s a reason why much of the recent research on middle schools has called for the elimination of middle schools long-term, that instead, K-5 or K-6 ought to become K-8. It’s a transitional period for kids, one that even with the best of parents, most preteens face mostly unprepared. It’s based on a system that educators and policy makers designed a century ago, when the average student completed their formal education in seventh or eighth grade (only one in five students living in the early twentieth century went on to high school).

The teachers traditionally prepared by schools of education really aren’t prepared specifically for sixth, seventh or eighth grade, but for secondary education. Meaning, teachers either have higher social and emotional expectations of 10-to-14-year-olds than they have prepared for, or they have higher academic expectation of their students than the students have been prepared for, or both. These are among the reasons why middle schools can easily become a black hole for students too young to be dealing with teachers trained really for high school, and a black hole for teachers who simply aren’t as prepared for tweeners and thirteen-year-olds as they like to pretend.

Sligo Middle School, Silver Spring, MD, August 2014. (http://montgomeryschoolsmd.org/).

Despite the advances in teacher preparation in the past couple of decades, this reality still exists at most middle schools, including my son’s Sligo Middle School in Silver Spring. Common Core, PAARC assessments, a wide variety of fatty lunch options, all make students feel that education matters and yet it really doesn’t. My son has already had a couple of teachers whose first and second instinct for controlling their classrooms has been to yell early and often, to the point where I’m convinced that at least one of his teachers this year had Tourette’s (at least, until we had the school move him out of that class). At least two others could be accused of unconsciously labeling their students, as their expectations of their students have gone unmet.

Through meeting these teachers, I’ve re-recognized something that used to be wrong in my own teaching, back when I first started teaching in Duquesne University’s College of Education in the late-1990s. To have high expectations and standards of conduct isn’t enough. Teachers need to communicate it, through examples, through their lessons, through a rubric, quite frankly, and not just a laundry list of expectation. Simply put, given the age of the students, teachers need to positively and consistently encourage students to meet those expectations, and lay out why these expectations will help them, academically and practically.

I had precisely two teachers at A.B. Davis Middle School in Mount Vernon, New York in the early 1980s who did exactly that. My eighth-grade science teacher, Mrs. Mignone, and my first-year, eighth-grade Algebra teacher, Ms. Jeanne Longerano were the best two teachers I had in two years of middle school Humanities-style. Both were committed to the idea that every student in the classroom deserved their undivided attention, which meant that we as students — even us fidgety ones — had to give our maximum preteen attention to what was happening in the classroom as well. Both had high expectations of us, academically and otherwise. I don’t think I got away with much of anything in their classrooms that 1982-83 school year, not even as much as scratching my pubescent balls because the hair was coming in that year.

I learned a life lesson about internalized racism and having high standards for human decency from Mrs. Mignone at the end of eighth grade. Not to mention, the applications of math to science, and science to history, which I carry with me to this day. From Ms. Longerano, I renewed my love for math, began my technical understanding of computer science (we had a computer science club that she started that year), and had a neighbor that I talked to from time to time. Ms. Longerano had given us such a strong foundation in Algebra that it wasn’t until AP Calculus in twelfth grade when I ran into any serious math troubles again.

In all, though, I had twelve different teachers in two years of middle school. I had an art teacher who was also the Humanities coordinator for A.B. Davis in Doris Mann who graded us on the quality of our art, “not just for trying,” to use her words. I had a seventh-grade science teacher whom I’d based some of the nutty stories I told my son over the years, about him eating raw clams in class or coming in after being sprayed by a skunk that same morning. I had a music teacher in Mrs. Mallory for two years who was flat-out goofy to the point of seriously immature, only to find out years later that she had done her same song-and-dance when she taught second-graders. I had a seventh-grade social studies teacher in Mr. Court who was the teacher who probably made his class the most fun, but not necessarily the most educational.

In contrast, Ms. Simmons (seventh-grade math), Ms. Fleming (Italian), and Dr. Demon Travel (eighth-grade social studies), were teachers who cared more about discipline and/or quick-and-dirty rote memorization than anything else. Simmons actually intimidated me, until one day near the end of the school year, I stood next to her. Only to find that I’d grown two inches, to five-foot-four, and that I was now at least an inch taller than her curly mini-fro. Mrs. Sesay, my homeroom and seventh-grade English teacher, was the opposite, a teacher who had little control over her classroom. Almost every incident of taunting and humiliation I experienced in seventh grade had its origins in 7S homeroom or English first period.

Still, I survived, mostly because of a crush in seventh grade, more maturity in eighth, and two really wonderful teachers in that latter year. I don’t want my son, though, to look back at his middle school years and go “Meh.” Unfortunately, he can already do that for sixth grade. Seventh and eighth will have to be better, even if it means I have to home-school him.

The 8th-Grade History Award Race

06 Wednesday May 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Mount Vernon New York, music, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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616 East Lincoln Avenue, 8U, A.B. Davis Middle School, Benetton Group, Cool, Demontravel, Dr. Demontravel, Exoticism, Grimes Center for Creative Education, History, History Award, Humanities, Humanities Program, Pennington-Grimes ES, Teaching and Learning

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, last general-secretary of the Communist Party, USSR (1985-90), first and last president of the USSR (1990-91), May 6, 2015. (http://biography.com).

One of the worst teachers I ever had was my eighth grade history teacher at A.B. Davis Middle School between September ’82 and June ’83. His name was Mr. Demontravel, our American history teacher. Or as he preferred in the last three months of eighth grade, Dr. Demontravel (he had finished his doctoral thesis on the Civil War, on what beyond that, I wasn’t sure, and, given the way he was to me and us, I didn’t care either). Or as I liked to call him throughout that year, “Demon Travel.”

Old Scantron machine, January 24, 2012. (http://www.publicsurplus.com/).

His was a class that sucked the life out of history for most of us. Like most teachers of K-12 social studies or history, it was a dates, names, and places class. Unlike most social studies teachers, his teaching methodology was the epitome of lazy. Every class, five days a week, Demontravel would put up five questions on the blackboard for us to copy down and answer using our textbook. At the end of every two-week period, we’d get a fifty-question multiple choice exam, helping Scantron stay in business.

Demontravel rarely stood up to lecture or do anything else. Lectures for him might as well have been appearances by Halley’s Comet, only the lectures were far less memorable. This process went on unabated for forty-weeks, four marking periods, an entire school year. Calling this boring would only get you into the door of the intellectual famine Demontravel subjected us to in eighth grade.

He wasn’t particularly helpful on the rare occasions when someone did have a question. When a classmate did ask him something, the portly Demontravel would stand up from his desk, which was to our right as we faced the chalkboard, slowly walk toward it, point to a question on the board, tell us in his best Teddy Roosevelt voice what page to turn to in looking for the answer, and then, just as slowly, return to his seat at his desk. Demontravel was truly an unremarkable and boring fifty-something man, virtually bald in all of his pink salmon-headedness, skinny and potbellied beyond belief. His shiny bald head had a Gorbachev-like spot on it.

But there was the fact that there was a prize on the line for us nerdy middle-schoolers—the eighth-grade History Award. “Something I could actually win,” I thought. And Demontravel was the sole arbiter over the award. My favorite and easiest subject was in the hands of this hack of a teacher. That made me downright angry whenever I thought about it.

Post Grape-Nuts cereal at its visual best, with milk, raspberries and blueberries, May 6, 2015. (http://plantbasednutritionlifestyle.com/).

I ended up not winning the award, mostly because I correctly corrected Demontravel in front of the whole class one day about key battles of World War I on the Eastern Front. And, also because after he threatened to kick me out of his classroom, I drew a naked picture of his Santa Claus-looking body with a scrotum the size of two Grape-Nuts! Though I drew it in Italian class, I’m sure my counselor told Demontravel about it.

So, 96.4 average or not, I lost the award to my classmate Jennifer, who had a 96.3 average. She was part of what I came to call the “Benetton Group.” They were a group of superficially aware, middle-class-to-affluent folks in the Humanities Program who went through the Grimes Center program (which later became Pennington-Grimes Elementary) together, who thought they were down with the cool and the exotic (with people like Wendy and Brandie being prima facie examples of both). Or, at least, Jennifer acted like she was a part of that group.

She was a bit withdrawn in eighth grade. I never fully understood why. All I knew the first half of the year was that she had set a mark that I needed to beat to have any chance at the history award. By the time I drew my post-modernist interpretation of my lazy, boring-ass history teacher, though, I cared far less about the award and a bit more about this person I only talked to after school, on our walks back to our real lives near the Mount Vernon-Pelham border.

As I wrote in Boy @ The Window:

I guess Jennifer knew that she would no longer be a part of the grand experiment that was Humanities, the social experience that was integration in a “dangerous” majority of color high school. I bumped into Jennifer a handful of times after eighth grade, between high school and my bachelor’s degree finish at the University of Pittsburgh. Though I have no idea where life has taken her, I must admit, I enjoyed competing with her all eighth grade for an award I knew I’d never get.

Humanities: 26 Years On

18 Tuesday Jun 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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A.B. Davis Middle School, Academic Competition, College Access and Success, College Retention, Gifted, Graduating, High-Stakes Testing, Humanities, Humanities Program, Talented, Well-Rounded Students

Leonardo di Vinci's Human Body sketch, June 18, 2013. (Wikipedia).

Leonardo di Vinci’s Vitruvian Man (human body sketch, 1485-90), June 18, 2013. (Flickr.com).

Today marks anniversary number twenty-six since the Class of ’87 spent two hours sweating in our polyester caps and gowns on a triple-H summer evening at Memorial Field in Mount Vernon, New York. Oh yeah – and graduated from Mount Vernon High School. Not a big year to mark an anniversary, for sure. But still important for me to remember. After all, I’ve just published a book in which I spend a significant amount of time talking about myself and my former classmates whom help comprise this Class of ’87.

Today I want to say a few positive things about this class, particularly the Humanities Program members of this class. Not that this isn’t in Boy @ The Window as well. But it does help me to reiterate both the obvious and the hidden. Without Humanities, I wouldn’t have taken the path that led me to become the writer, historian, thinker or man that I am today, good, bad and occasionally even ugly. Period.

Not that every high-achieving student in A.B. Davis Middle School or Mount Vernon High School was in Humanities. Some of the more creative and musically-talented folks I’d either met or knew of were in what what I call “gen pop” and not in Humanities. But being someone who on his best days can barely hold a baritone tune (in the same way that an experimental fusion reactor produces energy for only a few seconds), Humanities gave me a chance to do some of what I did best on a platform that could occasionally allow me to maximize my academic gifts.

After ten years of undergrad and grad school at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon, and years of teaching at places as different as Pitt, CMU, Duquesne University School of Education and George Washington University GSEHD, my former classmates remain among the highest academic achievers I’ve ever met. As a group, that is. I’ve met many super-talented and highly creative individuals since ’87. Some of whom were literal geniuses as musicians, actors, studio artists or writers. Students whose academic and athletic prowess would’ve made their peers think about how unfair life can be.

But the one boon (and one criticism too) of Humanities for me was the competition it inadvertently sanctioned. That competition made me a better student, one who could actually focus on the long-term implications for any course I took and how it would apply to what I’d need to do in college. Some of my classes I realized were bullshit (see Andy Butler’s eleventh grade “Higher Math” as prima facie evidence), but I found something useful in most of my courses for my years at Carnegie Mellon, if not at Pitt.

Mount Vernon High School graduation ceremony, June 24, 2009. (http//education.lohudblogs.com).

Mount Vernon High School graduation ceremony, June 24, 2009. (Carucha L. Meuse/The Journal News; http//education.lohudblogs.com).

I think that this competition made us all better students, even as it often didn’t make us better human beings. After all, out of my immediate circle of the top twenty students in the Class of ’87, three of us have doctorates (history, psychology and mathematics education), two have medical degrees, and seventeen of us have earned at least a bachelor’s degree. I’m sure that some of us would’ve done well in college, grad school and our careers even without Humanities. But I’m also sure that the poorest among us – yours truly included – would’ve struggled mightily in college (even if we found a way to graduate) without such a focus on the academic in the first place.

I’ve taught high school students whose skills readily approached my own and those of my classmates from a quarter-century ago, particularly in versions of the AP US History course I taught at Princeton in ’08 and ’09. I’ve also served on the curriculum committee at my son’s school here in Montgomery County, Maryland for the past three years. These students – some more talented than anyone I knew in Humanities – have one thing in common. For the most part, they aren’t challenged by their schools, teachers or curriculum to be competitive, to be well-rounded academically, to strive to be both better students and develop creative talent simultaneously.

Many of these students already feel a sense of academic fatigue, partly because of constant yet meaningless testing, and partly because of a concentration on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) fields. Both have led to the near-total exclusion of extensive work on reading and writing skills (even though picking apart STEM field problems requires good reading and analysis skills). Not to mention the slashing of budgets for physical education and art, music and chorus, theater and so many other things that would push them to be better students, to be competitive – in a healthy way, that is.

There are nearly 120,000 words in Boy @ The Window, about 60,000 of them dedicated to my years between the end of sixth grade and the beginning of my junior year at Pitt. Many of them describe all that I remember about being in Humanities. It’s not a pretty picture overall. Despite this, without the likes of Laurell and Sam, Brandie and Bobby, Alex and Allison, Dahlia and Dara, Phyllis and Wendy and JD, Joe and Danny, Suzanne and Denise and Mandume and Rhonda and Kim and so many others, I’d still be living in Mount Vernon right now. I’d be lucky to have a minimum-wage job and a one-room flat in someone’s dilapidated house on the South Side. It’s just that simple.

Monkey See, Baboon Do

22 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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8U, A.B. Davis Middle School, Baboon, Beauty, Bigotry, Humanities, Italian Club, Monkey, Racism, Stereotype Threat, Teenagers, Writing, Writing Scrapheap

Monkey See Monkey Do, May 22, 2013. (http://kidsunder7.com).

There are plenty of stories and vignettes that ended up on the Boy @ The Window scrap heap. Most because they weren’t relevant, some because a particular person or character really wasn’t a significant player in the book. In my final set of story revisions (not dialogue revisions) in ’09 and ’10, I operated under the “two or more rule.” If a person or character showed up fewer than two times in the book, I took them out, as they really weren’t as significant as I originally thought.

But in the case of the Sonya story below, it was a tough cut. I wanted to craft a book in which people felt everything I went through while not feeling sorry for me. I think and hope that I did. Though this story contained many elements of what I wanted in the rest of the book, it didn’t quite fit. Still, it serves as a good reminder of how mean even someone as polite (but certainly not always nice) as I am today could be at thirteen.

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“Sonya was major fodder for Alex in eighth grade. She had a short Afro, an ‘au naturale’ to be exact. She wasn’t nearly as polished in maintaining her looks as many of the other girls in 8U. Sonya wasn’t ugly by any stretch. But by her not attempting to beautify herself in any way, she stood out for some in our class. Why would’ve she needed to anyway? She was also well-spoken, intelligent and outgoing, at least at the beginning of the year. Unfortunately for Sonya, my Italian Club classmates Alex, et al. were around to call her all kinds of names, like ‘baboon,’ and ‘monkey.’ I felt sorry for her, but I was also angry with her too. It pissed me off to see her respond to these semi-racist barbs with a blank face or even a smile.

It pissed me off so much that I ended up calling Sonya one of those names by the end of the school year. One day in homeroom, par for the course, Alex and company picked with Sonya again, calling her a ‘baboon’ among other things. She just sat there with that silly ‘Oh well’ smile on her face, as if they were telling her that she should go into professional modeling. Under my breath, I called her ‘monkey,’ and not as a joke. I just couldn’t believe that she was going to sit there like some pre-Civil Rights era Black in the South and take their crap without any response.

Except that I had called Sonya a ‘monkey’ within earshot of her and Alex. She ran out of the room, apparently to the girls bathroom, where she cried for several minutes, I later learned from Allison. I immediately tried to apologize, which Sonya eventually accepted (after my eighth grade science teacher Ms. Mignone and Allison shamed me for what I said). What I said was unacceptable to me, and the rationale was too intellectual for my own good. For Sonya, it simply came down to her looks, not her disposition. I wished that it had never happened, given what I faced from some of my classmates on a semi-regular basis.”

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1990s R&B/hip-hop duo Zhané from their 1994 album cover Pronounced Jah-Nay, May 22, 2013. (http://centrictv.com).

1990s R&B/hip-hop duo Zhané, from 1994 album cover Pronounced Jah-Nay, May 22, 2013. (http://centrictv.com).

The Sonya story has many of those elements, exposing me good, bad and ugly in the process. It’s about race and teenage ignorance and intellect. It’s about stereotype threat on one obvious level and trying to fit in on an unconscious one. It’s about the person I needed to become in high school as well as how I got to be that quiet yet observant person. The story is significant, yet because I only dealt with Sonya for two paragraphs in a 345-page book (in print form), it didn’t make the final cut. Because there are other and more central characters and stories in which stereotype threat and the ugly side of my immaturity both come out, I didn’t include Sonya.

Luckily, I also have a blog, where even scrap-heap stories can find the light of a new day. So, for this week, the thirtieth anniversary of my calling Sonya a “monkey,” I apologize again. I was a baboon for saying it in the first place. And Sonya, I hope you are well!