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Leaving Mount Vernon

26 Wednesday Aug 2015

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, High Rise Buildings, Jimme, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, music, My Father, New York City, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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I left for Pittsburgh and for the University of Pittsburgh on this day/date twenty-eight years ago, my first trip on my own. It was my first trip out-of-state since my Mom took me and my brother Darren on a bus trip to Pennsylvania Amish country in June ’78, nine years earlier. At 5:51 am on the last Wednesday in August ’87, with my older brother Darren’s help — and with my Mom and three of four younger siblings watching us from the living room window — I packed my luggage, Army sack, and two boxes of bedding and materials into a Reliable Taxi. We headed for East 241st to meet up with my dad. From there, we took the 2 Subway all the way to Penn Station, with enough time to board and get all of my stuff on the 7:50 am Pennsylvanian train to the ‘Burgh. For the second time in a row, my dad was sober, and gave me a glassy-eyed hug and shoulder squeeze. Darren was both sad and happy to see me go.

Amtrak's Pennsylvanian train pulling out of Altoona, PA station, heading east for Philly, NYC, uploaded February 2013. (Dustin F.; http://www.northeastrailfans.com/).

Amtrak’s Pennsylvanian train pulling out of Altoona, PA station, heading east for Philly, NYC, uploaded February 2013. (Dustin F.; http://www.northeastrailfans.com/).

I’ve gone over the trip to Pittsburgh and my transformation from a seventeen-year-old with the pent-up emotions of someone who hadn’t left May 31, 1982 behind throughout my eight years of blogging and through my memoir. I’ve written about moving on to Pittsburgh before. What I haven’t really written about fully is how I thought and felt in leaving Mount Vernon, New York behind. The short answer is, I was somewhere between terrified, joyous, embittered, and sad to go, and all at once.

I was terrified. It was my first trip on my own, to a city I’d never been to before, to a university I never visited prior to saying yes. I could meet people who might catch on that I was someone who had spent the previous six years with few acquaintances, much less friends. I was hopeful, but had zero idea what to expect.

But I really was happy to leave. Between my decade living at 616, the abuse, the poverty, the Hebrew-Israelite years, the constant ridicule, the years in Humanities, the constant work of watching after Mom, my dad, my siblings, I was through. Throw in a summer of obsession with and emasculation by Phyllis, and five years of realizing that I needed to get out, and going to Pittsburgh was a no-brainer. Heck, if I’d been a bit smarter about my application process, I could’ve just as easily applied to the University of Washington, Stanford, Northwestern, Georgetown, Michigan, University of Toronto and UPenn and almost certainly gotten in. It didn’t matter where I was going, really. I just needed to go and find my myself, and my education with that.

That last year or so in Mount Vernon had let me know that even with an academic scholarship (after a private investigation) from Columbia, staying would’ve been a huge mistake. Between the silent disdain and snickering of Black teachers at Mount Vernon High School around my sullen presence and the whole Estelle Abel episode at the end of four years of torment. Add to that the years of Black middle class folk talking at me about how my life was so much better because they marched or protested somewhere before I was conceived, or because they prayed for me. Add to that this insistence that I “give back to the community.” As if Black Mount Vernon had given me anything but a hard way to go since I was knee-high to a boil weevil.

Viewing and wake service for Heavy D, Grace Baptist Church, Mount Vernon, NY, November 17, 2011. (Mike Coppola/Getty Images; https://cbsnewyork.files.wordpress.com/).

Viewing and wake service for Heavy D, Grace Baptist Church, Mount Vernon, NY, November 17, 2011. (Mike Coppola/Getty Images; https://cbsnewyork.files.wordpress.com/).

As I saw it, the only difference between the vapid, seething facade of White liberalism among paternalistic White Mount Vernonites and the false smiles and frequent excoriations of Mount Vernon’s Black middle class was skin color. They drank deep from swimming pools full of what we now call respectability politics, born out of a need to be good examples to the world, like Kendrick Lamar described in “Swimming Pools” (2012). (Pour up [drank], head shot [drank]…faded [drank]). This isn’t the same as doing the right thing at the right time or speaking truth to power. You make money, wear nice clothes, drive a nice car, stand up straight, look a White man in the eye while firmly grasping his hand. And apologize for not being as assimilable as you pretend. It was 100%, USDA-approved bullshit, and it smelled like it a lot of days, too.

I was sad to leave, too. There was a part of me that still wanted to fit in, out of loneliness, if nothing else. I still liked Clover Donuts and some of the breakfast places on the South Side. I longed for some sort of acceptance, an acknowledgment that I was a real person, even though that would’ve required being around real people at 616, and in Humanities, and in the rest of Mount Vernon. I knew that I’d miss the close proximity to The City. I’d put my hopes and dreams in a place in which I knew I couldn’t afford to stay, literally and figuratively. That longing would come to haunt me in the coming year, but I’d eventually learn, I could always visit New York.

My First Walk (and Making Plans)

15 Thursday Aug 2013

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon New York, race, Religion, Youth

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Thirty-one years ago this week was the beginning of an inadvertent coping strategy that would lead me away from 616, out of Mount Vernon, New York, into Pittsburgh, and college, and grad school. (And eventually, to a worn-out right knee, leg exercises and a running regiment that I’ve adhered to for nearly a decade.) It was a walk that was literally my only time away from home and my summer of abuse at the hands of my late idiot ex-stepfather Maurice Washington (or Judah ben Israel). It was a walk in which I began to plan my escape from the madness.

From Boy @ The Window:

“It was August ’82, and I didn’t know if I’d make it to the end of the year.

“If masturbation were the only thing that I discovered that month, I might’ve begun aspiring for some other kind of life. Instead, I decided on another boring August day to do something else novel. I didn’t want to go to Wilson Woods again. We didn’t have any money anyway. I decided to take my siblings on a walk on the wild side, to walk outside our immediate neighborhood. First Darren and I took baby Maurice and Yiscoc in his new stroller out of 616 and walked to Pelham…The four of us walked and strollered down East Lincoln Avenue, across the stone bridge over the Hutchinson River Parkway into Pelham, and turned left on Fifth Avenue to go north. This was uncharted territory for all of us, especially me. I hadn’t been down in the city all year, and my life for most of the summer was spent between Wilson Woods, Pearsall Drive, and 616. North Pelham might as well have been Helena, Montana to me.

‘We don’t know where we’re going,’ Darren said.

‘Yeah, and?,’ I said in response.

‘Okay, but it’s your fault if we get lost, Donald,’ Darren said.

“We didn’t get lost. We walked until we hit Chester Heights, the beginning of the village of Eastchester. It was amazing in that it was much more suburban than Mount Vernon or the part of Pelham that I’d known up until that moment. The homes were luxurious by my standards. Everyone seemed to own a BMW, Volvo, Mercedes-Benz, or Peugeot. There weren’t many sidewalks around, only well-manicured lawns. We had walked into a ritzy community without any warning. But instead of becoming depressed or angry, it made me introspective. ‘Look at these houses!,’ I said to Darren as we walked by one Tudor-style home after another three-story mansion, broken up only by a few cul-de-sacs.

We walked across another bridge, this one with an overhanging meshed metal fence, across the Cross-County Parkway, and ended up in Mount Vernon for a brief moment. We veered right as we walked up a hill and out of Mount Vernon again. After walking through what appeared to be an enchanted forest, we discovered we were in Bronxville. Even at twelve, I knew that Bronxville was just about the richest community in America. And it looked like it, too. I began to think that the world was a cruel place, having rich Whites living so close to us yet their lives were so far apart from ours. Darren, having been around rich Whites through Clear View for nearly eight years, didn’t think too much of it.

“That’s when it hit me. If I wanted to live a better life, to have a nice house and a car and a family, it seemed to me that I needed an education, a college education. I wasn’t going to get there just graduating from high school, especially in Humanities, where the expectations for college were so high that some kids already knew that they were going to law school. I just knew that I couldn’t go through another summer of abuse. So I said to myself, ‘I’ve got to get through the next five years. I’ve got to go to college.’ I knew almost intuitively that my choices were to continue to experience abuse without reaching for something that I thought I could do based on my smarts. Yet it seemed like an impossible task.

“So as we walked through the villages of Bronxville and Tuckahoe, ending up on North Columbus Avenue/Route 22, I began to think about what I wanted to get out of eighth grade. It seemed to me that the most important class for my future was Algebra, since that led to higher forms of math. I knew English and Social Studies would be really easy, but with success in Algebra, I could go into high school with a little more confidence.

“That’s when we passed by a ranch-style home with a stone facade. I looked and saw someone out in front I hadn’t seen since the end of the school year. It was Phyllis, outside in the front yard with her sister, apparently back from bike riding. She called us over, and the four of us talked. Phyllis asked what we’d been up to over the summer. This was the first Black family I’d seen during our two-hour walk.

“Of course I didn’t go into any detail about what we’d been up to. After all, the one thing that the past year had taught me was not to open up my mouth and say everything that was on my mind! So I let her and her older sister Claudia do most of the talking. They’d gone somewhere, somewhere down South to visit family. It looked like they were having a good time, the time of their lives compared to us.

‘Do you live around here?,’ Phyllis asked.

‘Oh, we’re on a long walk and just happened to be in the neighborhood,’ I said.

‘Okay,’ she said in response.

“In the neighborhood. Sure, if Bronxville, Eastchester, Pelham and 616, all part of our eight-mile trek, was all part of one gigantic neighborhood. After about ten minutes, we continued home. Darren was more excited about seeing Phyllis and her sister than I was.

“Yet it wasn’t that I was unexcited… I finally had a plan, a long-term plan, for dealing with the situation at 616. I knew that there would be a lot of smaller steps that I’d have to take before even getting to college, much less getting a degree…Otherwise I really didn’t have anything else to look forward to, except what I thought would be a very painful life and an extremely early death.”

That walk — and the hundreds of walks (and runs) I went on all through eighth grade and high school –was the difference between becoming a professor and a writer and having died well before the turn of this century. If not literally, then certainly psychologically.

Pressure

09 Friday Apr 2010

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Stanford University's Hoover Tower

This week, The Daily Beast posted their piece “The 50 Most Stressful Colleges” (see link: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-04-04/the-50-most-stressful-colleges/?cid=hp:beastoriginalsC1). In the piece, the writer or writers emphasized five (5) criteria for college stressfulness: 1) cost; 2) competitiveness; 3) acceptance rate; 4) engineering; and 5) crime on campus rates. Sounds great right? Not if the writer or writers relied mostly on US News and World Report for most of their data in ranking what they believe are the Top 50. It seems to me that reporters with little background in higher education, the psychology of talented high school youth and college students, or financial aid should refrain from writing about such a topic. Still, since they did bring the subject up, it’s probably a good idea to address it from perspectives The Daily Beast would likely not consider.

For starters, the high correlation between their five criteria and the most prestigious research universities in the country — including Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Stanford, University of North Carolina, and my doctoral alma mater, Carnegie Mellon University — seems okay on the surface of things. But really, are students at the University of Pittsburgh who are engineering majors less stressed out than English majors at Carnegie Mellon? Or could a student at a liberal arts school like Oberlin be experiencing higher levels of stress than a student at a school not on The Daily Beast’s list — say George Washington University?

Based on my own experiences as a professor and a student, yes, highly selective, research-oriented universities with competitive engineering programs can deliver stress to students on a platter. Yet, it’s not as if the other liberal arts colleges, state colleges and universities, and schools of similar elite ilk not on the list. The Daily Beast could’ve used pre-med and biology programs — such as those at Tufts and Johns Hopkins — as examples of competitiveness, as if engineering students are particularly prone to stress and suicide. I think, though, that this is the main point about The Daily Beast’s piece. It’s the taking of the recent news stories — students killing themselves or murdering students and faculty — and drawing the conclusion that it’s combination of the criteria that’s the difference here.

The piece discounts the experience of millions of college students under the stress of financial aid, whose programs, though not as prestigious, are likely as demanding, and with the pressure of high expectations from their schools and their families. It discounts students, quite frankly, and the baggage they bring with them when they enter college. The schools they list could cost $150,000 a year to attend, have acceptance rates or eight percent or less (I have no idea how Carnegie Mellon made their list with a thirty-seven percent acceptance rate), and pressure-cooker engineering programs, but the suicide rate and violent crime rate would likely not correlate at all. It’s all about how students handle pressure, and how schools help students with managing the pressures they experience at competitive and selective colleges and universities.

I should know. Halfway through my first semester at the University of Pittsburgh, I experienced stress because of the baggage I brought from my Mount Vernon High School days, specifically in the form of a young woman I wanted to date but couldn’t. I spent the last six weeks of that semester missing more than sixty percent of my classes, withdrew into a alcohol-binge one weekend, and generally didn’t seek any social outlets for my emotional and psychological pain. Because I knew that there was a stigma attached to seeking psychological help, I didn’t, and struggled my way through the end of ’87 and into the first days of ’88 wondering if the sacrifices I made to get into college in the first place were actually worth it.

I think that student mental health is a much neglected aspect of pre-K to graduate education. Period. We act as if students and parents are solely responsible for the maintaining of student mental health, when in point of fact, most students and parents see the exploration of the subject as a stigma of some sort. Of course they are wrong. Still, I think that every school and every school district in this country should have at least one psychologist on staff (age-appropriate, of course), and that every student be given a mental health evaluation at least once a year.

Going a step further, I think that mental health fitness should be a part of the college admissions process, and that students who have the academic abilities but show signs of mental health issues be given additional resources to deal with these issues before the stress of higher education has had a chance to effect their undergraduate journey. I also don’t think it would hurt to make faculty, staff and administrators at universities to take professional development seminars in student psychology, so that they themselves can understand the difference between normal and abnormal behaviors of their students.

Some of you will think this idea beyond crazy. After all, those who can’t cut it are losers, right? And, since when can a university look at the mental health fitness of applicants, anyway? How many parts of doctor-patient privilege don’t I understand? I never said that this would be a perfect solution. This would provoke a number of controversies and lend itself to multiple obstacles. On the other hand, wouldn’t it be good for students and parents to have a sense of the kinds of stresses that can affect the well-being — academic and otherwise — of someone before they went off to a college or university?

Perhaps the biggest obstacle of all on this matter is the issue of competition. There’s nothing wrong with having students in a competitive environment. It often brings out the best in them academically (and the worst, unfortunately, hence my comments in the previous two paragraphs). Suffering setbacks in the process of competition can even teach us more about ourselves and the world around us than constant success. That’s what folks say, at least. So students shouldn’t be afraid to compete. But college campuses — and public schools also — should wrap this competition in a velvet cocoon of excellence. Meaning that from an early age, students are encouraged to strive for and achieve excellence, academically, socially, athletically, and so on. Along the way, healthy competition should be inculcated, but within the context of students performing well to begin with.

All so that by the time students arrive on a college campus, the stress of competition is managed through an atmosphere that is all about excellence. This is not a zero-sum game where the winner takes all and the loser should think about becoming a janitor. These are human beings, after all, whose lives should be about more than A’s, and competition about more than destroying their opponents. It took me until my third semester at Pitt to learn that lesson, which made my transition to a healthier mental health easier.

Student Follies

01 Thursday Apr 2010

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I’ve been chomping to talk about some of the more inane and insane actions of some of my students over the years. Why? I’ve found that the boundaries between professor and student have broken down quite a bit over the years. So much so that students tend to tell me things that would’ve earned me an F at the University of Pittsburgh as an undergraduate twenty-two years ago. It amazes me that common sense — or at least, some sense of etiquette — doesn’t kick in for these folks in their dealings with me and other instructors. It’s as if we’re merely tutors or academic mercenaries, subject to their feelings and whims, as if we’re only in the classroom to be there for them when they’ve screwed up. So, for those of you who are within a few years of embarking on your higher education journey — or are hopeful parents who expect their kids to attend college in the next decade or so — here are ten examples of what I’m calling “Student Follies.”

1. “I’m paying for this course, so…”: This one drives me nuts. It’s not like these students are writing me checks to pay for a course. The thing I say to them is that until my paycheck has their signature on it, I’m going to teach as a representative of the university, not as an agent for a student.

2. “Can you give me extra credit?”: What? Is this high school? Are you kiddin’ me?!? Whenever I get this question, I have to make sure not to laugh. If it were just college freshmen or high school students asking this question, I’d understand. But I often get upperclassmen or older adults who should know better asking about extra credit to increase their grade. Unlike high school, college is an endeavor that’s about a balance between providing every student an opportunity to excel and providing relative fairness and equality in those opportunities. I often explain that offering extra credit to an individual student is unfair to the students who busted their tails in getting their papers or other assignments done on time. They say they understand, but the fact that they asked in the first place says to me that they might not.

3. “Can I redo my paper?”: This question is an extension of number 2. Why would I give any student an extra bite at an apple that every other student got to bite only one time? I don’t like it when students don’t do well on something I know that with the right amount of training and effort, they could’ve earned a better grade. But my advice will remain to look at my comments and use them as strong advice for their next paper or assignment.

4. “I haven’t been to class because…” or “I have to miss class because…”: Every semester I’ve taught, whether high school students, undergrads or grad students, at an elite university, community college or other institution, I’ve had students miss as many as all of their classes for an entire semester. My first year as a TA at the University of Pittsburgh, I had a student-athlete (played on the tennis team) in his senior year who missed the semester because of an injury. What? Was this a brain injury? Of course not! After attempting to cheat on his makeup final, he failed my course, unsurprisingly.

I’m a flexible professor, and certainly understand when stuff comes up for students, more and more whom have jobs, spouses, families, and serious issues to deal with. So communicating with me like an adult is encouraged. But, at the same time, some students don’t understand the TMI rule. I don’t need to know that you might miss class to watch the NCAA Championship Game Monday night if West Virginia beats Duke on Saturday. Plus, I’m a Pitt fan anyway.

5. “I don’t like the grade you gave me…”: If a student really feels that they should talk to me about their grade, then they should. After class, before class, during a break, with an appointment to meet. Not while I’m giving instruction or explaining the pitfalls that most students fall into in writing papers. I generally hand papers with grades and comments to students at the end of class to avoid them creating an awkward moment. But the students I’ve been working with of late seem to think that their tuition payment gives them the right to object to a grade as soon as they see something they don’t like. The last thing I would’ve thought of doing as an undergrad was to object in front of other students to a grade or grading process. After all, it’s the professor, not the student, who determines grades for courses.

6. Complaining about things that I cannot do anything about: Complementary to number 5, it’s this sense that somehow I’m supposed to know that the LCD projector isn’t working properly, or that a student forgot her glasses for class one day. Or, for that matter, that a student has dyslexia or some other learning or physical disability, or that I should be more patient with another student because she works two jobs. Or that my course schedule, planned out months ahead of time, posted and handed to you the first day of the semester, is now an inconvenience for you because your job has scheduled you for a week-long conference out-of-town. Although I’m flexible, I’m also not going to rearrange my schedule or the schedule set for twenty, thirty or forty students because your life has just become more intense. How about, “Dr. Collins, can I get an extension?,” with a reasonable reason, and without complaining about being an adult?

7. “I’m entitled to my opinion…”: Really? Yes, in a free democratic society, you are entitled to your opinion. But in a college course, your opinion needs to be an informed one. With evidence from relevant and quality sources, based on reasonable analysis, with the ability to discern the difference between bullcrap and actual facts and acceptable interpretations. Unfortunately, I’ve had far too many students who’ve only been interested in expressing their opinions on life in the classroom and in their paper assignments, who think that every sentence should start with “In my opinion,” or “I believe…,” or “I feel…,” or “I think…” College papers aren’t expository essays, or, as we say more often these days, opinion-editorial pieces.

As a student, you shouldn’t think that it’s okay to write that American Indians were decimated by diseases after contact with Europeans “because they practiced a heathen religion.” Or that Whites prolonged slavery in America because “they were under the influence of satan.” Without any evidence to add to this, statements like these merely amount to bigotry. College is about exposure to new ideas and ways of thinking about the world. Giving answers to questions only in the form of opinions demonstrates that these students would prefer not to learn anything at all.

8. Bringing a full meal to eat during class: What? Do students actually think that it’s good form to bring a full three-course dinner to class? Apparently, the answer to this is yes. I know that people need to eat, pee, and deal with family issues when they’re in an evening course. But that doesn’t mean that you should interrupt a lecture, discussion or film with Triple Delight or a Big Mac and french fries. Cell phones should be on vibrate if a student can’t turn their phone off. Slamming the door to the front of the classroom after entering shows little respect for the professor or for the other students. This isn’t even something specific to being in college. I mean, would anyone pull this crap in a meeting with their boss?

9. “Your lectures are incomprehensible…”: Oh well. I guess that I should turn the class over to the students to run, since I’m obviously a teaching hack. I’m not naive enough to think that everything I say is crystal-clear or that everyone understands what’s being taught. But I also know that most of the students who complain have one or two issues. One, they haven’t been doing their readings or other preparation work for class, but somehow expect my lectures to make up for their laziness. Two, they expect me to give them direct answers to questions that require an understanding of interpretation and nuance. Some of my students have expressed their frustrations with this in ways that would’ve gotten me kicked out of my classes as an undergrad at Pitt.

10. Let’s play “Stump the Professor”: Too many students believe that showing the professor that they know historical trivia is necessary for their earning of an A. Knowing facts is helpful, but thinking through those facts takes much more than telling me that five people — and not three — died in the Boston Massacre in 1770. Great to know, but not really the point. Students don’t get to move on to Double Jeopardy if somehow I miss a fact or get a date incorrect by nine years. Correcting these things are fine, but not if a student does it with the idea that this proves that I as their professor somehow didn’t know what I was doing. This one is more annoying than many of the others, mostly because the students involved have an agenda, usually along the lines of proving how much smarter they think they are when comparing themselves to me.

So there it is. There are more, many, many more follies and stories I could tell. But, it comes down to respecting the position a professor holds, even if you don’t like the person. And learning as much as your can when in a course, rather than cutting corners to a higher grade.