Tag Archives: Humanities Program

Peaking As A Sixth Grader

24 Friday Jun 2011

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William H. Holmes Elementary, Mount Vernon, NY, November 23, 2006. Donald Earl Collins

I can’t believe that this Sunday’s the thirtieth anniversary of me and my cohort finishing sixth grade. Thirty years since I first felt that feeling of reaching the mountaintop, as if I’d accomplished something in my life. Three decades since the last time I was unknowingly naive and unnecessarily arrogant.

Combined with having become a part of a bizarre religion, I had a new point of view on my life by the time graduation day on Friday, June 26 of ’81 rolled around. My family was now two months into our serving Yahweh, and I was six weeks removed from losing my best friend Starling because of this nutty religion. It was a time in which I felt overwhelmed about my present and immediate future. Yet I acted as if I’d published a book that was both a New York Times Bestseller and a Pulitzer Prize winner. I couldn’t have been more pumped up if I’d been on Walter White’s blue crystal meth from Breaking Bad.

But I had some basis for seeing myself as great. As far as I was concerned, I was the unofficial valedictorian of my elementary school class at William H. Holmes Elementary, the ’50s structure next to the big Presbyterian church on North Columbus and East Lincoln Avenue. My teachers had chosen me out of all of my classmates to speak at our graduation ceremony. On that last Friday in June ’81, I served as the opening speaker, introducing the city councilman who served as our keynote. I even wrote the short introduction that I delivered on that wonderful day.

I firmly believed that no one in the world was smarter than me. In the three years prior to graduation, I had straight A’s. Still, that paled in comparison to my performance my last year of elementary school. I figured out that I earned an A on forty-eight out of fifty-two quizzes and tests in sixth grade. The lowest grade I earned that year was an 88 on a spelling quiz. I’d won a Dental Awareness Month award for Best Poster and came in second in a city-wide writing contest that included essays from high school students. If anyone had known how big my head had grown that year, they would’ve stuck a pin in my temple just to let the air out.

It wouldn’t have been any funnier if I’d pretended I was Mr. October himself, Reggie Jackson, saying his

Ana Gasteyer as Celine Dion, SNL, April 6, 2002. Source: http://snl.jt.org

words, “Sometimes I underestimate the magnitude of me.” Or, really, Ana Gasteyer (of SNL fame) playing Celine Dion and calling herself the “greatest singer in the world.” I wanted so badly to see myself and to be seen by others as special that I forgot about the work it had taken to move my reading and writing skills up seven grade levels in a little more than two and a half years.

It was a great day, sunny and low-eighties with cumulus clouds and low humidity. But knowing what life at 616, Mount Vernon and Humanities had in store for me over the next eight years, I should’ve smelled the ozone in the air. I should’ve looked more closely at my sky, to see the flocks of seagulls flying away from the shoreline. I should’ve sensed — and did, on a very low-frequency — the hurricane gaining strength in my life. I chose to ignore it, hoping that I could fake my way through it while resting on my laurels.

To think that it would’ve been another nine years before I felt like I could take on the world again. If someone had told me in June ’81 that I’d have to wait until my junior year at Pitt to have a straight-A semester, I would’ve grabbed a gun and shot myself through the heart with a Colt .45. And I would’ve made sure that the bullet I used had a hollow tip. If I’d known that I’d have to wait a full decade to be comfortable with myself as myself in all of my goofy-ness again, I probably would’ve cried on the spot.

All I can hope these days is that I can help my son strike a balance between being cool and being cool with himself, especially once he approaches his teenage years. I don’t want him spending a decade trying to figure himself out all by himself.

A One-Year Sooner “What If?”

18 Saturday Jun 2011

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Through The Wormhole, Star Trek DS9 Style, June 18, 2011. Donald Earl Collins

Today’s twenty-four years since I graduated from Mount Vernon High School in Mount Vernon, New York as part of the Class of ’87. I’ve talked about the events immediately before and after that milestone. I’ve spent a bit of time on the day of the ceremony itself, and will again when I hit the quarter-century anniversary mark next year. Today, though, I want to hypothesize about what would’ve happened if I had decided to graduate one year earlier. I can’t help it. I’m a historian and intellectual, and not just a scholar who cares about research, so I often speculate in order to find answers that are a little outside of the box.

Because of Humanities and AP, many of the best of the best and brightest had or nearly had enough credits to graduate by the end of our junior year, in June ’86. A dozen or more members of the projected Class of ’87 actually took the option of graduating without a senior year. I could’ve myself. I was a quarter-credit short of graduation, and could’ve gone to summer school to take PE or health class to graduate no later than August ’86.

Back To The Future Photo Clip, May 7, 2009. Source: http://gilka.co.uk

What would’ve happened or not happened isn’t all that easy to figure out with any degree of certainty. But I can make a few educated guesses based on the kind of person I was twenty-five years ago. I hadn’t made any definitive decisions about what college to go to because my plans by April ’86 were for the fall of ’87, and not sooner. I had taken the AP US History exam that May, and all but knew that I’d earned a “5” and six college credits because of my score. The thought of graduating early had crossed my mind in the weeks after the exam.

The reality of life at 616, meanwhile, would’ve been harder to manage. With me out of school in ’86 instead of ’87, I suddenly would’ve found myself with more time on my hands for resentment and anger than I had before. Especially once my Technisort job came to an end at the beginning of August of that year. Sure, I would’ve filled my afternoons with watching or listening to Mets games from August to the World Series win on October 27th, and my fall/winter Sundays with Giants games as they marched to their first Super Bowl. But in between, I would’ve been looking for work, or would’ve found part-time work.

I know for sure that I would’ve spent even more time watching over my younger siblings, washing clothes, running to the grocery store, cooking meals, and so many other things that I ended up doing during my summers at home from my studies at the University of Pittsburgh. That would’ve made me resentful, given the lack of emotional support I had from my Mom.

I would’ve had to endure more weekend searches for my alcoholic father Jimme in order to have enough money to get away from 616 while waiting to start college in ’87. I probably would’ve seen a bit more of my idiot (ex) stepfather between September and November ’86 and March through May ’87, not an easy task considering I sometimes imagined myself stabbing him in the neck.

Or would I? If I know anything about space, time and history, if you change one decision, no matter how small, you change almost everything that comes afterward, even if some events on the surface look the same. I would’ve thought about taking some college courses at Westchester Community College, Pace University, perhaps even Fordham or one of the CUNY schools, like Hunter College. I still would’ve explored applying for schools outside of the NYC area, including the University of Pittsburgh. A couple of extra months at home would’ve made me more weary of being at 616 and in Mount Vernon than I actually was at the beginning of my senior year at MVHS.

Still, there was so much I would’ve missed learning my senior year. About the pitfalls of liking a girl whose only goal in life besides pleasing her parents was in pulling away from them by being cool (read Crush #2 and cruel, actually). All of the friendships and relationships that failed to endure the year. The difference between a great teacher like the late Harold Meltzer and someone in need of a career change like an Estelle Abel or a David Wolf. And that taking three AP courses in one year with teachers of varying abilities and with senioritis in full bloom was a terrible idea.

Those lessons wouldn’t have been learned for at least a year, and made my transition to college harder. Without those bitter lessons, I probably wouldn’t be a historian and a writer. For all I know, I probably would’ve ended up a bartender making the best daiquiris in Westchester County.

Humanities Origins: Goofball

05 Thursday May 2011

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This week marks thirty years since I learned that my sixth grade teacher Mrs. Della Bryant had recommended me and two other classmates into Mount Vernon public schools’ Humanities Program. It was a great achievement, but it felt bittersweet at the same time. For it came a week after the end of my friendship to Starling, and three weeks into the bizarre-ness of being a Hebrew-Israelite. It was the beginning of six long years of learning life’s lessons the hard way, like a soft-shelled crab in the middle of a hailstorm.

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Mrs. Bryant had pushed for my acceptance into Mount Vernon’s Humanities Program at the beginning of May. Between my SRA scores (Reading, 12th grade level; Math, 11th grade level), three years as a straight-A student and her recommendation, it was pretty much a slam dunk. This meant that I could spend as much as the next six years taking accelerated courses with the brightest students in Mount Vernon. When Mrs. Bryant told me about her recommendation, I bounced the seven blocks home to tell Mom about the opportunity. Mom asked, “Are you sure about this?,” as if I was planning to become a Catholic priest. I responded with an emphatic, sportscaster Marv Albert-esque “Yes!”

Of all the things that I was first asked to do after Mrs. Bryant told me that I was in, I had to pick a language of study — for the next four years! I didn’t think much past the next couple of weeks, except when waxing philosophic, so four years might as well have been forty. I opted for Italian over Spanish and French, mostly because of my love for spaghetti and pizza and Italian cheeses, a desire to visit Little Italy, and because the other six Holmes School classmates who had been accepted into Humanities chose the other languages.

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But with the loss of Starling as my best friend, it was hard to celebrate without feeling lost and loss. I hoped that, at the least, that I could connect with the other kids that would make up Humanities at A.B. Davis Middle School in seventh grade. I hoped that I would do as well as I’d done between fourth and sixth grade, that I could prove myself as among the smartest — if not the smartest — kid in the program. Most of all, I hoped that I’d be challenged in ways that fourth, fifth and sixth grade hadn’t.

A.B. Davis Middle School, Humanities Wing, November 21, 2006. Donald Earl Collins.

As it turned out, I was challenged. Thoroughly. My future and now former classmates challenged all of my assumptions about people and life, about how the world works, about relationships, tolerance and acceptance. I faced challenges that I couldn’t have possibly anticipated three decades ago.

I attended William H. Holmes Elementary, a school that was 99.8 Black and Latino, with high number of kids from poor and low-income backgrounds. I assumed that with a greater degree of intelligence came a greater degree of acceptance, but I hadn’t learned anything about eugenics or Nazism as an intellectual practice yet. (Not that Humanities was an incubator of Nazism, but it shows how poor my assumptions were.) I was arguably the highest performing student in my class, but that’s like saying that I’d won a hot-dog eating contest against a two-year-old.

But that was all to come with the transition to middle school, the economic collapse of my family and the puberty process. In the moment of origin in May ’81, I was on an academic high that I wouldn’t achieve again until my junior year at the University of Pittsburgh. I was a newborn baby, beautiful yet naive, not yet ready for the torture of the growing pains that would follow.

This…Is…Jeopardy?

18 Friday Mar 2011

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The first class I ever taught was as a guest lecturer my first semester of grad school at Pitt. Larry Glasco, my advisor, had me take charge of his History of Black Pittsburgh course one November Thursday in ’91. It was a task made easier by the showing of the documentary Wylie Avenue Days during the two-hour and twenty-minute class. With about a quarter of the class composed of adult learners, including several who’d grown up in the Hill District during the time frame covered in the documentary, it became a real conversation about experiences with racism and inter- and intra-racial relations in Pittsburgh in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. It was a great introduction to teaching.

In the two decades since, I’ve often wish that all of my classes had the kind of intellectual balance that my first class possessed and I as instructor helped provide. Sadly, many times in my journey as a teacher, instructor and professor, I’ve had students who showed as much interest in discussing the hows and whys of history as Glenn Beck of FOX News Channel has in science and the truth.

These students, about one out of every six I’ve taught over the past two decades (about 300 in all) have taken up an amount of my teaching time. They’ve groused about the assignments I’ve given them to do, the exam questions I’ve created to assess their knowledge. They’ve gnashed their teeth about my grading, about how tough I supposedly can be in assigning grades. With papers, short-answer exams, multiple choice tests, even fill-in-the-blank quizzes. There’s been no pleasing this group of students.

Until now. It occurred to me about a year ago. I was watching yet another episode of Jeopardy, and it swung to a history category, one that I would’ve swept if I’d been on the show that day or anytime since the show came back on the air in ’85. That then reminded me of something one of my Humanities classmates from Mount Vernon High School said to me soon after finding out that I was ranked fourteenth in the Class of ’87. “All you can do with history is play Jeopardy,” he said with derision.

That memory then reminded me of how teachers like our seventh through tenth grade social studies teachers taught us. Whether Court, Demontravel (who I’ll talk about later this year), Flanagan or Zini, the idea was to be able to spit out as many date-connected facts, names and battles as quickly and accurately as possible. With no thought about human nature, empathy with the struggles of individuals and groups, or any attempt to explain the processes behind why something happened, like slavery, Jim Crow or Indian removal, for instance.

To satisfy my students who want a high school version of history, I need to come to class next semester and draw a gigantic box on the chalkboard. In that box, I’ll draw six columns by five rows of smaller boxes within this huge box. In the top box of each column, I’ll write in a topic area, say, “Colonial America,” “Expanding Voting Rights,” “‘Eq’-words,” “Myths & Legends,” “My Founding Fathers,” and “Rebel Yell” (this on the American Revolution and the Civil War) across all six. There wouldn’t be any money values, just number values, from 1 to 5 from the easiest to most difficult questions. Daily Doubles would help struggling students make up points, while Double Jeopardy sessions would help the best students solidify their A’s.

This is a great idea, isn’t it? My least interested students can then pretend that they’re learning history by being entertained and memorizing history trivia. My students who need to learn or sharpen their critical thinking skills will find themselves sorely neglected. And my most interested students would be ready to strangle me.

In the end, it’s not worth it to turn my part in this profession into Sony Entertainment, especially for a minority of the students I’ve taught over the years. Besides, I can’t afford to buy Watson to impress my students, or at least, have someone pretend that they have the artificial intelligence of IBM’s Watson by sounding like a teraflop supercomputer.

This Is Why I Write…I Think

09 Tuesday Nov 2010

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A Younger Me, Thinking, Central Park, New York, NY, December 23, 2002. Angelia N. Levy

In the course of the past half-decade of struggle over a now 360-page manuscript, even I’ve asked myself, why? What am I doing? Why in the world would I want to dredge up and relive twenty-three, twenty-five and thirty-year-old memories? Of all the books I think I have left in me, why a memoir about the years of my life I’ve tried hardest to forget, to not even discuss? Wouldn’t it be easier to write fiction, a novel that includes elements of that life without a detailed account of it? Why take the risk of offending my first hometown, my former classmates and teachers, my family? Why, dummy, why?

 

Well, it’s not because I get some perverse pleasure out of describing myself as a loser, or torturing myself with unfulfilled love, or because I’m trying to hurt other people’s feelings about Mount Vernon, New York or the Humanities Program. There are lots of reasons. Some of them start with my seven-year-old son. At the very least, I want him to understand his old man as he grows up better than I understood myself

Diary of a Wimpy Kid Book Cover Picture, November 9, 2010. Donald Earl Collins

growing up.

 

But it’s more than that, much more. I’m tired of sitting in interviews and in on staff meetings (when I worked full-time and had more consulting work) and hearing about the tiny number of highly educated Black males in the pipeline for high-level professional jobs. I’m tired of the narrative that says that Black males — and other males of color, for that matter — have to fuck up their lives in order to find the right path. It makes me groan — in my mind and out of my mouth — when I hear over and over again how few males of color even consider college, much less graduate or go on to advanced degrees.

But that’s not all. It’s disheartening to see these narratives play themselves out in African America, in America writ large, and in the publishing world. Like with my growing-up hometown. For the most part, entertainers and athletes — from the Williams and McCray brothers of the NBA past to Ben Gordon, from Denzel Washington to Al B. Sure — are the only ones with cred. Basketball, music, and occasionally, acting and dance are the ways other Blacks are inspired to have aspirations. Intellectual abilities, especially the ability to retain and then critique knowledge, are discounted. People like me growing up were nerds, or worse, just plain weird.

I write what I write because I know that in communities and in neighborhoods like the one I grew up in, the constant ridicule and the stifling of creative thinking and intellectual development can easily lead to stunted lives. I was lucky in a lot of ways, because I was deliberately naive, because of Humanities, because some of my classmates were almost as weird as me, because we had some wonderful teachers. But that doesn’t represent the Mount Vernon educational experience, not by a long shot.

I’m tired of students of color — especially males of color — falling through the cracks of horrible K-12 education because of bad policies, racial and economic politics, and principals as prison wardens. Not only in Mount Vernon. Pittsburgh. DC. PG County, Maryland. Baltimore, Sacramento, Oakland, New York City, Cleveland, Jackson, Mississippi, Jacksonville, Florida, Atlanta, San Francisco, Philadelphia and so many other schools and school districts I’ve visited for work or research purposes over the years.

The narrative that a Black male can only find their way out of poverty through committing criminal errors that lead to prison time and enlightenment goes all the way back to Richard Wright’s Native Son and Black Boy. The one about Black males finding a niche in the world of entertainment — as athletes, musicians, rap artists, actors and comedians — has its roots in original Black heavyweight champion Jack Johnson. The narrative that involves Black males who used education and their intellectual talents to overcome their circumstances and these stereotypical narratives is seldom heard from in the publishing world.

 

616 Living Room Window Screen Shot, November 23, 2006. Donald Earl Collins

That’s likely because some folks think that this story’s been overdone. Even though anyone can count those memoirs and novels on their fingers and thumbs. Maybe it’s not entertaining enough to describe a life full of violence and psychological torture, but with no crimes committed by the main character, no veins injected with heroin, no women knocked up with kids. I write my manuscript because I lived long enough to have learned that there are tens of thousands of Black boys and other boys of color — not to mention their teachers, parents, principals — who languish in the struggle to succeed because they’re not scoring touchdowns, spittin’ rhymes or dunking on rims. Or trying to live the thug life, for that matter. These are the kids that need to be saved, as much as the kids who are already on the brink of prison life.

 

For all these reasons, I write Boy @ The Window. For all of these reasons, I post on this blog as much as I do. To say what I’ve thought, but often haven’t said. And to do it without sounding as serious as an academician. Nor as entertaining as a stoned Baby Boomer trying to make the 70s sound cool. It’s a balance, and I’ve made many mistakes along the way. And will likely make more. But in all of this, I’ve found so much more of my humanity than I thought possible. I just hope that it’s really worth it.