Tag Archives: Lessons

Mrs. Bryant and the Beginning of Donald 1.5

03 Sunday Jun 2018

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

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A bright blue sky, just before the long storm, February 19, 2011. (http://www.photos-public-domain.com). In public domain.

We’ve reached the end of yet another school year, number 32 for me overall, between my twenty-two years between kindergarten and doctorate and my son’s ten years of K-9 (this doesn’t included the 13 years of overlap, in which my primary job has been as an instructor, or my wife’s two years of grad school). The end of sixth grade was not particularly violent. But it was a rough transition to nearly eight years of bumps, bruises, grinding poverty and psychological torture, and a constant struggle for my true self.

The one strong and calming influence in the midst of this gathering storm system was my sixth grade teacher at William H. Holmes ES, Mrs. Della Bryant. She was the fourth of my four Black teachers between first grade and middle school. Mrs. Bryant was as important to me on the cusp of becoming a teenager as Ms. Griffin was to my grounding as a student in first grade, and the crush I had on Mrs. Shannon in third. Because Mrs. Bryant didn’t just aspire for us to do well and get A’s. She wanted us to think big picture, and not just about high school or college. Mrs. Bryant encouraged us to think in larger, worldly terms, to take politics and religion and literature and the stuff of intellectuals seriously.

She indulged us, especially me and my then best friend Starling. So many times that year, Mrs. Bryant allowed us to debate current event topics in class, whether we had sufficient facts or not. The Iran hostage crisis, the 1980 election cycle and why Ronald Reagan would be worse than President Jimmy Carter (no one in our class played devil’s advocate), the legality of Israel unilaterally bombing an Iraqi nuclear weapons centrifuge site.

Those were among the moments I lived for in Mrs. Bryant’s class that school year. I lived for them not just because I liked showing off my knowledge. I already knew I was smart. I spent the following year saying “I am the smartest kid in the whole world!” to myself, and occasionally, to Humanities classmates who made me feel inferior.

No, those debates weren’t about my raw analytic power and great ability to remember. They were about discovering what I thought I knew about a topic, understanding what I didn’t know, and being able to articulate it all without losing my thoughts in the ether. And in all that, I discovered parts of myself. My forthrightness. My New York-style sarcasm. My sense of righteous anger. My ability to summarize a situation in order to derive or intuit possible responses, even solutions.

That was what Mrs. Bryant with her light but steady touch helped me get to in sixth grade. A sense of enlightenment that could survive the false gods of Hebrew-Israelite-ism, the false father of my then idiot stepfather “Judah ben Israel” née Maurice Washington, and the fallacy that I had any control over my world.

But that wasn’t all Mrs. Bryant helped me do that year. She encouraged me to take on other projects, especially contests. Like posters for Dental Health Month, or participating in Election 1980 activities, and journaling and writing down my thoughts about virtually everything. Mrs. Bryant did me the honor of having me introduce our graduation speaker at the end of sixth grade, nearly 37 years ago. It was a two-minute speech, but it was also in front of a couple hundred people. I don’t think I’ve even been as nervous being on radio or television. Most of that stuck with me for years, somehow surviving through years of crumpled neglect.

Mrs. Bryant was the one who shepherded me into the Humanities Program, something that I’d only heard about once before, inadvertently through Brandie Weston (who was a student at Pennington-Grimes) the year before. With my grades and test scores, I probably could’ve made into the Grimes Center a year or two earlier. That is, if my teachers Ms. Pierce and Mrs. O’Daniel had thought of me that way. But in the big scheme, it wasn’t that important. Mrs. Bryant did think of me that way, and went out of her way to say as much. “Mrs. Bryant’s encouragement, her insistence that I was ‘one of the best students’ she ‘ever had,’ made sixth grade a joyful time,” I wrote in my memoir.

Now, despite Mrs. Bryant, I wasn’t prepared for going to school every day with 150 other know-it-all’s, many of whom would never have to worry about Con Edison bills being overdue or having no food to eat for three or four days at time. Or, the constant threat of domestic violence and abuse at home. Heck, between Humanities’ decided demographic affluence and ideological Whiteness, I doubt that most of my eventual classmates worried about anything other than getting A’s until puberty took full hold.

As I wrote in Boy @ The Window, “Mrs. Bryant never warned me that Humanities would be overwhelming because my social skills outside of Holmes were as well developed as a spoiled seven-year old’s.” I simply didn’t handle the transition from a 98-percent-Black elementary school to the mostly White Humanities program very well. Then again, with so much going wrong at home, I didn’t handle much of anything well in the 16 months after sixth grade.

But one thing I carried from my year with Mrs. Bryant was that I could survive and succeed despite it all. To observe and listen, and not just speak off the cuff. To be patient, and keep working. Frankly, it was likely because of teachers like Mrs. Bryant that I discovered my first superpower, my ability to think, remember, and write. And in that discovery, bury the pains of earlier abuses that would’ve surely killed me (or at least, led to a successful suicide) by the time I turned fourteen. Mrs. Bryant, wherever you are, and whatever you’re up to, I say, with love, many, many thanks!

The Grad School Maze

22 Tuesday Mar 2016

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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An endless maze, May 24, 2014. (http://turbosquid.com/).

An endless maze, May 24, 2014. (http://turbosquid.com/).

It’s been a quarter-century since I had to choose my academic path post-bachelor’s degree. That statement in itself is proof that I am no longer young, seeing that I was barely smart enough at twenty-one to decide on my advanced degree path in the first place.

In the fall of ’90, I had applied to six schools to do master’s degree (and potentially PhD) work in the history field: University of Pittsburgh, UC-Berkeley, University of Maryland-College Park, Howard University, University of Virginia, and New York University. I had briefly considered law schools, but decided against a year or torts and contracts for something a bit more relevant to my interests. Beyond the master’s, I still wasn’t sure if I wanted to do a doctorate, teach, write, work outside academia, or just find a job that enabled me to buy my first car. Such are the issues with a student too close to his former life of grinding poverty making decisions about an ill-defined path to his future. I could’ve been my eleven-year-old self applying to Humanities for middle school for the first time, almost as naive, and nearly as myopic.

My GPA at the time of my applications in October ’90 was a 3.28 (I’d reach a 3.4 by the end of the spring semester ’91), with a 3.8 as a history major, and my one GRE test had me in the 64th percentile in reading, 54th in math, and 78th in analytical. The analytical section was new and — as I sensed at the time (and would learn for sure a few years later) — the most relevant part of the GRE for anyone planning on a humanities or social sciences graduate degree. But I couldn’t convince either Berkeley or UVA of that. Berkeley rejected me in January ’91, saying that the GRE scores of their typical students were in the 80th and 90th percentiles in math and reading. UVA sent me a one-page rejection a month later. As I learned later on, my post-1900 focus on US and Black history — UVA’s main specializations were pre-1900 US and African American history — was the biggest reason for my rejection.

University of Virginia Cavaliers' sabers logo, March 21, 2016. (http://www.southwesttimes.com).

University of Virginia Cavaliers’ sabers logo, March 21, 2016. (http://www.southwesttimes.com).

By March, I started to hear more positive news. NYU had accepted me into their program just before Pitt’s mid-March Spring Break, and Pitt’s acceptance followed soon after. I had been back and forth with Howard’s graduate admissions office, who had acknowledged receipt of my application packet before losing it for two months, finding it and sending it back to me because I missed one checkbox on the first page, and then losing it again in February. By the time Howard found my packet again and then accepted me, I had already moved on in my mind.

The main sticking points in most of these acceptances were around my GRE scores or what aid or fellowships I qualified for. Not one school knew what to do with my GRE analytical score, but they seemed quick to jump on my math score as cause for concern. Seriously, unless I had planned to be a statistician or engineer, why would my math score matter in earning an MA in History? Wouldn’t my ability to do broader analysis beyond numbers matter more?

As for aid and fellowships, this was where the University of Maryland became part of the story. They had also accepted me initially in March, but somehow managed to “lose” my application packet for more than a month. I say “lose,” because the admissions office and the history department at College Park lost my application just long enough for all the deadlines to grant fellowships and departmental aid to pass. Not exactly a coincidence.

Afterward, the folks at College Park contacted me to let me know that I was a “provisional status” grad student if I wanted to do my master’s work at UMD. I was “provisional” because of my GRE math score, thus making me ineligible for aid, and requiring a minimum GPA of 3.25 my first semester before being granted any aid. NYU, for its part, wanted me to sign a letter of commitment to the university and the history program before revealing to me any financial aid or fellowship options at all. Even I knew that this was ridiculous, especially after my experience with Columbia four years earlier.

This week twenty-five years ago, I began saying no. I said no to NYU’s heavy-handed slight-of-hand acceptance, and I’d say no to College Park’s deceit seventeen days later. I never actually responded to Howard at all, figuring that my packet was gathering dust bunnies in a dry-as-dust room in Founders Hall.

New York University logo, March 21, 2016. (http://pinoyespressoshots.com).

New York University logo, March 21, 2016. (http://pinoyespressoshots.com).

That left Pitt as my only choice, a place that despite its nurturing, was now lukewarm to me as a student they accepted into their master’s program. It would take a small miracle, in the form of Pitt’s assistant provost Jack Daniel, for me to have the money I needed to earn my master’s degree.

What are the lessons here? That I should’ve worked full-time for a year after graduation, taken some more courses to raise my GPA to a 3.5 and my history GPA to a 3.9? That given my interests, I should’ve also applied to schools of education for an MA in education with a focus in history? That the change to add the analytical section of the GRE was a waste of money and time? That admissions officers and departmental selection committees in the pre-Internet era were even more incompetent in 1991 than they are today?

The most important lesson for me was that grad school wasn’t completely about merit. Just because I had the grades and other achievements and intangibles didn’t mean that admissions offices and departmental committees would recognize them. People play favorites, provide aid and opportunities to some and not others equally deserving, out of spite, because of narrow-mindedness, or because of their -isms. That applying to graduate school was no safe haven, that there were folks who not only didn’t want me to success, but who would actually actively work to make sure I didn’t succeed.

That was a sobering reality. The kind of disillusionment that was the stuff of success for me over the subsequent six years.

Aside

Brotherly Love

12 Wednesday Aug 2015

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, Jimme, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Pop Culture, race, Sports, Youth

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Not quite the courts at Chester Heights (aka, Bronxville/Mount Vernon border), but more or less what would've looked like 30 years ago, Eastchester Playground, Capitol Projects, Bronx, NY, August 11, 2015. (http://www.nycgovparks.org/).

Not quite the courts at Chester Heights (aka, Bronxville/Mount Vernon border), but more or less what they would’ve looked like 30 years ago, Eastchester Playground, Capitol Projects, Bronx, NY, August 11, 2015. (http://www.nycgovparks.org/).

This is a Boy @ The Window story, one that occurred a little more than thirty years ago, and so typical of my experiences growing up with my older brother Darren. Nothing I ever did to help my older brother seemed to help him overcome the trap of going to The Clear View School, a school for the mild to severely mentally retarded (of course, we say mentally disabled in 2015), although Darren was never such. He, in fact, had taught himself to read at the age of three, and taught me to read on my fifth birthday. Darren’s issue was severe shyness, and between my Mom, my father Jimme, and the good White liberals and moderates at The Clear View School, the trap for Darren’s potential genius had been set by the summer of ’74. By the time I was aware enough to say anything about Darren’s predicament, it was already too late.

But say and try I did anyway. Everything from sharing music to talking to Darren about our futures and my escape-Mount-Vernon-for-college plans. I shared books, and tutored him through algebra and geometry and US history.

I even tried playing sports with Darren, including basketball, which in the summer of ’85 was only my third favorite sport. As I wrote in the memoir

“Darren played at the center spot on Clear View’s basketball team, which made sense since he was already between six-three and six-four at seventeen. Of course they crushed every team they played. It was truly unfair. Darren towered over his classmates and his opponents, and being the only non-mentally retarded person on the floor, he could run rings around folks.

Still, Darren could knock down any jump shot within thirty feet of the hoop. His shot was smooth, like Isiah Thomas’ or Bernard King’s. It was the kind of shot no one on MVHS’ basketball team had at the time. Knowing this, I wanted to — no, I had to play my brother to see this shot up close. There were two well-maintained courts near 616, one in Pelham near its main street of Fifth Avenue, the other a longer walk in Chester Heights. We chose Chester Heights for most of these battles. Their court felt like a good outside court should, surrounded by trees, with level, quality-painted asphalt, and bright-white mesh nets.

The first few times we played that summer, Darren just killed me. Every time I left him open for a jumper, he buried it. It was obvious I hadn’t touched a basketball other than in gym class since I was ten. I didn’t have a jump shot, had never worked on my footwork, and could dribble only moderately well with my right hand. Forget about using my left hand! I was so afraid of hurting my two crooked fingers that the left hand’s role for me was to block shots, not to catch passes or take shots.

"Nothing but net" (in context of UPS/NCAA March Madness cross-promotional ad), March 2012. (http://compass.ups.com/).

“Nothing but net” (in context of UPS/NCAA March Madness cross-promotional ad), March 2012. (http://compass.ups.com/).

My semi-buried competitive nature got the better of me. I knew I couldn’t beat Darren in a shootout. But I knew I was quicker than my taller brother. So I decided after another embarrassing performance (I lost 23-2!) that it would be easier to play defense and try to steal a few balls to keep the next game close. Amazingly, the plan worked! It worked so well that I took Darren completely out of his game. After three blocked shots and a couple of steals, I discovered that Darren couldn’t play me one-on-one if I drove hard for the hoop, that I could beat him with my first step. So every time I got the ball I attacked the rim. The last two games we played I won by a combined score of 50-18. I started feeling bad when Darren started forcing long jumpers. After a while, he just gave up. I wanted to win, but I wanted it to be competitive, too.

Darren was so upset that we didn’t talk on our way back to 616. He then walked to the back of our apartment building and threw his basketball down the garbage chute. I wanted to continue to play because I thought it would make both of us better and give us something positive to build on in our relationship. Instead it just made Darren mad and made it even harder for me to talk to him about what was going on at 616.

Standard New York-area garbage chute door, June 2009. (http://theferrisfiles.com/).

Standard New York-area garbage chute door, June 2009. (http://theferrisfiles.com/).

I really did feel awful about how Darren felt after the game. I had shattered confidence in one of the few areas in his life in which he had any. I had humbled a star basketball player at his own game, a game I’d yet to learn. I’d given my older brother yet another reason to be jealous of me. It was shocking to watch him throw the basketball away. I really didn’t know what to say. “I’m sorry, Darren, for beating you two straight games, for making you look bad at your favorite sport?” I guess I could’ve said that. What fifteen-year-old with as much on my plate as me would, though, especially in an environment as competitive as ours when it came to basketball? It made me pity Darren for his situation at Clear View, but also left me angry with him. I was trying to help him, after all, not break his spirit. The incident left me shaking my head.”

I didn’t play basketball with Darren again until the spring of ’97, during my Teachers College interview/PhD graduation week. By that time, Darren’s jealousy and stubbornness had pretty much forced me to give up on my reclamation efforts. But, when left open, Darren could still nail a twenty-four-footer with ease.

In-Abel-ed

10 Sunday Jun 2012

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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“Murder of Cain by Abel,” Ghent Altarpiece painting (1432), Jan van Eyck, January 6, 2007. (Paunaro via Wikipedia). In public domain.

I’ve written about the infamous Estelle Abel in my blog on this date (or at least, this time of year) for each of the previous five years (see “My Last Day,” “The Last Class,” “AP Exam Blues,” “Honors Coronation,” and “Twenty Years in a Week” for the full scoop). She was the chair of Mount Vernon High School’s Science Department while I was a student there, and remain so for years afterward.

As anyone should be able to tell from my previous posts on Abel, I have a bit of an ax to grind. More like a samurai sword, actually. The woman and her ten or fifteen minutes of berating me as both a student and as an un-Black young adult Black male ruined my last day of high school. Forgive me, then, for not being completely objective when it comes to the subject of Estelle Abel and her methods of teaching, motivation, and guidance on issues of academic achievement and race.

Though I’ve also forgiven her, I’m not God, and with my memory, I can hardly forget. But if there had been any chance at forgetting, I lost that opportunity in a conversation I had with my late AP US History teacher Harold Meltzer back in the ’89-’90 school year. Estelle Abel came up as a topic because of something that had occurred with one of his AP students. Apparently, this particular student, a female basketball player, had made the decision to apply to some predominantly White institutions, and had left HBCUs off her application plate. And apparently, Abel had gone after this student for doing so, all but calling her a traitor to her race by taking the route that a majority of traditional African American students have been taking since the ’70s.

Two Oreo Cookies, February 7, 2011. (Evan-Amos via Wikipedia). In public domain.

In all, it took Meltzer about twenty minutes to tell what would’ve been a five or seven-minute-story for the long-winded. That’s how much he could meander in the forests of his stories sometimes. Then I told Meltzer my Estelle Abel story from my last day of school. It sparked a conversation that I wasn’t quite prepared to have. One not only about Estelle Abel, but about the African American faculty at Mount Vernon High School in general.

For most of the rest of the conversation, Meltzer was in full gossip mode, telling me things about individual teachers that I shouldn’t have known, and mostly have forgotten, thankfully. But I did say to him early on in this part of the conversation that I really didn’t know much about the Black teachers at MVHS. The reason was simple. I didn’t have a single Black teacher as my teacher in four years of high school. Humanities classes — particularly the Level 0 and Level 1 classes — had few, if any, Black teachers, much less any teachers of color.

I didn’t say that exactly, but it was the essence of what I said and thought about while Meltzer yammered on about the disunity among MVHS teachers. To think that from Ms. Simmons’ math class in seventh grade at A.B. Davis Middle School until my history and Black Studies classes my junior year at Pitt, I’d gone without a single African American teacher or professor. I knew that some of the blame fell squarely on the shoulders of my guidance counselor Sylvia Fasulo, Humanities coordinators, MVHS’ leadership and the Italian Civic Association.

But how much of this was my fault, being so myopically focused on grades, college and getting away from 616 and Mount Vernon, I didn’t know. After all, I learned in the middle of my senior year that Dr. Spruill taught a Black history class, that there had been efforts to bring in more Black teachers and other teachers of color at Mount Vernon High School dating back at least four years.

Uncle Ruckus screenshot, from Aaron McGruder’s animated TV series The Boondocks, July 4, 2011. (Grapesoda22 via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because of picture’s low resolution.

Still, none of that really mattered to me that year. I had already and unsuccessfully attempted to thread the needle between a cushy senior year and a year that prepared me for the rigors of college. Anything else, whether it was Black history, a trip to West Africa or a visit to some HBCU campuses, was hardly on my radar.

Whatever my lack of focus could be construed as in ’86-’87, it wasn’t because I wasn’t Black enough, or ashamed of being Black, as folks like Estelle Abel implied or accused me of in their thoughts and words, and with their eyeballs that year. Sure, I was weird, and readily admit to being weird, aloof, and emotionless in my MVHS days. But given the hell that I lived with at home and in that community in my last years in Mount Vernon, weirdness and a focus on getting out through college should’ve been applauded, or at least tolerated, without teachers like Abel staring at me as if I was demon-possessed.

That it wasn’t tolerated was the real shame. It took me years to get over it, that uncomfortability of being judged by other Blacks as too smart, too weird, too un-Black in their eyes for my own good.

Occupy Wall Street (and the Fed, and Capitol Hill…)

05 Wednesday Oct 2011

Posted by in 1, culture, Eclectic, New York City, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

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Occupy Wall Street protests, Day 14, October 1, 2011. (Source/Mrwho00tm). Permission granted via Creative Commons v. 3.0.

Folks like me have been saying for years that we need a mass movement of people to stem the tide of economic and racial inequality that this country, the Land of the Thief, um, Free, has been experiencing for more than four decades now. Finally, it’s happening, albeit in a relatively small way, around Wall Street and other cities around the country. This is great, I certainly wish I could be there, but this can only be the start of something. Because if it ends here, I don’t want to wait until I’m in my sixties to see grassroots protests cut across racial, socioeconomic (again, relatively speaking) and other lines that tend to divide us as a nation.

We need to not just occupy Wall Street, or do more than this one-day march that’s suppose to happen in New York today. Or attend rallies hosted by Van Jones. We need to occupy the Fed, Capitol Hill, every Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, AIG, JP Morgan Chase, CitiGroup, SAG, ExxonMobil, Shell, BP

Michael Moore at the 66th Venice International Film Festival, September 6, 2009. (Source/Nicholas Genin via http://flickr.com/photo/22785954@N08/3895119443). Permission granted via Creative Commons v. 3.0.

corporate office in this country. We need to say to these folks, and the corrupt, greedy, soul-destroying interests they represent that were mad and we’re not gonna take it any more.

I just want two other things to come out of this, even if the evil capitalists manage to bash every protester and faceless writers like me in the head to stop what’s been happening over the past few weeks. One is that I want the folks from my youngest sibling’s generation to get credit where credit is due, to not hear from the idiot Baby Boomer crowd about how what they’re doing is just like what they (and by they, about 1 in 50 Baby Boomers, really) did back in the ’60s. It’s not. People born in the ’80s and ’90s grew up in a nation of diminishing resources, increasing economic inequalities, increased acceptance of bigoted, xenophobic, me-first-and-always behavior and a willingness to squander trillions of dollars to go to war in our name.

If anything, these protesters are more like the factory workers at GM in 1937, who sat-in for forty-four days amid violence and threats of violence for their labor union rights in Flint, Michigan. Or like the African

Michael Moore as Pillow Pet Penguin, October 5, 2011. (Source/Donald Earl Collins).

Americans who desegregated lunch counters, boycotted stores that refused to hire them, and staged work stoppages at military ports during the Depression and in the middle of World War II. It’s relatively easy to protest a war like Vietnam from a position of strength, as already enrolled-in-college students. It’s not so easy when your future truly hangs in the balance.

A few months ago, I was playing with my son and one of his stuffed animals, a penguin Pillow Pet. I realized one evening that this Pillow Pet had many of Michael Moore’s facial features. So I began to talk like Michael Moore about the need to stop the greedy folks on Wall Street from eating all of our cake. My son said, “I do not understand what you are saying. But that doesn’t sound nice.” In response, I said, “It’s not suppose to be nice. But then again, neither are the people who’ve put people out of work.” It provoked my eight-year-old, if only for a moment, to think about inequality. The other thing I hope is that this protest provides more thought-inducing moments, for both of us.