First Day and Last Day of School This Week

03 Wednesday Sep 2014

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

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ABD, Bruce Anthony Jones, Cecil Parker Elementary, CMU, Common Ground (1985), Dan Resnick, Daniel P. Resnick, Dick and Jane, Dissertation, Dissertation Overview Defense, Humanities, Humanities Program, J. Anthony Lukas, Joe Trotter, Kindergarten, Mrs. Shannon, Nathan Hale Elementary, PhD, World Book Encyclopedia

Cecil Parker Elementary School (formerly Nathan Hale ES), Mount Vernon, NY, November 23, 2006. (Donald Earl Collins).

I’ve written about parts of this before, back in my first days of blogging about my life and times as a student. But this week is especially poignant. Yesterday (September 2) marked twenty years since I sat through and passed my PhD dissertation overview defense at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, making me ABD (All But Dissertation, an official PhD candidate). Tomorrow (September 4) will be forty years since my first day of school, attending kindergarten at the Nathan Hale Elementary School (now Cecil Parker ES) in Mount Vernon, New York. It was a school two buildings and an asphalt playground down from our second-floor flat, 425 South Sixth Avenue. In between was nineteen years and 363 days of time as a formal student, going from learning how to read “Dick and Jane went to the store” to writing a “book” about multiculturalism and Black Washington, DC.

I’m sure most of us don’t remember so much of what occurred in between day one and day 7,303 of student-hood. I remember plenty, though. I remember the morning being unusually cold and having to wear a windbreaker or a raincoat (according to a weather website, the high that day was only 69F, and it actually rained at some point during the day). Kindergarten was only a half-day endeavor back then, so I remember getting released to come home for lunch and spending the rest of the day playing with my Tonka toys and watching Sesame Street and The Electric Company.

Second floor of Baker Hall, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, December 2, 2010. (Daderot via Wikimedia). In public domain.

Contrast that with a warm first Friday in September ’94, at a time when I’d met some new first-year PhD students in the History program, Carl, Jeff, Susannah and a few others, who all seemed surprisingly interested in my dissertation work. I think it was just that I was one of their first points of contact, going through something they themselves hoped to do within a few years. Either way, I’d been preparing to defend my eighty-page dissertation overview for the previous six weeks, in between working on a migration studies research project for Joe Trotter and keeping an eye out for dissertation grants that I firmly believed were necessary for me to get out of grad school with my sanity intact.

As I walked up the sloped, dark, factory-mimicking hallway on the second floor of Baker Hall to what would be two hours of interrogation from Trotter, Dan Resnick, Bruce Anthony Jones and Department Chair Steve Schlossman (among others in the conference room that morning) with my “entourage,” I had this two-decade juxtaposition in mind. I actually started thinking about the long path from kindergarten to PhD, and all the bumps, bruises and breaks along the way. About how on a September 2nd morning six years before, I’d been homeless and came within days of dropping out of college. About how none of this would have been possible without my older brother Darren, who taught me how to read on Christmas Day ’74. Or, for that matter, without my third-grade teacher Mrs. Shannon encouraging my Mom to buy the entire set of the ’78 edition of The World Book Encyclopedia, which led to me reading through that set between December ’78 and April ’79.

Even J. Anthony Lukas‘ Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families (1985) was in my head as I laid out my papers and dissertation overview as references for my overview defense. I’d only read the book in the previous year. This Pulitzer Prize-winning book for nonfiction lived up to the award it earned Lukas, as he went to excruciating lengths to make the process of desegregation by busing, White fears, and Boston’s racism and racial divide come alive.

Front cover of Common Ground (1985) by J. Anthony Lukas, September 3, 2014. (http://goodreads.com).

In reading about what the White parents did to stop busing in September ’74, it forced up a memory of watching the evening news my first two days of school about Boston’s White community rioting over busing and desegregation. The picket signs, the bottles and rocks. I remembered asking my Mom about it then, but I don’t think she gave me a direct answer. Lukas, though, did, twenty years later.

Finally, I thought about my Humanities classmates as I sat down and had gone through all of the pleasantries with my dissertation committee and other professors and grad students in the room. I thought about how classmates like Josh and Danny ridiculed me as a savant, who told me that history essentially was only trivia, that I couldn’t do anything with it other than “go on Jeopardy.” In some ways, they were right. They just weren’t correct on September 2, ’94.

All of this gave me a place to start. So when Trotter asked me, “What in your life has prepared you for this moment?,” I knew from which parts of my life’s journey to pick. Only to realize that in starting at the beginning, I was nowhere near full circle.

Why Students Need Teachers Who Look Like Them

24 Thursday Oct 2013

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

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Black Teachers, Diane Ravitch, Diversity, Education Reform, High-Stakes Testing, Mount Vernon public schools, Nathan Hale Elementary, Reign of Error (2013), Teach for America, Teachers of Color, Teaching, Wendy Kopp, William H. Holmes Elementary

Wendy Kopp and Diane Ravitch head-to-head, Aspen Ideas Festival, Aspen, CO, June 28, 2011. (http://www.aspenideas.org/).

Not exactly the most precise title I’ve ever written. But it does get to a sensitive point for many involved in education and so-called reform. Between Wendy Kopp and Diane Ravitch — especially since the publication of Ravitch’s latest and most comprehensive salvo Reign of Error a couple of months ago — it’s been hard for anyone to get a word on K-12 education into the national dialogue. Kopp’s running around ringing the educational Armageddon bell, while Ravitch has all but revealed the likes of Kopp, Michelle Rhee and Dr. Steve Perry as money-hungry reformers who wouldn’t know reform if it bit them in their derrieres.

The debate over high-stakes testing and anti-union teacher effectiveness models has put aside so many other conversations on improving K-12 education. So many that the average person may think that test scores and teacher training are the only issues on the table for reform, whether from the perspective of false prophets like Kopp or actual experts like Ravitch. For me, the one effort that has been neglected over the past decade and a half has been one to diversify the teaching profession, on the basis of race, gender and even levels of expertise.

It’s taken my son’s five-plus years of education in Montgomery County Public Schools to fully appreciate how unique my own time in an integrated school setting in Mount Vernon, New York truly was. From first through sixth grade, at Nathan Hale and William H. Holmes Elementary Schools, four of my six teachers were African American. But it wasn’t just that they were Black. The one thing that Ms. Griffin, Mrs. Shannon, Mrs. O’Daniel and Mrs. Bryant all had in common was their high expectations of me and my classmates. They were kind, but also no-nonsense teachers. They gave me a hug when I needed one, and a slap on the butt (in O’Daniel’s case, nearly literally) when I needed it. By the way, they frequently made school fun, too.

No reflection of self in the mirror, October 24, 2013. (http://mailfeed.blogspot.com/).

They also dared to venture beyond the state-mandated curriculum to infuse it with materials about everything from Black history to the Maya, from reading our standard textbooks to encouraging us to discuss the Camp David accords (Menachem Begin, Anwar Sadat and President Jimmy Carter) and the Iran hostage crisis. Mostly, I learned more about what I’d face from the world in terms of race, gender and class from these teachers than from all the rest of my teachers combined (other than Harold Meltzer).

I would’ve liked some more male teachers of color, particularly once I became part of Humanities at A.B. Davis Middle School in seventh grade. In fact, between Dr. Larry Spruill and Dr. Hosea Zollicoffer, they were really the only Black male teachers/administrators I saw between end of sixth grade and my junior year at the University of Pittsburgh, a span of almost nine years. As it was, administrators and teachers like my seventh grade math teacher Ms. Simmons, along with Brenda Smith, Spruill and the handful of other I encountered often looked at me as if I was the cursed Son of Ham, or, rather, some weird version of whom they considered Black. At least, respectable and Black. Still, they served as reminders that not all teachers were White and female, if only that. (But, I digress…)

Now, I know what some of you may say. It shouldn’t matter what the race of the teacher or administrator is, as long as they care about the students. That The New Teacher Project (founded by Rhee) and Teach for America (founded by Kopp) provide alternative opportunities for professionals of color to enter the teaching profession. No they don’t. Not really. They provide an elitist version of Peace Corps for impoverished urban and rural school districts for folks who often do not stay in teaching for the long-term (beyond four or five years), only to then move on to graduate school, law school or Wall Street.

Reign of Error (2013) by Diane Ravitch, front cover. (http://bn.com).

My teachers to a person remained teachers until they received promotions, retired or passed away. But they could stay teachers (and later become administrators) because they weren’t trying to reform education. They saw themselves as part of a larger community, helping to nurture children, not just educate them. They had the autonomy and parental support necessary to do so. And they didn’t have an atmosphere where they lived in fear of their jobs in case the students’ SRA scores dropped between 1979 and 1980 or between 1980 and 1981.

Despite my experiences and the experiences of my generation of students, the money grubbers of K-12 education reform will continue to insist that public education is at Def Con 1, and that we should launch our proverbial nukes in a pre-emptive strike to reform it. The sad truth is, in places like Texas and Philly and Chicago, their warheads have already gone off, irradiating school districts, poor students and students of color alike. And all without dealing with issues involving poverty and diversity in the process.

Kidneys, Baking Soda & 240 East Third Street

06 Wednesday Feb 2013

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

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240 East Third Street, 616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Alcohol Abuse, Alcoholism, Arthur, Baking Soda, Black Migrants, Black Migration, Callie Mae, Cecil Parker Elementary, Child Neglect, Divorce, Domestic Violence, Drinking Buddies, Drug Abuse, Flu, Ida, Kidney Failure, Kidney Transplant, Lo, Mount Vernon Hospital, Nathan Hale Elementary, North Side, Poverty, South Side

Arm & Hammer Baking Soda, 1lb Box, circa 1970s, February 6, 2013. (http://wackypackages.org).

I wrote at length thirteen months ago about the devolution of my mother and father’s marriage in ’76 and ’77, and how that led to an incident with a coffee table on or around my seventh birthday (see my post “Stomping in Coffee Table Glass” from December ’11). It was a difficult time in all of our lives, and my grades in second grade reflected this. Me and my older brother Darren had a different living arrangement from week to week between September ’76 and April ’77. But for my mom, it was life-threatening. No wonder my Uncle Sam clotheslined my father Jimme as if he were Deacon Jones and my father was Johnny Unitas!

Despite my mother’s (real and imagined) infidelity and her filing for divorce — or because of it — my father refused to move out of our second-floor flat at 425 South Sixth. From September ’76 through March ’77, he’d come and go as it pleased him. Jimme would be home for a few hours on a Wednesday, cut the cords to the telephone or dump my mom’s mink stole in a bathtub, and then be gone for another five days or a full week. If my mom somehow was home when Jimme was, they’d fight all hours. On the nights my mother was out with her bowling league, or with friends, or (presumably) with my eventual stepfather Maurice, she’d call us to make sure we were okay, only to find Jimme at the other end of the line, threatening to kill her and us.

Starting at the end of that September, barely a month into the school year, Darren and me found ourselves spending more and more time with our babysitter Ida at 240 East Third Street. For folks who have never been to this part of the Mount Vernon, New York’s South Side, the best thing to say about 240 East Third was that it was next door to an environmentally hazardous scrap metal yard. It was a dangerous place, one of extreme poverty, alcohol and drug abuse, a place in which the most recent of Black migrants from the South and their sons and daughters tried to make into a home.

240 East Third Street, Mount Vernon, NY, September 2007. (http://googlemaps.com).

Ida had been our babysitter for as long as long as we could remember. One of my first memories was calling her a “bitch” when I was three because she had made us a bubble bath out of very itchy Tide detergent. I didn’t know the full meaning of what I said, but Ida took a switch and whupped me anyway. Now we were living with her for days at a time, having to walk a mile down East Third, then South Fulton Avenue, and then Sanford Blvd to get to Nathan Hale Elementary (now Cecil Parker Elementary). The irony was that our real home was just two doors down from the school.

That wasn’t the only irony. On the many days we spent with Ida, we also spent time with her friends, Callie Mae, Lo (short for Lorenzo) and Arthur. The reason we could spend so much time with these friends of my mom was precisely because they were Jimme’s friends originally. They were part of his circle of drinking buddies! And, with us already at 240 East Third, my father would swing around and drink to his heart’s content with all of them.

My mother, meanwhile, began experiencing what the doctors at Mount Vernon Hospital thought was mere signs of stress. Her kidneys, though, were shutting down, causing a multitude of health issues. She’d gone to see her primary care physician about this in October, then again in December and January. By the end of January ’77, my mother was stuck at the hospital, as her doctors at one point thought that she would need a fast-track to a kidney transplant. Keep in mind that this is ’77, so kidney transplants weren’t the exact science that they are today.

I ended up in the hospital with her in early February ’77, with a fever of 105°F. They put me in a bed near my mom, stuck a thermometer in my butt, and figured out that I had the flu. That I still have positive thoughts of this visit is a sure sign of delusion and the grimness of that time in our lives.

One human kidney, sliced open to reveal hydronephrosis, typically the obstruction of the free flow of urine from the kidney, February 6, 2013. (http://meducation.net).

Luckily, my mom and her doctors were smart enough to have a specialist from Westchester County Medical Center come in to check out her candidacy for a kidney transplant. He took one look at her labs and realized that she didn’t need a transplant after all. It turned out that my mom’s sodium levels were so low that they had caused the flow of fluids and waste through her kidneys to drop by something like 80 percent. The doctor’s solution was really simple. “Eat baking soda,” he told my mom and her doctors. That was in March ’77.

Two teaspoons of baking soda a day, to be exact. That’s what it took to bring my mom’s kidneys back to life and for my brother and me to finally move toward a more stable home situation at 616 (at least between April ’77 and the Hebrew-Israelite years). It wasn’t that I hated 240 East Third. I just hated what being there meant for us and for my mom.

Black Male Id-entity & the F-Bomb

26 Thursday May 2011

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Anti-Gay Slur, Authenticity, Basketball, Basketball Courts, Bigotry, Black Males, Carnegie Mellon University, Context, Coolness, F-Bomb, F-word, Faggot, Heterosexism, Homophobia, Joakim Noah, Kobe Bryant, Michael Wilbon, Mount Vernon New York, Nathan Hale Elementary, NBA, Nigga, Pitt, Pittsburgh, Playgrounds, Sean Miller, Toure X, Twitter, University of Pittsburgh, Washington DC, Words

Gay Rights Month isn’t for another six days, as it’s still May. But in light of Joakim Noah’s unfortunate anti-gay slur outburst, “Fuck you, faggot!,” it makes sense to start this year’s conversation a week early.

This is more than about the NBA, gay athletes in the closet or what professional athletes should and shouldn’t say to fans and to each other. The behind-the-curtain issue here could just as well be about Black male identity (whether heterosexual or gay) and how Black males express themselves to each other and to the rest of the world.

My first memories playing with a group of Black males in Mount Vernon, New York are all negative. When I was six in ’76, a group of preteens on the neighborhood playground near Nathan Hale Elementary on South 6th Avenue tried to force me into sucking one of their dicks, practically sticking it in my face to do so. I got away before being truly scarred for life. After we moved to 616 East Lincoln Avenue in April ’77, our first time playing outside was spent running away from the other kids, who greeted us by throwing rocks at us and calling me and my brother Darren “faggots.” (see my June 1, 2009 post, “In the Closet, On the Down Low” for more).

When I was nine, I played basketball on a court near 616 for the first time with a group of kids from my building. After throwing up an awkward brick and an air ball, I got five minutes of “You terrible!,” “You need to sit down!,” “You’re never gonna be an athlete!,” “You need to get back to reading them books of yours!,” and “You shoot like a faggot!”

Even though I eventually learned how to dribble with both hands, shoot a j, make layups, block shots, and on rare occasions, dunk a basketball, I’ve been leery being around other Black males on the basketball court. One would think after playing pickup with former Pitt basketball players while in grad school that I’d completely forgotten what happened to me back in the spring of ’79. But I hadn’t, at least on an unconscious level. I often watched what I said, I mean, down to every single word. Not to mention how I walked, where my arms were, and how I held my head. Still, I sometimes felt inadequate on the court, whether I went 8-for-9 or 2-for-7, blocked a shot, stole a ball, or got knocked down guarding someone six-foot-six and 260 pounds.

But I figured out something in those years of playing pickup at Pitt and Carnegie Mellon and other places in Pittsburgh and DC over the years. That blending in doesn’t matter. Fools — even ones with momentary lapses in judgment like Joakim Noah — will be fools because on the playground or court, it makes them cool in the minds of their peers.

Yes, this isn’t just a Black male issue. Sean Miller, currently coach of the University of Arizona men’s basketball team — not to mention an all-time Pitt basketball great — once played a prank on me our freshmen year. He called me up in my Lothrop Hall dorm room late one night, offered me a blow job, and called me a “faggot” in the process. So being called a “faggot” or saying that something or someone is “gay” is part of our culture on and off the basketball court, for Black and White males to be sure.

But unlike Michael Wilbon, I can’t excuse it because it’s commonplace and therefore it may be difficult for some young men to immediately stop themselves from saying “faggot.” Nor can I rationalize this like Touré (a.k.a. TouréX on Twitter) attempted to do in a Twitter exchange with me a couple of days ago. He compared the use of “faggot” to “nigga,” with the idea that both words have more than one meaning and that the meaning can sometimes be positive, depending on context.

I can see the argument for “nigga,” even though I don’t like it when younger men use it to affirm each other and especially me. But “faggot” meaning “less than a man?” Or “stupid” or “dumb?” So is Noah or Kobe more of a man for telling someone else they’re not a man? Even in context, this isn’t positive — it’s potentially soul-destroying, and not just for someone being called a faggot.

Of the preteens and young boys who called me “faggot” growing up, at least three have served hard time. Is there a direct connection? Of course not. Still, it seems that a culture steeped in the requirement of being cool, finding quick and easy success and putting down others while doing so lends itself well to a crash-and-burn mentality that so many of us have about our lives.

Teacher Ignorance

25 Tuesday May 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Eclectic

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Culture, Discipline, K-12 Education, Mount Vernon New York, Nathan Hale Elementary, Teachers

I’m confronted with the fact that not all teachers are competent or considerate when dealing with their students. In the past week, my son Noah has had two incidents with his first-grade teacher that have involved a complete lack of communication skills. On one, I ended up sitting with Noah in detention for something Noah shouldn’t have been in detention for in the first place. On the other, Noah was accused of cheating — yes, a six-year-old was accused of cheating — on a math quiz because he didn’t put his pencil down immediately after time was up.

We contacted Noah teacher and one of his principals, because the teacher overreacted on both occasions. But now, I feel as if Noah is dealing with a problem that I had the pleasure of dealing with in second grade, ignorant teachers. By ignorant, I don’t mean stupid or dumb. I mean teachers who are ignorant of context, whose level of world knowledge is limited, who understand the letter of the law only slightly, and the spirit of it even less.

The first teacher I had who was like this was my second-grade teacher at Nathan Hale Elementary (now Cecil Parker) in Mount Vernon, Mrs. Hirsch. One of only two White teachers I had in all of elementary school, Mrs. Hirsch was extremely impatient with all of us. She snapped at us for violating any rules at all. “No talking,” she’d yell, and very loudly at that, for any whispering whatsoever. Our single-file lines in the hallway were the straightest in the school in all likelihood. I thought that Mrs. Hirsch was mean.

And she proved it one day during a spelling test. I was already upset that day, as my mother and father were divorcing, and the stress of it had landed my mother in the hospital. I wasn’t feeling well, and was a bit stressed myself. We started the test, and I, with my usually disgusting self, dug a booger out of my left nostril, which landed right on my paper. I wiped the rest on there as well. Another student said, “Ill, Donald!,” and I said something back, something like, “I couldn’t help it.” Mrs. Hirsch came over, looked at my paper, and gave me a zero on the spot. “Shame on you, young man,” she said.

My crime was cheating. At least according to Mrs. Hirsch. But what I’d really done was disgusted her with my booger, nothing more, nothing less. That was it for me as far as Mrs. Hirsch was concerned. I hoped that she would melt, like the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz.

Noah’s issues of late are even more innocent than me digging up my nose during a test. He talked too much to his friends last week, so he and I got to spend ten minutes in his teacher’s classroom during the Dine with Dads event last Friday while she’s eating lunch in the teachers lounge? Or going overtime on a math quiz constitutes cheating? That’s ignorance, plain and simple, unacceptable and unbecoming of a teacher dealing with students as young as Noah.