Mayor Shirley Franklin is on CNN announcing that they didn't expect the climate change, didn't expect so many people to move to Atlanta, as a way of explaining the water hardship in Atlanta. Gov. Sonny Perdue is continuing his fight with Alabama over the shared water of the Chattahoochee. I think somebody ought to give Ms. Franklin and Gov. Perdue a radio or a subscription to the newspaper, anything to help these two get educated.
Speaking of educated, I'm filling in for a Humanities teacher this week. He's well-organized so it's typically a pleasant day. This morning we started off with an assembly with a super-star boxer from Portland named David Bonds. He gave a great talk about his time on the reality tv show The Contender and spoke highly of his mama who raised him and his two sisters after his father was shot and killed. He didn't say so, but I gathered it was a gang-related death. Bond urged the kids to make good choices, to surround themselves with people who want to see them succeed. Great talk.
The assignment was a worksheet based on the Superstar's talk. Contemplative questions to be answered in an essay format. You would have thought they'd been told to hike to the top of Mount Hood, barefoot in the snow and get back by dark, for all the whining. I heard everything from, "I don't have a pencil. I don't have paper." To, "I got there late. I wasn't listening." I drew the line, however, at the wisecracking gal (8th grade) who said, "I was too busy checking his body out to hear what he was saying."
Things spiraled down from there, and ended in her getting written up and the Vice-Principal paying a visit to the room, to lecture the kids on how to act when guests are present. The gal returned to my class later in the day, with this one-page letter which was supposed to be an apology, but was simply a thinly-disguised rant that said, "Maybe more teachers should stop and ask a child what's wrong before jumping to a citation. I'm sure that teacher could learn a lot."
She picked the wrong gal to give that message to. I called her out to the hall. "Listen, sweetie," I said, "Nobody is more understanding that I am about kids who have too much on their plates. I'm sorry you have a crappy homelife. (She'd noted that earlier in her musings.) But if you did a poll, about 80 percent of the kids at this school have as crappy if not worse home life than you. Shoot, I didn't have the greatest of upbringings myself. My mom was a single parent. My father was dead. Mom wasn't around a lot. I did my fair share of getting in trouble. But did you listen at all to what the speaker said this morning?
"Your future is up to you. You can't do anything about the family you are born into. But it is your decision on whether you are going to arise above that or not. You can go on surrounding yourself with others who think it's funny when you get in trouble. Or you can decided to change your fate and make something of yourself. The choice is yours -- I know. I was the first kid among all my family to graduate from college. The first among all my cousins. I decided I wanted better and I worked toward it... blah, blah, blah..."
Anyway, you've all heard the sermon. You've probably given it a time or two yourselves. The student was crying as I spoke, so hopefully, she was listening. Who knows?
But I remember now why I never taught full-time. I've no tolerance for it. Worse than this student acting out was the dozens of kids who sat in class, staring into space for the entire hour, refusing to write or read because, frankly, engaging the brain requires so much more effort than engaging the mouth. (Study the politician of your choosing) It disheartens me to see how much time is wasted by students day-in-day-out because they simply see school as a social experiment and fail to understand that this is their life they are ruining, not mine.
I admire my husband, everyday. I don't see how someone with his intelligence and discipline can indulge students who have no heart for learning anything at all. It depresses me nearly as much as the idea of Mayor Franklin and Gov. Perdue who blame everyone else but themselves for the crisis they find themselves in.
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