Prelude:
Teaching traditional high school English was not for me. I wanted to touch lives more, force kids to identify metaphors less.
Don't get me wrong, I love a good metaphor, and I love good books. But somehow casting your pearls before swine for little money and a lot of vacation was not attractive to me. I kept noticing the lost kids, the hurt kids, the arrested kids.
So that's how I got here.
Chapter One:
Kids apply to get in here. Sometimes they are rejected for not being ready. Sometimes they are dropped from the program. Most of the time they re-apply. One of our graduates was dropped four times. The fifth time she made it to a diploma. She passed the high school exit exam. Now she is going to junior college. She has not gotten pregnant, she is not in jail, she has no boyfriend in jail.
Chapter Two:
A kid on probation has a lawyer. We document everything. He is expected to change. He doesn't. He threatens to stab us all. He is dropped. Do I look over my shoulder everyday?
Chapter Three:
Our incredible office manager is on maternity leave. Her replacement is a very beautiful, quiet woman. This morning the replacement found a note, printed in eratic pencil stokes, "Fucken bitch you Better leave this # school your life depends on it." She quit immediately. The staff is working toward identifying the handwriting of the culprit.
Chapter Four:
Today I took our girl's basketball team to play for the Alternative Schools League. I watched these tough girls get their game on, and play their best. They told me about the rival school, filled with members of rival gangs, that they love to play. There is a lot of body contact in those games, they say. Gang rivalries played out in sports, it gets their blood going.
Afterword:
The students I have now, they are the kind that like to feel adrenaline. Some were previously powerless before they found violence. Before they learned to inflict violence on others, many of them were neglected or abused themselves. Growing up around violence, poverty and drug addiction can do that to a kid. Now they are out on the basketball court, playing by the rules, and planning to conquer. It's pretty damn beautiful sometimes. When they made a basket, I found myself yelling, "I love my girls!" And I do. Even though they are so behind socially, they have traveled farther in growth than most people I know.
Will I be stabbed? In this program's fourteen years no one has been.
Sometimes I get so tired. Then they win a game.
Today it's official - I got the teacher grant for the Academy of Art in San Francisco. This summer I'll be taking fashion design courses at a school that sends some of its students to fashion week in New York every year. Being a polite pest really paid off!
