North Side

I have such a weird job. So, I work as a substitute teacher for four days a week. Today I am subbing for a music teacher at a high school here in the Fort. Most days when I'm in music (aka band) classes it is interesting because, well, I'm not really a band director. I'm a musician, I was in loads of music stuff in Jr. High and high school, I love music and I can get by reading most music - but to be a band director is another story. To be a band director at a school in the city is another world. Most of these kids are so undisciplined when it comes to being a musician that it makes me want to shake them and scream "what the hell are you doing with your life? You're fourteen years old - grow up." It's at this point in my imagination that I usually see the irony of the situation and snap out of it. Like I knew what the hell I was doing with anything when I was fourteen.

There are these questions the run around in my head all day long while I'm baby sitting, I mean subbing, at the various schools in my school system. What is reasonable to expect from these kids? What is reasonable to expect from their parents? Or, maybe, what is responsibility of me to expect from all of them? What does one do with a child who seems to not want to have anything to do with the education they are receiving? Or, in other words, how can one enable children to realize that if they give up on math in the seventh grade that they probably are never going to accomplish anything significant with their life? By the way, how relative is significance?

Sometimes I think I hate rappers. I like hip hop and all that but it just blows my mind everyday how much hip hop culture, and the way it is perceive by African American children, seems to get in the way of me being able to communicate effectively with urban kids. It's as if I'm talking white speak and they are talking black speak and we aren't able to communicate or understand each other at all. And, since I'm in authority, when my white mind gets fed up with their black speak I can just kick they out of class and label them a "bad" kid. This is all really messed up. What does it take for a normal, African American, urban child to succeed in a system that is, for the most part, organized, planned, executed and sustained by white, middle class people? Can this child succeed? I'm not sure. It seems pretty hopeless for the black community to ever have a voice of change and influence (at least one that the white man will agree with) in an education system that is dominated by educated, white men and women. I digress.

So - racial reconciliation anyone? I think that we (white and black) have learned how to co-exist but we still have a long way to go before we treat each other as equals.