The Parent Imperfect loves the springtime, despite the fact that it is his most frantic time of year. It is the time when I add spending a lot of time with a group of kids in the Regan Youth League to a life that is already barely doable. The RYL Opening Day was “postponed” this year, not because of the April showers that often do the trick, but because it was scheduled for the day after the city had been locked down as thousands of police combed Watertown for Suspect #2 in the Marathon Bombing. The games started on the following Monday and the parade happened on a gorgeous day a week later, so the season is now well underway. It seems that playing baseball is part of what has gotten life back to “normal” for many of the league’s children….and parents.
Getting back into the rhythm of school has been another part of starting to live life again in Boston. Both Connie and Vince were unusually ready to get back to school after the week-long vacation that began with Patriot’s Day and the Marathon. They were in full complaint mode (and, in Vince’s case, nonviolent resistance to homework) by Wednesday of the first week back, but that, too, was part of beginning to put behind them the wild mix of feelings that had resulted from two explosions on one of their favorite streets in the city. Connie is still not sleeping well, plagued by dreams playing out horrible scenes that she’s not talking about in her waking hours. Today, she’s planning to go to a large gathering of people for the first time since Patriot’s Day. I know she’ll have some different emotions than what she had the last time she helped Wake up the Earth.
Spring is always a difficult time for her in school. Like most kids, she really wants to be outside at this time of year. Her declining patience for the routine and the boredom of school coincides with a natural increase in the stress level of the teachers who must somehow deal with 25-30 kids, most of whom are constantly contemplating a group jailbreak. Add to those tensions, the nine-hour day in force at the Irving, and you have a recipe for trouble…even for the children who carry the “teacher’s pet” label in the cafeteria.
Connie definitely enjoys some parts of her day at the Irving, and one of the things that makes life bearable this spring is a theater elective that she has two or three times in alternating weeks. Yes, there is a theater elective at the Washington Irving Middle School. She is frustrated by the fact that many of her classmates could care less about something that she really loves, but she has grown accustomed to that…matured, one might say. Her teacher has, however, noticed her love and found some ways to feed it. One of those ways was to cast her as Hamlet in a production of a fragment of that famous play. The small group of theater enthusiasts in the class so rose to the occasion that the teacher arranged for them to do their scenes yesterday at an assembly of the students of a nearby school.
Connie was more excited leaving for school yesterday than any day this year. I was sorry that I wouldn’t be able to see her as Hamlet. It turns out that the neighbor who often goes to school with Connie was playing Claudius in the show, so their energy on the way to school was palpable.
When I got home too late last night, I was excited to ask Connie how it had gone, but she wasn’t home. Before I had a chance to ask Liz about it, she said, “Connie didn’t get to do Hamlet today, so she’s pretty upset.”
It turned out that a scheduling confusion at the other school meant that they had to cancel the production there. This was certainly a huge disappointment for Ms. Connie and her fellow thespians. Knowing how excited they were about this day, the teacher scrambled to organize a show for several classes at the Irving. Having succeeded at that Herculean task of organization, he gave each of the cast members a pass to get out of class to be in the show.
Unfortunately, for Connie and the others, this meant presenting a pass to the teacher who has been very difficult for Connie and some of her fellow classmates since the beginning of the year. Predictably, when they presented the passes to the Teacher, she said something like, “He can’t do that…he had to tell me that at least a week ago…you can’t miss this class just before MCAS.” And she outright refused to honor the pass, telling the children that they’d better take their seats and be quiet.
Connie was crushed. Leaving aside, for the moment, the fact that MCAS scores are definitely not Connie’s problem at the Irving, she just couldn’t believe that someone could be so heartless. It got worse when they proceeded to spend the next 80 minutes practicing this ridiculous “clicking” mechanism that they use, quite inexplicably, to identify the right answers on the test.
Since the theater teacher had already organized the presentation, he had to scramble to find other kids to read the lines off a script. Those students were all excited about having done so and understandably shared their excitement in the halls during the short break between classes. This pushed Connie over the edge. When it came time to go to Science class, she just couldn’t do it. Quite thoughtfully, she asked if she could go see the Guidance Counselor, and seeing how upset Connie was, her Science teacher gave her the pass to do so.
The Guidance Counselor was very welcoming and comforting to Connie. Upon hearing the story, she immediately told Connie that “Ms. — was wrong. When a child comes to her with a pass from another teacher, she must honor that pass.” That made Connie right, but she’d much rather have been Hamlet than right. The counselor’s affirmation made her feel the injustice of what had happened even more strongly.
Anyone associated with the Irving in any way knows the characters in this tale, regardless of my feeble efforts to protect the innocent and the non-innocent. I’m sure the teacher in the story is a perfectly good person who could probably do many jobs in the BPS quite well, But, at this point in her life, the demanding task of teaching a living and breathing group of our sixth graders is not one of those jobs. In our system, however, she has just that responsibility and will probably continue to have it next September.
Ironically, this sad tale transpired on the day after the inaugural meeting of the Quality Working Group of the Boston Public Schools. That group, which came out of the long debate about school assignment in Boston, will spend many hours trying to unlock the magical formula to “measure” educational quality. I don’t know how one would measure what happened to Connie yesterday. Incredibly, if Connie scores one point higher on the MCAS test (which won’t happen) because she was “clicking” instead of reciting Hamlet, the spirit-crushing arbitrariness of the teacher in question would count as a “quality intervention” in our current way of defining educational quality. Even more incredibly, the extraordinary efforts of the theater teacher to nourish the special interest of a few kids in theater, and then, against all odds find an outlet for that interest, would have no place in our considerations of what makes a quality education. If, over the next weeks and months, the Quality Working Group can find no way to change that equation, its time would have been better spent savoring the lilacs in the Arboretum.
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The Parent Imperfect had many excuses not to do it, but, last Thursday night I went to the Boston Public Library for a showing of Episode 4 of the America to me series now showing on Starz. The series is a kind of cinema verité documentary about racial dynamics in a high school in Oak Park, IL. Calling it “Reality TV” would cheapen it way too much, but the series takes a deep dive into the reality of this particular school.
Why would over 250 people (including a good number of people whom I recognized as busy parents) show up at the library on a Thursday night to see a TV show? Because this is not just another TV show, and somebody did a great job of putting the event together and promoting it, that’s why.
The event was part of a nationwide tour to promote the use of the film in communities. The key partner here in Boston was The Boston School Finder (BSF), a new web tool that describes itself as a tool to help Boston parents find a good school for their children. If you’re wondering why the producers of this tour chose an app as a Boston partner, welcome to 2018. When the tour director explained to the audience how it all happened, she recounted that her primary contact in Boston told her that she needed to speak to BSF’s Executive Director, Latoya Gayle. The rest is history.
It also seemed like City Year was somehow in the mix, as they had a table at the entrance and dozens of fresh City Year recruits were in attendance. The organizers of the national tour clearly provided some resources and professional help to make this event happen, but Ms. Gayle and her BSF team also deserve a lot of credit for pulling off an impressive event. There was a reception beforehand at the Lenox Hotel, with free food and soft drinks (for the alcohol, you paid), which I’m sure didn’t hurt the turnout. Somehow I don’t think that the Lenox threw that party for free.
The Rabb Lecture Hall at BPL is a great place to see a film. After taking some time to get the capacity crowd into their seats, Ms. Gayle introduced the show by emphasizing the importance of all children getting a quality education, and suggesting that we need to evaluate our political leaders based on whether or not they are serious about delivering on that equity promise. That was a great message and a good intro to the film.
America to me follows several students and their families through a year in the life of Oak Park and River Forest High School (OPRF). All the publicity says that the school is in Chicago, but it is actually in Oak Park, IL, a relatively prosperous, close-in suburb of Chicago. Oak Park is known as a diverse, politically progressive community. It seemed more like Cambridge than any part of Boston, and the women sitting in front of me (who were from Cambridge) agreed. The school resembled what I know of Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, the public high school in that city.
If Episode 4 is any indication, Steve James, director of Hoop Dreams and many other films, and his crew did a great job on this series. After struggling with the school administration to get access to OPRF, they managed to find some very compelling young people to give life to this story. The parents of those students also play important roles.
In essence, the message is, “Even in this very progressive, well-resourced public school, young people of color and their families face some very daunting challenges. Those challenges are rooted in both the culture of the school, and in the implicit and explicit biases of members of the school community, even those who consider themselves to be very aware of racial issues.” Most of the hundreds of hours of filming was done in the school or at the home of students, but the cameras do follow one young man trick-or-treating with his little brother on Halloween and another as he accompanies the school marching band on a long-awaited trip to a Disney facility (much to the dismay of his wrestling coach).
The young people emerge as complicated characters, rather than the cardboard figures that we get in some documentaries. The viewer sees their pain and frustration, as well as many moments of joy and happiness. One student can’t perform in an important improv competition because he received a three-day out-of-school suspension for, in his words, “walking while black.” Another young woman who seems particularly affected by the academic pressures at the school is not chosen for a poetry slam team that seems like the most important thing in the world to her. A male student who does make the slam team recites a poem on camera that bares his intensely felt emotions about his missing father. That poem left both the student audience at the school and the BPL audience in stunned silence. This is the same youth who was bantering with a barber ten minutes earlier about how he wanted his hair cut.
In a particularly excruciating scene, a white teacher who fashions himself as highly aware when it comes to racial issues, sits down with two students of color (one of them the aforementioned poet) to ask how he, the teacher, is doing in class. The resulting conversation summarizes the message of the film in a way that no narration ever could. I’d love to know how the man experiences seeing himself in this film.
After the lights went on, there was a panel discussion moderated by Meghan Irons of the Boston Globe. She’s done some great writing on education and many other issues in Boston, and was a perfect moderator. The panel featured the director of Episode 4 and Boston education leaders, but the highlight was the presence of one of the young men from Oak Park who appears in this episode (the wrestler who opted to go on the Disney trip with the band). It was great to hear his perspective on the issues addressed in the film.
America to me is not the definitive film on racism in the U.S. today, nor does it capture the challenges facing public education in urban areas without the resources of an Oak Park, IL. Episode 4 was, however, a very engaging telling of the an important story happening at one quite unusual high school in one equally unusual community. It offers a special invitation to people who think they have overcome their/our racism to take a moment to question that assumption.
The show must have had an effect on me, as I signed up to have showings of future episodes at my house. The producers are organizing these “watch groups” to generate discussion around the series. I won’t be able to screen them all, but I will do a couple of showings. If you’re in Boston and interested in joining a group to check out an episode, comment here or contact me some other way, and I’ll let you know when I’ll be doing showings. If you get Starz, or are up for the On Demand fee, you can also watch America to me, in the comfort of your own home. I recommend it.
Parent Imperfect 