Spite

I just read an article on prisoners who rate prisons and jails on Yelp.

If you didn't know, the difference between prison and jail is that jail is for up to one year; prison is anything longer than that time.  For longer sentences, inmates tend to prefer prison- less frustrating and people who have been in longer know the rules and culture better than short timers who sometimes behave like complete idiots.

I think rating these places on Yelp and other social sites is a great idea. It gets information out to the public and can bring to light any serious offenses, as well as commend those who protect them (i.e. correctional officers). 

However, in the comments were really hateful stuff, such as Catalyst247s "they are prisoners, they need a nice warm cup of STFU" and Reality201s thought that "I think that prisoners should work for their food digging ditches, picking fruit and other "jobs Americans do not want to do". No work = no food."

Having taught in a men's prison, I can tell you that the people who are posting these comments have never been to one. Prisons are not a fun place where people relax, watch tv, eat and work out nonstop. Public opinion is so poor that often the food is spoiled, the work - at 23 cents per hour- is hard and it's often unsafe to go to sleep.

Here is what I wish I could say to each person who put up a negative comment:

a) people do get out of jail and prison after serving their time.
b) you obviously have never been in a prison if you think it's club med.
c) how society treats those on the fringes is a good way to judge that society.

...so yes, I am glad that prisons and jails are being reviewed on Yelp. I am also sad at the proudly ignorant responses.

Ah well.

I Thought I Was Here To Stop This...

This was going to be a blog post about how I am sick again with bronchitis-like symptoms and thank God and Cathy Klasek for antibiotics. I was going to write about how just being in the main building in school for 15 minutes and breathing that toxic air made me sick.

I was also going to write about how yesterday I broke up a fight between two of the kids who were going to class in the room next door to me and that I felt bad because one was crying when he found out that his mom was going to be called. He had been in trouble for fighting before and he just looked so young and helpless. I felt awful for not turning a blind eye. Both kids said they were just play fighting, even though they were both all read and bruised looking.

Then I thought that perhaps I'd post a rant about the CRT writing test my 8th graders have to take next week. How I can't read or write or do anything for the 70 and 90 minute writing prompts but stare at kiddos. I was going to compalin that my kids are not on a level playing field and that even though I've been severely thwarted in my efforts to help them learn grammar- which they need for the test- it's now become very clear to them that this is exactly what is needed. So I have a week to get them there. The five paragraph format? No problem. Writing it in proper English with well-developed themes? Not a chance. But if they want to learn to drive and get a license, they have to pass.

Maybe this was an appropriate place to think on paper about how well my 8th graders and I are getting along. How my first hour class asked me yesterday if they could just read for awhile. I said yes, of course. They seem to enjoy getting lost in a novel these days. I'm sick that it took six months to get here, but all of my kids seem to have found a groove with me.

But no. Todays' topic is a kid you'll never hear about again, except perhaps on the six o'clock news one day. A sweet kid that I will name Bobby. Bobby comes to school only sometimes and he always wears the same thing. When he shows up, the red rims of his eyes give away his fatigue. He's a night person, he says. He has fallen asleep in my class a few times and the last time, I walked him over to the In School Suspension office myself. "What are you going to do when I call your mom?", I asked. "What will she think?"
"She'll be sad. She don't need this." He sort of ducked his head.
"Yeah, I can't suppose anybody would. What about your dad?"
"He's not around." His eyes darted almost wildly.
I nodded. I know better than to ask where a parent is. The answer is usually one that breaks the heart- drugged out, absent, jail, dead, gangs.. the list is endless.
Jail. Bobby's dad is in jail.
I did what I always do. I cut him some slack. Maybe others would disagree with me, but you know what? I'm always going to err on the side of believing someone and giving them a chance. My top readers in class right now are two boys that I caught doing some ruly shit and they asked for clemency and got it from me too. Why use a sledge hammer when a nudge will do?
"I'll tell you what. I won't call your mom, but get more sleep at night. Ok?"
"Yes, ma'am."
He was awake the next time. He's a bright kid, Bobby. You'd like him. Quiet, clean cut. Handsome with such a beautiful dark tone to his skin and intelligent eyes. As a 7th grader, he is very popular with the 8th grade girls. Two of my 8th grade girls to be exact.

On Monday he stepped off of the bus to school with some of his friends and took off to a local fast food joint to get some breakfast. Guess they didn't like the breakfast offered by the cafeteria. Automatic suspension in a closed-campus junior high school. Today he stepped foot on campus again. It's probable that he rode the bus to school, hung out all day off campus and only came back to catch a ride home on the same bus. Why his mom wasn't watching him is anyone's guess.

If you weren't aware, that's trespassing and it's illegal. According to school policy, he had to be apprehended for such behavior as coming to school while suspended. And arrested.

So it came to pass that I stood with my mouth open saying his name without realizing it. He looked over at me and looked down. I think he would've crawled into his shoes if he could have. He was handcuffed behind his back and the officer took him into custody and escorted him to the police car.

I was reminded so strikingly of the time I worked in the prison. The guards would wait until class was over to arrest anyone who was going to be arrested because they didn't want to interrupt what I was doing. As long as we were in that classroom, they weren't just felons or numbers or yucky inmates with MRSA and aggressive disorders. They were people and they were my students. One sunny day I came into work after 2 days off and found that a transport was in progress. One of "my students" was in the office, waiting for his ride. Normally, they wore kahkis and polo shirts. This man also wore his long white hair in a neat ponytail down his back. He was very good at English and we had worked very hard on his math skills so that he could get into community college and take correspondence courses. This day he was in belly shackles. That's where they cuff your hands to a chain around your waist that drops to the ground. Your feet are shackled into it too. It makes people walk funny too, sort of a slow, shuffling sound. His hair hadn't been brushed and it was wild and stringy about his head. He wore an orange jumpsuit and flip-flops- a sure sign he had been in isolation. That's what they called "The Hole". I didn't know any of the guards- I was friends only with a few people in the education department as everyone else was very suspicious of teachers- and didn't say hello to anyone. But for a moment I met his eyes. And they looked ashamed.

The same shame I saw on Bobby's face today.

And it broke my heart.

Schism

I've been at East Central University now for about a month. I like it, overall, and get to have all sorts of conversations with people from all over. My new colleagues on campus are drawn from Oklahoma and surrounding states and a few neighboring nations. This is the major advantage of academe: I get to meet the world in a four block radius.

We invariably turn to politics. Many people think the way I do, which is what I might term a liberal leaning, non-religious moderate. Some are far more liberal than I in their thinking and others range towards conservative. But there are few absolutists, few extremists. In fact, one of the major goals in my classroom- in all of our classrooms- is to educate people out of narrow perspectives enough so that they can hear and respect other viewpoints. Even if we don't agree, we can get along. That's the take home message. Yes, I'm an English teacher. But English is just the venue for modeling critical thought and tolerance. And there is a lot of intolerance out there. Where does it come from?

I can almost hear my students' parents' voices echoing in hatespeech. I see it in the unconscious racism and white entitlement. And I cringe whenever I have occasion to hear white elitism parroted through the bible. Jesus didn't speak English, folks. And he hung out with the "lower" classes. And he sure as fuck wasn't white. But I digress. Prejudice is learned in society and in the home. And it's spread from racism and religious intolerance to political party hatred. I think that should be a new category of "isms": racism, sexism, religious intolerance and party-ism. This schism has been growing in the last few years, but has widened with the election of a president of color. One in five Americans think he is Muslim, and that being so is bad. Our president has wonderful oratory skills and excellent relations in the international arena. His foreign policy has been carried through and every single domestic policy he has attempted has been thwarted or otherwise criticized unilaterally and propagandized and in many cases (*cough*sarahpalin*cough*) even denigrated by opponents, both political and social. I can tell you that no matter what he tries to do, it will be shot down if possible. Period. It's a power struggle, out and out. It's a political/media war.

What we have is a problem of trust. We no longer allow others to disagree with our viewpoints. If someone disagrees, then they must be a democrat/republican/socialist/communist/whatthefuckever. They must not know what they're talking about because if they paid attention they would see how badly my side is portrayed in the media and how awful their own representatives are screwing over the American public. That person must then become the enemy. They must be discounted not just on an academic level, but on a personal one. They may sympathize with those who bombed the twin towers. They must be silenced because their views are becoming dangerous. We must mistrust them and perhaps fear them and perhaps pre-emptively strike them and retreat to our own homes and block out our neighbors and listen only to our churches and our pastors. But the priests are molesting children, the Mormons won't allow black people, the Christians may want to cast out the Hispanics and the Muslims are all terrorists. "They" (whoever that is) have nothing in common with the rest of "us Americans" (whoever that is).

My friend Bohn, who is ex-military and who now works as a prison guard (nearly 2.3 million people are behind bars which is greater than 1% of the U.S. population- an all-time high), talks a lot about the men and women he works with and their attitude towards inmates. He sees the common atrocities every day. Is not the measure of the "goodness" of a society dependent on how that society treats the worst and the least among them?
"Mindie," he says, "When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

The fact is that we can only pull apart and hate each other for so long. We must find new tools. We teachers must supply new tools for listening, for understanding and empathizing and for sewing our nation together again. "One nation, under God," does not specify the Christian or the Catholic or any particular mono- or polytheistic deity. It's also not "One nation, under single party control." However, "Religion is the single most important factor that drives American belief attitudes and behaviors," saysMichael Lindsay Assistant Director of the Center on Race, Religion and Urban Life at Rice University. "It is a powerful indicator of where America will end up on politics, culture, family life." And those factors all produce a student, sitting in a classroom, waiting to talk to me, to listen to me, to interact with those around them and hopefully, to share and find more tools.

Peace.

Why I Do What I Do

Sometimes I wonder why I do what I do. I get paid very little and don't have health, vision or dental insurance insurance. I haven't had my teeth cleaned in 3 years. Not that I need it; I avoid sugar and eat healthfully. My income tax return says that the government owes me money every year and they're sorry the taxed such a small amount of income. The refund check looks embarrassed. My monthly paychecks are pathetic, especially in summer when adjuncts are limited to a certain number of classes lest they fall into the full time category and then be afforded benefits.

And I'm a full time graduate student. I've been a full time student since 1997, earning a biology degree, an English degree and a master's. Now I'm coming up on my last year of college, ever. It's a scary thought. I returned to college because I can't make enough money as a teacher with a master's degree. If I want to help people- and really my life and focus as a teacher has been to help people- I need a doctoral degree. And the starting pay for what I want to do is around $35k per year. Yup. That won't even cover my student loan payments.

So why do I insist on teaching adults that they can find voices as writers? Why do I insist on returning to places that pay me peanuts so that I can spend time with reluctant writers and recovering addicts? It seems, well, a retarded strategy. I should by all rights just get a teaching certificate and take a cush job at a high end high school or private school and take summers off to relax and watch my 401k build up. Maybe plant a real garden. Maybe have some children and get a tan for heaven's sake. Spend time at the lake. Or the ocean. Travel.

Because sometimes I get a bigger kick and payoff than you'll ever find in a 401k. Sometimes, ok a lot of times, my students teach me more than I teach them.

I spent this summer semester shoving 16 weeks of curriculum down the 8 week program's throat. I don't believe in abbreviating the work. It has to be done. And tonight was the last night. I bought pizza for the whole class and gave the final exam. Students were to use the skills they had learned over the course of the semester to argue what their grades should be. They could refer to their essays, assignments, the syllabus and class and environmental notes or videos, handouts and anything else they thought would be helpful.

I have a lot of amazing students this semester. Among them are some pretty decent writers who just needed a little shove in the right direction to develop their confidence. One in particular stands out. In her forties, she wore glasses and dressed modestly and kept her long dark her neat and straight. She checked all of her work twice and worked closely with a few other students, rarely volunteering in class but writing insightful and grammatically sound essays. Overall, I got the distinct feeling she was paying attention.

She handed in her final tonight, thanked me (and I her), and quietly left the class. Her paper reflected thoughtful consideration of her work in the course and came to a logical conclusion that she deserved a particular grade for the course. I concur. Her paper was in correct MLA format and was of appropriate length and addressed all of the proper higher order and lower order concerns. I never worried about her a bit. She sat on the front row and showed up early, every single class period.

At the end of her paper, she wrote: "You know I am a convicted felon. I have been to prison a couple of times. I got my GED in prison. I always feel like an outcast. Like I am different, and should not speak about such things. I have never felt that way in your class. I need to thank you for that. I did not want to put that in the body of the paper but I wanted you to know what it meant to me."

The emperor has no clothes and I've no right to complain. I feel so small next to so tremendous a person. And grateful. How lucky am I to get to do what I do?