“…they favorite 50 Cent song’s 12 Questions…”-Kanye West, “We Don’t Care”, The College Dropout, 2004
I don’t know about your city, but in my city…Washington, DC, that is…it seems to me like the children are getting dumber and more violent, all at the same time. I know, I know, its not nice to call kids dumb. But hell…if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck…it ain’t a moose! I think the saying goes something like that…and besides, I’m not making this shit up.
Anyway, I volunteer at one of them “inner-city alternative” schools. Hmmmmm…inner city AND alternative all in the same place? Yes. And what does that mean exactly?? Well you know how much I love definitions…
Inner-city alternative high school. noun. def. school where kids are all minorities and don’t care, teacher’s care but are smaller than the kids that don’t care, white people volunteer but are scared, black people don’t volunteer and are still scared, books are a moot point, absences occur more because of court dates than sickness unless it pertains to a violent crime, at least one kid has a gun on him at all times, they maintain an R.I.P. corner in the school…and ALL of the female hormonal girls will hit on the black male volunteer tutors just because (though I’m sure this goes on at every high school in America where there are actually black male teachers, like him)
Get the picture. Not sure you do…I’ll give you an example of a conversation I had with one of my students on the first day that I ever tutored at this school:
Prof. Panama: What did you get kicked out of school for???
Sherman aka Do Dirty: I shot this girl in the ass. Shit was only a bee-bee gun though…she ain’t have to run around yelling and shit like that, acting like it was a REAL gun…bitches.
Prof. Panama: (visibly concerned at his non-caring attitude about shooting somebody) Dog…WHY THE HELL DID YOU SHOOT HER???
Do Dirty: I had a gun…what else am I supposed to do with it??
At this point…I don’t know what had me more perplexed…the fact that he shot somebody on purpose and didn’t care or the fact that I couldn’t argue his logic with the gun. I mean…what ARE you supposed to with a gun aside from shoot it? That had me completely dumbfouned for a good hour. As a judge…I’d have to let him go…he stumped me.
I think I digressed somewhere though.
Back to the violent and dumber kids. The kids in inner city schools nationwide are doing poorly on standardized tests. Horrible even. So badly…Starbucks wants to take over the schools. And the kids are also shooting up people at alarming rates, at least here in DC (we’ve had a very violent summer around here with a large percentage of the shootings being committed by teens). So you’ll understand why this actual (a teacher in Chicago submitted this to an article I read) test question bothers the living shit out of me:
“Johnny has an AK-47 with a 40-round clip. If he misses six out of 10 shots and shoots 13 times at each drive-by shooting, how many drive-by shootings can he attend before he has to reload?”
Now, if you are anything like me, first and foremost…you’re gonna try to solve this problem. And then be mad when it takes you 30 minutes because they gave you all this extra shit in there to decipher through and then it finally dawns on you that you don’t need most of it leaving you to think to yourself…shit, and I have a degree and can’t figure this mess out…before you realize that, why are they using street violence and murder to relate math to kids????
Newsflash…this type of thing is happening at urban public schools across the country. You know why…because young ambitious and enthusiastic white teachers and some out of touch black teachers have no idea how to connect to their inner city students. They watch a little TV, you know a little bit of country, a little bit of rock and roll…check out BET and STARZ! and see what the kids are looking at…then voila! Little urban kids like guns and Menace II Society (a classic by the way)! Let’s teach them math this way. But really…by using stuff like this in schools, it’s almost like an acceptance of the situation. It’s like saying…this is your reality, let’s understand how to navigate through this reality, you endangered species, you!
The fact that they can’t answer the question, as witnessed at the school I’ve volunteered at for years now, doesn’t surprise me. But THIS does:
Panama: So what’s the answer Do Dirty??
Do Dirty: Man…I don’t know…who cares, besides, ain’t nobody using no damn AK-47′s anymore anyway. They too big and heavy. We need lighter stuff on the streets to conceal ‘em. Dog, DC got gun laws man…you can’t be rolling around with no AK…Desert Eagles and .45′s…that’s what you need, mo!
Hmmmmmmmm…dun son couldn’t answer the question, but knew that it didn’t make much sense either. I thought the AK thing was a little strange. Shit people haven’t used those since the Cold War ended and they ARE too big for the streets nowadays. Not the brightest kid on earth…but he knows his guns. At the University of Maryland-College Park, there was a seminar on helping teachers understand how to relate to the kids in the “streets”. I’m all for that…but using violence to get the point across just seems a bit odd to me.
Let’s use music references or something. Who doesn’t want to be an entertainer??? But no, we want to use violence and create an extra problem for ourselves.
Cuz when that little bastard who gets the answer right decides to apply his knowledge to his violence, figuring out ways to calculate exactly how many shots in yo’ ass he has before he has to pull some ninja shit to take out people in the streets, everybody is gonnnnnnnnnnnnnnna be mad.
There is a good side to this though…I think there’d be less innocent bystanders being shot. (Though I do have a theory on reducing innocent bystanders for a later post.)
The fact that kids nowadays can’t read or count is a big problem. The fact that kids nowadays are more violent is a huge problem. So why in the shit would we combine the two and teach them to count with violence??? Where is Sesame Street when you need it??? Ernie wasn’t packin’! The worst thing is, I almost understand the reasoning behind it. As a young energetic teacher coming from the suburbs or wherever and in attempts to connect with your students, finding common ground is hard enough. But attempting to use what happens on the streets to do it…sounds a bit fishy. Besides, shouldn’t we use things that are as far removed from the streets as possible to keep their minds off of what goes on out there? Like talk about flowers and trees and shit, not what they know about AK’s and AR-15′s/ equipped with night vision shell catchers and inf-beams, uh huh.
And don’t they/we have 50 Cent for this anyway?????
Maybe that only bothered me…but I’d really hate for a lot of these kids to be stuck seeing and hearing the same thing in school and on the streets and at home. They already ain’t learning standard stuff as evidenced by tests, why teach them how to be better criminals??? And I know this doesn’t happen everywhere. But it does happen in some places. Enough so that I read about this in the Washington Post, a paper that people read nationwide. And if I’m not mistaken…most of these kids don’t want to have to worry about drive-by’s and stuff so making them understand the math behind clips and guns is counterproductive. It’s like saying, this is your life, understand it. I don’t want that as my life…why am I gonna impress that upon them???
Of course…at least the teacher didn’t rent Dolemite and come up with this question…
“Johnny Whitegirl from San Francisco has 4 hoes and only 2 hands. Whenever one of his hoes gets out of pocket or comes up short with his money, he slaps her 3 times across the face and punches her twice in the stomach. If two of his hoes end up $25 short at the end of the night AND have the nerve to talk back, how many body blows will Johnny Whitegirl throw?”
And in case you’re wondering…the answer is 8.