I Survived...

My first two weeks as an academic tutor for GEARUP(Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs), a program at my alma mater that's designed to help Chattanooga middle & high school students get to, pay for, and succeed in college, and I couldn't be more pleased with myself.

I'm an English tutor at Howard High School of Academics & Technology, an all black school that was established in 1865 by the American Missionary

Society. The school has a bit of history attached to it with it being the first free public school in Hamilton County. In 1873, Howard School was incorporated into the Chattanooga School System and it was named after General Oliver Howard, Commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Its curricula includes courses in English, Foreign Language, Math, Science, Social Studies, "Career", Fine Arts, PE, and JNROTC --classes that most of us had in our own high schools years ago. However, there on block scheduling. Traditionally, schools schedule six or seven 40- to 55- minute classes per day. These classes usually meet for 180 school days per school year but with block scheduling there are fewer class sessions scheduled for larger blocks of time over fewer days. For example, in block scheduling, a course might meet for 90 minutes a day for 90 days, or half a school year. Does this type of scheduling have any advantage over more traditional scheduling methods? Schools that have tried it believe it does but from observing the behavior and attitudes of some students, I think not (but I won't get into all that in this post)...

My first day at Howard was an experience...the students were a mess; rude, disrespectful, cursing and talking back to their teacher and not paying any attention to instructions it seemed. It's a new semester for them so I suppose they were just testing her any which way they could to see how far they could go in pissing her off for the New Year. One female student came into 2nd block late and she was pregnant. I really wasn't ready to see this. I mean, it's 9th grade for crying out loud! You're immature, acne prone, uneasy around your peers but not pregnant. Of course, times have change and it's blatantly obvious that today's children, today's high schooler's aren't the similar to those 4 or 5 years ago. It seemed that the 3rd block students were uglier, louder and ruder and 4th block seemed to transcend what I'd thought about the previous blocks.

During 4th block, I watched these 2 boys constantly taunt one of their classmates. I mean, just picking at him for no reason at all, throwing paper wads, pen tops and pencils a the boy and name calling. Just watching this was working my nerves but I just wanted to see what the other boy would do before I said a word. When he took it upon himself to move away from the punks, I made my decision to speak up and them them to quit the foolishness & be quiet. One of them gave me a little lip service but I ignored him and minutes later, he was quiet, watching the movie and answering the questions his teacher had given him. The next day that I saw him, he apologized for being disrespectful. Ah, 1 point for me; 0 for the teenaged bullies EVERYWHERE!

From the academic perspective, the classes watched the animated movie Antz to supplement the reading of George Orwell's Animal Farm. Pixar's Antz isn't as child-centric as it seems for it deals with slightly more complex themes like conformity and war, similar themes found in the Orwell classic. I was amazed that Animal Farm had found its way onto the English 9 reading list. I don't think I read it until maybe my sophomore year in high school some years ago. For those that may have forgotten what the book's about (or have never even heard of it before), Animal Farm is a satirical novel, a modern fable if you will about a group of animals who oust the humans from the farm they live on and run it themselves, only to have it corrupted into a brutal tyranny on its own. It was written during World War II and published in 1945, although it wasn't widely successful until the late 1950s. Many events in the book are based on ones from the Soviet Union during the Stalin era. I re-read the book this Christmas and found it far more enjoyable than when I was 16 and slightly oblivious. Of course, these students are having a difficult time finding any interest in the book at this moment...

I spent a lot of time just observing the students, trying to figure out the approach I wanted to take in getting to know them and having them respect me as an adult. You know it's so easy to look into the faces of these students and see the nothingness that the our society expects from them.

At first glance, they're unruly, ghetto teens-they have no respect for themselves, each other or even the administration. You look a little deeper, there's more to shock you-some of them are academically behind, emotionally unstable and utterly immature. BUT, what if there's more? There's got to be more, right?

If only these students could get a glimpse into their futures, see what happens if the status quo is actually accepted and not challenged. Would they then show each other a little more respect? Apply themselves? Prove society wrong about its expectations of them? Or are they too far gone to even know the difference, to even know that there is more for them but that they have to start caring more aobut themselves to really achieve...

Lately, I've wondered if I can make some difference in their lives some how. I suppose that time can only tell.