A concerned fellow teacher stopped me at lunch ‘concerned” because pre-sale posters put up by my yearbook students got “tagged.” Kids are always marking up things, especially posters that they think are lame, so I wasn’t too surprised. Then I remembered that the poster-makers insisted on “signing” their work as “Koolaide was here” in an open spot on the poster. But when I tried to explain this to the teacher, she disapproved the “gang” style of the writing. It didn’t help when I said something about not liking the way the poster-makers make their “E”s look like “L”s, to which she cracked, ‘well, you’re the teacher.” Right.
The reason for this heightened “gang-awareness” was that just before Spring Break a local eleven-year-old (not a student from my school) was senselessly shot and killed when walking home late at night from a neighborhood donut shop. At the following staff meeting the district’s gang-intervention officer came to speak. The gist of his argument was that staff and teachers cannot afford to be complacent about letting gang-like behavior on campus. That seemed pretty obvious. Alas, when he commented about rooting out signs of early gang interest the staff completely fixated on gang-styles of dress, as if the answer to this problem was to have the boys tuck in their shirts.
It’s all well and good for the gang officer to be confrontational and draw a hard line against anything that might contribute to tragic things like the eleven-year-old’s death. But I feel that getting in some of these kids’ faces about the color of their shirts and calling them out about this only makes the gap between their lives at home and ‘school life” all the greater. but then I’m the teacher who couldn’t get his little yearbooks kids to not use their silly “E”s that look like “L”s. what the hell do I know? jbb
Music/Podcast: this WEEK in MEDIA 87: Play With Lasers from the album “this WEEK in MEDIA (enhanced)” by Pixel Corps
