Value Your Education

A week or so ago, I walked into my classroom, and said this:

“This is a picture of Dorothy Counts. She was the first African-American to go to our school. She lasted four days. She was spat upon, had things thrown at her, and racial slurs screamed at her. Then her parents moved her to Pennsylvania to go to school there. If you could ask her any question, what would you ask her?”

“Why did you do it when you knew it would be so hard?”

“What were you thinking when people spat on you?”

“Why did you give up?”

“Good questions,” I told my class. “Let’s go ask her.”

They just looked at me, and then one student broke into a broad grin. “Aw, you’re playing us, Ms. W.”

“No. She’s in the media center. Let’s go ask her.”

“If you are playing us, I’m gonna be mad,” I heard from all over the class. But when we walked into the media center they got solemn. The jazz band was playing, chairs were set up in a row of honor, a buffet was set out, and clearly Ms. W hadn’t planned a prank this elaborate just to mess with students’ minds.

When Dorothy Counts-Scoggins entered, we stood up and cheered. This was living history, the first person like them to walk into the school. I looked around the crowd. Now it was all people like them. We’d gone right back to segregation. What had been won?

A senior, the school poet laureate, gave his slam poem about being on the verge of killing or being killed by his community. Then Dorothy Counts-Scoggins spoke. She told her story, and opened up for question. I was proud of one of my students for raising his hand twice. Another student I know from the National Honor Society delivered a bombshell: how do you feel when students don’t value their education, and all the hard work you did goes for nothing?

Ms. Dorothy turned it right back upon the students. “Why don’t you value your education? Why?” Students shifted uncomfortably. Teachers waited to see what they would say. One of my IB scholars raised her hand and spoke about lack of resources and illiteracy in high school. “How can someone who doesn’t know how to read because his teachers failed him in elementary, value a high school education?” I was proud of her for raising this point.

Dorothy Counts turned it right back around. “You have a voice? Get out there and get heard. Tell them about your lack of resources. Go to city council meetings and on social media. People will listen to you. Your voices matter.” As we applauded her, a surge of energy ran through the crowd. She had challenged them, and acknowledged their agency.

Yesterday I headed outside for my planning period. The art classes were on the quad, and after cheerfully heckling two of my best students with an art teacher who agrees that their academic game is on fleek, I sat down to grade with them. They headed inside a few minutes before the bell rang. I heard one of the campus security guards scream at someone with apoplectic rage, but it’s so common, I didn’t turn around to check it out. After the bell rang, the art teacher approached me.

“That was A being shouted at. He’s one of my best. You said he was one of yours, too, right?”

“That was A? Why on earth--?” We agreed that nobody should be shouted at like that. One of our best students, a tall, dignified young man who’s about to graduate, was screamed at for no reason other than that he was caught outside by security. If I’d been yelled at like that by an adult in high school, I would have cried, and then told my parents, who would have agreed that someone who screams at children like that has no place on a school campus.

This morning I stopped A at the door. “Ms. C and I, we heard you being yelled at yesterday, and we just, you know, you know you’re one of our best students, right? You shouldn’t let that bother you at all, okay?”

This is how our education system works. And still they rise.

He looked down at the floor as I struggled to articulate. “I understand,” he said shortly, and went inside. What do you understand, I wondered to myself. Do you understand that as a young black man it’s considered normal for people to shout at you? Do you understand how assumed culpability is written into your skin? Do you understand that after Baltimore, Mecklenburg County is the poorest in the nation, and one in which a child is least likely to change their socioeconomic status in the entire U.S., and therefore ripe for the same horrific scenes as those enacted in Baltimore? Do you understand the embarrassed guilt your two white teachers feel that we are not capable of physically shaking the world into sense? But then, he’s very smart. Of course he understands. Much more than I do.

I spent last night on Google drive, curating the massive study guide that my students were building together in preparation for their IB exam today. Towards the end of the night, I linked them a study about how sleep affects exam performance, and suggested they all go to bed. When I woke this morning and checked the spreadsheet, some busy bees were still on it, working through neurotransmission and the ethics of genetic research.

I walked my students to the door of the media center before their exam. I hugged the ones who needed it, and told them good luck as they went through the doors. I was a bit of a nervous wreck, but I exuded confidence as strongly as I could. Then I went to watch one of my favorite students become the commander of the whole school at the year’s JROTC awards ceremony. When I came out, my students were finishing their exam. I hovered by the door. Some told me it was easy, others ran over the studies they’d used nervously, hoping they were the right ones. As one of the top students in the class described what she’d written to me, a fight broke out behind her. Two students attacked each other viciously, and security guards rushed in to drag them bodily off of each other as a maelstrom of screaming students converged upon them. But my student never broke stride, ticking off cognitive psychology studies on her fingers. Here, I thought. Here is the answer to Dorothy Counts. Here is the student who values her education above all else.