Number of times my students have used YOLO in their WWI
essays: 7 since I started counting. Apparently war brings out the YOLO.
In another class, a student was asked to write a letter to
an administrator about how to improve the school. This was her response:
Is she racist, or is she right? Would increasing the number
of white students also automatically (or statistically?) increase the number of
affluent parents worried about their students’ surroundings and both willing
and able to donate time, money, effort, networking skills and organization to
their children’s school? While I admit that the segregation in the school
system is disgusting and directly connected to the inequity evident across the
system, I’m hesitant to phrase the issue as solvable by pumping in white
children as a magical panacea. The white children in themselves won’t do much.
The amount of attention and resources they statistically bring with them might.
Then again, when I speak to friends teaching in rural North Carolina, I’m less
certain.
This morning I was previewing a video that I’m showing my
kiddies about doing what you love in life (to contrast with an article entitle
“Attention Grads: Don’t Do What You Love”), and kept playing it again and again, distracted from my planning as the
panoramic vagueness unfolded. I’m a sucker for lofty rhetoric. It’s probably why
I joined TFA in the first place. And blog. Anyhow, I kept wondering whether such
privileged problems even matter to my kids. I spent high school loftily certain
that I would do whatever I wanted regardless of money, and it works for me
because I came to it from a position of privilege, but what does it mean to
make that decision from the standpoint of poverty? What is so inspiring to me might seem mockingly out of reach to a good third of them. On the other hand, I have to let them listen to this wondrous accent.
I’ve been going through a slew of hateful end-of-semester
phone calls to parents of students who have racked up so many absences that
there’s some kind of legal obligation involved, and to parents of students who have
never done their work so have astoundingly low grades, and to parents whose
manners over the phone explain appallingly why their students speak the way
they do, or else trying to get in touch with parents or guardians who, one by
one, disclaim responsibility for the child until I’m left in a hopeless loop
that ends me back at the school counselor’s office.
To offset this, I decided this week to call all the good kids’ parents. I informed parents
that their kids were student of the month, or top of the class, or had helped a
friend through a difficult day. I got to tattle on kids who donated school supplies
to the classroom or gave me artwork to hang or did every single extra credit
project to bring their grades to astounding 114s. These parents were surprised,
and grateful, and one of them cried to hear that her son is near the top of the
class and one of the most astoundingly sweet students I have, so happy was
she to hear that she’s "doing something right" (not exactly lofty rhetoric but certainly dramatically uplifting). Another told me that they’d
framed and hung the “student of the month” award her daughter had brought home.
Probably I shouldn’t be printing them on bright orange paper. Sometimes,
after dealing with completely unreceptive parents, I forget how wonderfully
attuned other parents are, and how meaningful it is to them to hear about their
children’s successes. These students, the ones about whom I can call home to praise their hard work and intellectual curiosity and strength of character, are my focus for the remainder of the semester. 
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