tenth grade going on fourth grade

it's the tenth graders again. we'd done some standardized testing and i told them how they did. on paper they look like fourth graders. i'm not kidding. they're reading the way fourth graders do. how do they have any idea what goes on in the world? this is the sort of thing that keeps me up at night, makes me feel genuinely sad. they go through life believing that the way things are now is how they should be. they are planning to be things. to do things. to get jobs. and it's not likely that now, in tenth grade, anything is going to happen to change the way they read, so they're likely to walk out of high school reading the way a nine or ten year old child does and thinking that's okay.

and i do not want to be the one who opens their eyes to all this, but i'd be far more guilty if i kept my mouth shut. and i know you're thinking well, it's their own fault. but nobody gets this far into the world this unarmed for what's out there unless they had help. these are certainly children who have heard the word stupid out loud from adults who should have been trying to figure out how to help. teachers have said things like that to them. you'll never get this. just pay attention. why are you so stupid? parents have threatened and bribed without trying ever to get to the root of the problem. teachers have ignored, have walked away. and now there's this pile of big children in my room, functionally illiterate. i am pissed off. i want them to be pissed off. i want them to feel like they've been robbed because they have and i want them to get riled up enough to want to go out and get what's rightfully theirs- the ability to read and write the language they speak every day. so i tell them all this and they think it's cute. cute. this is going nowhere.

they prefer to think of themselves as lazy. plenty of folks have given them that out. told them they're lazy. and it's easier to think of yourself as lazy than unable. if you're lazy, it's a choice. i could read if i wanted to. i just don't want to. sigh. so we finished reading a bunch of essays about why teens are a mess, written by academic folks and included as part of our curriculum. they don't remember a thing about them. they're good essays, things i liked reading, but the kids don't see them as honest. another teacher suggested we try a book called killing the sky, a series of memiorlike essays by students at horizon academy, a school in riker's island (yes, the prison). now, generally when we read a book, i read it aloud to the class because they can't, but as i looked over the first story, written by someone named phat boi, i noticed that folks sitting in riker's island really aren't likely to write anything at a level much higher than fourth grade. this isn't nastiness i'm spewing here. i think if you're an adult reading and writing at a fourth grade level, you don't have many options these days. many of the options you do have will lead you to riker's. so we all got copies of the story and we did things a little bit differently.

i asked for volunteers. i got them. they like to read aloud, but they mess up a lot. when reading this first story, they found their own language on the page. they also found their own world. we talked for twenty minutes about why someone would call himself "phat boi" when "fat boy" is just as easy. we talked about language and power and how the way you choose to use language has a lot to do with your power. they asked if the way they write when they text is a dialect. technically, dialect refers to speech, but i think they're on the right track with the question. it identifies a community and allows them to communicate with each other a little differently than with the outside world. i love it when they're smart and they know it. i played as dumb as i could and asked them a whole bunch of questions about this child who ended up in prison. they took the questions seriously. if you're twelve and you're poor, selling drugs is really one of the few jobs you can get in the city. you can't exactly mow lawns. it's just the way the world is. when i asked why the author's mom didn't work harder to make her son stop using and selling, the kids were surprisingly sympathetic. what can she do? he's seventeen. she's trying to raise four kids. she's working day and night. the room started to feel heavier the more we talked. they don't hold adults accountable for anything. when i asked about a school and a cluster of teachers who knew this kid came to school high and saw him selling on the streets below, they said most teachers would do that. because what on earth do i expect it to change. i said i want it to change everything. i wanted to cry.

but they kept reading and were excited about the reading. they could read it and they had things to say about it after. when someone stumbled over a word, others said the word. this is a kindness, certainly, but also it feels so good to know a word someone else needs and be able to hand it over like that with grace, publicly. even when you can barely read. or maybe especially when you can barely read. and we came to a part of the story where the author was explaining how he'd been kicked out of school, how he'd been in all this trouble. he said he'd just had a bad day, wasn't feeling well. i'm lazy. but the kids knew and i knew they knew, so i asked them. is he lazy? no, miss. it's how he pretends there's nothing wrong. he's just hiding his problem. why? i asked. because he doesn't want to admit it. if he admits it there's work to do. and then i asked what i really wanted to know. do you think he knows what's really wrong? of course he does, they say. he knows exactly what's wrong.