Now, after the students have dutifully finished their work within that structured format, we have to grade them using some new rubric system. What the hell a rubric system is, I don’t even freaking know, but we are expected to hand out rubric sheets to the students so they can see how they are being graded. Yo! Who the fuck, what the fuck, how the fuck?! This is the most ass-backward, unintelligent bullshit ever! And they expect this to work in classrooms at Rikers. Puleeeaze!
My brain is buzzing with a swarm of trapped hornets trying to find a way out. I want to scream. All of the teachers are looking around the room at each other, but the robot is unmoved by our collective body language, which is clearly saying not pleased. She pretends to ignore us. Everyone is grunting, sighing loudly, signifying, throwing shade, and shaking our heads. We are so bewildered. One of my coworkers asks, “How are we supposed to implement this? It’s confusing and very awkward. I don’t know how this can work.” Silly teacher, not to worry, there will be several subsequent staff development meetings that will be facilitated by two women from Australia, whose company designed this brilliant rubric system. They’ll explain it just fine, the assistant principal insists.
My nostrils flare. I glare at her like Nunu from Sankofa when she made her slave master choke on his tongue just by staring at him, using her old African magic. I wish I remembered that magic. This meeting and what’s coming out of her mouth keeps getting more and more insane. I can’t believe the Board of Education contracted a company all the way across the globe, from Australia, to come to New York City and administer a whack-nonsensical-dumb-ass rubric system for kids in jail. What I would like is for these Aussie heifers, along with the bozo superintendent, to spend three days in a regular inner-city classroom in America, in New York City, and then bring their asses to Rikers Island school for three days and then tell me if that forty-five-minute lesson plan and rubric system is apropos. What an obvious waste of state money, time, and resources that could and should be allocated more productively.
All the teachers look superpissed; we are not feeling Evilene, this wicked witch from The Wiz.
A lot of side conversations are happening and secret notes are being passed among us. Now we’re the rug rats. With the staff morale already low, this is nothing less than a bully’s fistful of sand in the face. I’ll never survive this assault on my creative teacher-flow, a lane that I’ve just found my groove in.
We have all been dealt the most demoralizing blow to the joy of teaching. I’m ready to quit and plan my escape. I feel crushed like a tin can beneath the heel of a rigged system much stronger than me. I cry uncle, they win, I lose… fuck it. But before I throw in the towel and the baby out with the bathwater, I seek advice from one of the seasoned vets. Maybe there is a way around this; maybe I’m overreacting. I reach for insight and discernment from Mr. Shepard, who teaches a few doors down from me. He’s an older white man with a lot of gray hair and walks with a funky bop, shoulders slightly hunched over from the weight of wisdom, always clutching a mound of papers. Mr. Shepard is a veteran teacher with major service-duty stripes from this battlefield. He’s been teaching on the Rock for twenty-five years and has one of the few advanced academic classes that teaches GED-level curriculum and college prep. Unlike my class, which is pre-GED, Mr. Shepard’s class is more focused because the GED test is in immediate sight and graduation is within reach, so the guys don’t cut up as much. They can taste success.
Part of his academic curriculum is teaching the guys chess and introducing them to college prep courses. Shepard gets respect and results. I seek him out for counsel on this monstrosity of expectations we were just slapped in the face with. Surely, in his twenty-five years of active duty, he’s seen worse and has managed to navigate it successfully. He’ll know what this is, what to do, and help me to put it in perspective.
“Ms. Peterson,” Mr. Shepard says and pauses to let out a deep sigh, “never in my twenty-five years of teaching here have I ever felt so overwhelmed, crushed, and demoralized.” Shepard’s face turns red, his eyes become bright blue puddles, and he looks like he just might cry. Not Shepard, he’s the vet! Oh shit, this is serious. He continues his spitfire lament. “This woman has taken the t out of teaching, along with the fun, in one fell swoop! I got my time in, Ms. Peterson, and I could have retired a while ago, but I didn’t because I love what I do. I genuinely love teaching these guys. But it looks like I just got my exit date.”
This is personal for Shepard—this is all he’s known and dedicated his life to for a quarter of a century. I’m just angry and petulant, but Shepard, he’s wounded and defeated. He isn’t done venting and seems relieved that I’m asking him for his insight. He has no qualm about sharing his strong opinion. “Ms. Peterson, I’ve seen administrations come and go, but I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s terrible what they’re doing,” he says, letting out another deep breath as he shakes his head. “I guess I have to figure something out. I sure wish I could have been more optimistic, Ms. Peterson. I have to go sit down for a minute. I just lost my grounding.”
Now I’m ready to cry. This is completely counterproductive, bureaucratic nonsense. It creates anxiety, erodes morale, and succeeds in providing useless data for disconnected administrators while depriving teachers on the front lines of the experience of actually teaching. It creates obstacles for students to actually learn, think critically, and develop. Perhaps that is the intended plan. The school-to-prison pipeline seems to be playing out, right in front of my face. Urban kids are disengaging from school because so much of the curriculum is not relevant; it’s antiquated and the approach is stale. Music programs have been cut. Memorization for testing supersedes critical thinking and inspiration. The kids are tuning out and acting out and being systematically herded from public school straight into the criminal justice system. Just follow the dollars. There is a rush to incarcerate rather than educate. The pipeline is clear: metal detectors and cops in schools. Overcrowded, underresourced classrooms. Outdated textbooks. Overworked, underpaid teachers. Cultural competency not required. Students criminalized for disciplinary issues that would normally warrant a trip to the principal’s or dean’s office now are whisked away to central bookings and Rikers. I see a diabolical setup. I was shocked, but not surprised, to learn that many states calculate the number of future prison beds they’ll need based on failing reading levels of third graders. Funds are allocated based on these projections, so those beds have to be filled. It’s a prison preorder.
The war on poor, Black, and Latino youth is real in the field. Kids who can’t read are more likely to drop out of school and enter the underground (criminal) economy to survive. Kids who can’t think critically or creatively usually wind up with mediocre, low-paying line-worker jobs and are more likely to toe the line and not make waves in society, like robots. Work, work, work, and obey. Consume a bunch of things you can’t afford (and don’t need), watch the idiot box, drink and smoke, self-medicate, go to sleep, and repeat the cycle. People who are paralyzed by poverty, racism, and lack of access to adequate educational resources and employment opportunities, and are depressed, are much easier to control and exploit in order to maintain a permanent underclass. Keep the poor poor, and the rich richer.
Money, greed, power, and control are the sole interest of big-business plutocrats who pull the strings in the United Corporations of America. Mass incarceration is big business and works hand in hand with having communities of uneducated, underemployed, uninspired people; both feed the appetite of a caste system designed to keep the superwealthy in power and in control. If you’re poor and want freedom, education, and justice, you’ve got to snatch it off the shelf, because it’s not meant for you in the first place. The game is rigged. Poor Black and Latino kids are fighting against a well-oiled machine. The prison system is a racket and the current public education system is its partner in crime. Kids have to be anomalies and teachers have to be renegade third-eye warriors to counter this Matrix. My older sister, Leslie, and I talk about this and ot
her conspiracy theories all the time. We speak the same tongue. She said, when you look at the history of racism in this country and the relentless violent and economic assaults on African Americans, starting with hundreds of years of slavery, then the Civil War, followed by Reconstruction, thousands of acres of land and property being stolen from us, thousands of lynchings, decades of segregation/Jim Crow terrorism, murderous attacks on the Black Panthers, COINTELPRO, all the way through to today with merciless police brutality and state-sponsored murders of unarmed citizens and unyielding mass incarceration and hyper-unemployment, how can any serious thinking Black person not connect the obvious dots and see a strategic campaign of terror and conspiracy against us? She also said public schools aren’t designed to really teach the poor; they’re designed to program them and keep them obedient and complacent citizens who aim low. I can’t wait to call her when I get home. After today’s meeting, I need some reinforcement and a lifeline from my swami big sis.
My rage against this unfair machine and my conspiracy theories are riled up, making my blood pressure rise. Stress is a trigger for my migraines and I feel one coming on after all that ranting I did in this overactive head of mine. I drift off into a freestyle soliloquy.
I’m convinced that this new rubric system they expect us to implement is designed to fail. How else do you explain piling bureaucratic red tape on top of teachers who are already underpaid and overworked, with obscenely overcrowded classrooms and outdated materials? And how do you not support teachers who have to navigate layers of complex behavioral issues with students stumbling into class from urban war zones? How do you document measured outcomes for a super-shy or super-angry student who never participates but suddenly, through consistent encouragement, gradually begins to take risks and participates… even smiles? How do you determine measured outcomes for the immeasurable?
I work myself into a tizzy.
I know I’m not the problem and I know I’m working in a Goliath of an oppressive system, but yet I still manage to leave the meeting questioning if I am a good teacher. Doubt is mounting at warp speed. The meeting unleashed my inner gremlins. Those ANTs, automatic negative thoughts, begin running amok again, marching loudly. I am spiraling fast into a self-deprecating morass of self-sabotage that sounds like: You suck, you’re weak, thought you had this shit, didn’t you? You big dummy. Loser. Your artist failed and now your teacher has too, Miss Georgetown University… ha! And you still ain’t got health care or two pennies in savings… your plan ain’t working, hussy! You ain’t ringing no bells, honey. And you lonely. So just what the hell are you doing with your life anyway?
God, I am so mean to me. I hate when I bully myself into depression.
This afternoon, after the crippling meeting, I decide to let the kids watch a movie when they come up from lunch. I reach for Ray, the film about Ray Charles’s life, brilliantly played by Jamie Foxx. I want to listen to the blues and sit in the dark. This’ll take me to the end of the day and then I can go home, crawl into bed, call my sister, and cry myself to sleep.
I walk in slow motion back to my classroom to get ready for the rug rats, who will soon be returning from lunch. Killa’s squeaky art cart can be heard rolling down the hallway and I poke my head out to wave him over. The kids are late coming back up from lunch, so we have some time to chat it up in my doorway for a bit. Still exhausted and reeling from that obnoxious, deflating staff development meeting, I shake my head nonstop in stunned disbelief. “Killa, what was that straight-out-of-bizarro-land meeting all about, really? It felt like an assault. Is she serious? I’m kinda fucked up right now and… I don’t know how much longer I can last in this place. What a load of jumbo bullshit! My God! Christmas break can’t come fast enough. I’m crossing off days on the calendar like I’m serving time.”
Killa leans on his cart, which overflows with construction paper, colored pencils, markers, art books, and his infamous radio with a collection of hip-hop mixtape CDs on the lower tier. “Sis, did you see the expression on everybody’s face? Nobody was feeling it, not even the assistant principal’s usual ass-kissers. All it takes is one administrator to suck the life out of a place. She’s the reason why I stopped doing my annual Christmas play for the guys. I’m not doing it this year because I didn’t feel like being bothered with all her restrictions and no support. The woman doesn’t have a creative bone in her body, nor a humorous one either. She’s too uptight and, quite frankly, mean and weird.”
I’m still stuck on Killa mentioning a Christmas play. “Wait, you used to put on Christmas plays for the guys?” I ask, totally and utterly intrigued.
“Aww, man, sis, a few years back, this place used to be really fun. Me and a couple of teachers got together to put on a Christmas program for the guys. You know the holidays are rough, so we wanted to do something to cheer them up. Now, in the past, they used to have people come in to sing corny Christmas carols and have these dry presentations. So I decided one year to do a Christmas skit and got the teachers and even a couple of COs down to play different characters.”
I know this Christmas play he’s fixing to tell me about is gonna be a riot.
“Killa, you did a play with characters and the actors had actual lines?” I ask, hyping up the suspense and drama—not that he needs it, but it makes story time more fun, being his hype man and all.
“Sis, I had more people wanting to be in it than I had room for. First, I started off with a rap about Santa getting robbed in Brooklyn, which was the introduction. I had the whole auditorium of two hundred guys cheering me on. It was great. Then the play just took it over the top…”
“Oh, my goodness, I know it was crazy—what was the play about?”
“Sis, it was a dope play if I do say myself. I played Santa and I had a crew of Black and Puerto Rican elves working for me, but for low wages. The elves got tired of the low pay and devised a plan to get paid to supplement their income. I was a stingy and mean, Scrooge-type of Santa, the kind of boss you hate. Like assistant principal lady. So, behind my back the elves started moving cocaine through the toys and were getting their hustle on right under my nose. The cops got tipped off and when they searched the toys, Santa gets busted and goes to jail. So I’m in my Santa outfit going to central booking, getting fingerprinted, and I wind up on the Rock, at Rikers Island. The guys extort Santa for his boots and hat and wouldn’t let him touch the phone.”
I am rolling with laughter. “Oh snap, Santa was food!”
“Exactly, sis, it was hilarious ’cause I used all the jail slang the guys were used to, so they were going crazy in the auditorium, laughing, having a good time. Even the COs were laughing. It gave them a chance to escape. Everyone was human and for just a moment it wasn’t jail; we were at a Broadway show.”
I start clapping my hands like a giddy kid. “Killa, this is fabulous. Finish, finish before the kids come up!”
“So, Santa had to fight for the crib and got sent to the bing because someone planted a banger* on him. Mrs. Claus finally bailed him out and, for Christmas, Santa hit everybody off with commissary. It was one of the best assemblies we had here. Everybody, staff and kids, was talking about it for weeks because some of them never experienced anything like that in their lives, let alone in jail. It was a positive experience in a place full of violence and rage. I did it out of love, sis. I saw a need for laughter, because it helps the guys get through the day. That’s why I tell jokes and clown around with the guys in class; it makes it easier for them to learn.”
I see a couple of boys in beige khakis walk by. Their government-issued uniform indicates they’ve been sentenced and have a release date—they’re either going home or upstate. Sometimes, for some reason, the sentenced guys are the first ones back from lunch. I know the rest of the gremlins are about to flood the halls at any second.
“Wow, Killa—that was great! Damn, I wish I could have been here to see that. That sounds classic!”
Killa beams. “It was truly classic, sis. Things have changed a
lot; the morale is not the same. Even though this was jail, we still knew how to have fun in between the madness. But this lady here, forget it. She’s not a happy person.”
I sigh in agreement. “She’s miserable. I don’t know what I’m gonna do, Killa. You know I love the kids but this shit here—who can work under her grip with no flexibility, no freedom, no fun… no room for creativity!”
Killa tilts his head and pauses in thought as he looks at me with sage eyes. “Sis, I always told you, don’t let this place rob you of your essence. Remember, you’re an artist first. I have a wife and four kids so I can’t be as impulsive as I used to be. Do what you gotta do, sis; this is just a pit stop for you.”
Just then, one of the rug rats pretends to turn on Killa’s radio, making Killa go into a martial arts stance, playfully challenging the kid. “Yo, son, don’t touch my radio, or I’mma have to make it hot.”
The kid laughs and asks, “Yo, Killa, we got you next?”
“Yeah, man, I’m coming to your class now,” Killa responds as he shoos him away and pushes his squeaky cart out of my class.
“Oh aight, ’cause my son told me you was nice with the freestyle rapping. You gonna let me hear something, Killa?”
“Go to class, man. We’ll see.”
The kid pushes. “But I wanna hear how nice you are.”
“I don’t just rhyme on demand like a circus monkey… it depends on the vibe. I’m an artist.” Killa cuts his eye at me, punctuating “I’m an artist,” and then winks.
Killa has a reputation for entertaining the kids and they all enjoy his playful antics. He knows how to talk to them using slang while introducing new vocabulary at the same time. Like a big brother or favorite uncle, he’s skilled at engaging them in thoughtful discussions, offering new perspectives on life, all while the kids are working in class drawing or sketching something, being creative. Killa has Zen magic. He’s like the black-and-white yin and yang ring he wears on his finger.
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