Soapbox

So, nothing against South Caldwell, Home of the Spartans, and nothing against Caldwell County, where our native speakers tend to loose and L when we pronounce it (and an R in library... so frustrating),  but I feel like I got the tough end of the stick when I watch this video from Oprah.

Now, my school wasn't that terrible (and the merca was cleaned up super fast out of those locker rooms), but we didn't have an Olympic sized pool (yeah, half hour daily bus rides to Lenoir for swim team!) or a cardio room, so the comparison was just ridiculous. I had to watch all this for my education class, as well as read a ton of boring stats on how poverty is going up in the South and how, nation-wide as well as in the South, the United States is on its way to becoming a majority minority county. All right, I say boring because I want to block it out of my heart. Not the minority part, I'm totes cool with the increasing diversity of the country, I think it'll be awesome, but I'm not up for watching more kids live in poverty. I'm not ready to see our school system become anymore shameful than it already is.

So today I bring you my blackboard post for my teaching class. I got on a roll and then I got on a soap box and then I brought in a personal story and then I jumped up and down on my soapbox and then I clicked submit. In this class, my goal is to get an A and fly under the radar, so I kinda want to take my post back. I don't want to sound like a self-righteous jerk. "You, yes you, are funding the corporate empire that is America that ignores its poor and needy and you don't even care enough to make a well-phrased yet passionate complaint about it." Holy schnikes, if you're going to lecture me about how much I care about students and education, jerk in my education class, I am going to walk away before I send a virtual punch in your direction. I know it's bad. I want to hear how you're going to fix it. I want to hear how you're going to care, as in a verb, a thing you do. Or maybe your school system didn't cover that tense, you know, the future tense where you go and do something. *Breathes heavily* Jerk.

Enjoy my soapbox.

 "One thought that really hit me as I went through this material is how blase I was about it. Through most of it, just reading the stats on the segregation or the majority of students living in poverty or reading the stories about kids going to classes in trailers, I was wondering why anyone was surprised by this. I kept thinking back to the video [Oprah!], where the suburban students were shocked at coming to the other school, at the cracked seat in the weight room and the leaking gym. I spent a fair amount of time in my high school weight room for swim team and we had cracked seats too. And with the tracking and de facto segregation, again, that's just how schools are. I kept thinking, "And your point is?"

What I'd like to see is not more revealing stories, unless they're directed at the people at the top of the pyramid who might not yet realize what it's been like here at the bottom, but ways to correct the disparities. I was encouraged by a couple of the stories at the beginning of the Kozol reading [The Shame of the Nation, Jonathan Kozol, Chapter 7, Excluding Beauty] where teachers were still able to make a kid-friendly environment even though their school buildings were terrible. Teachers shouldn't have to work through that, but they should be able to, you know, to make the best of their surroundings.

Also, shout out to the band! It made it as one of the more racially diverse organizations [Clotfelter, Inside Schools, Chapter 5, Classrooms and School Activities]. Band can be like athletics- they raise their own money for equipment. I went to a school where the band director worked to raise the money for new instruments. The first french horn I learned to play on was duct-taped together (that's a great story) but I was still able to learn music well enough to place into the district band and into an ensemble here [at Carolina]. By my senior year of high school, I had worked up to one of the newer, better instruments and my old horn was only being used because our program and section had out-grown the instrument purchases [OK, so Childers bought a bunch of new mellophones my freshman year {I learned on an altonium, before he bought them, that was a party as well} so the french horn story isn't 100% true, but it would have been, if he would have just bought a couple of nice double horns... or bought replacement string for the ones that were there... and maybe did some welding... I digress].

So, I guess, coming from a high school with a ridiculously high drop-out rate, a middle school in a building that was built almost a hundred years ago and an elementary school where the academically gifted program was held in a trailer, I'm not surprised by the disparities between rich and poor and the segregation that still goes on. I'm just ready to see our nation move past it, to a time where success stories don't have to happen."