From Mr. Stickfigure's Archive of the Unpublished

Saying Maybe to Urban Education

Maybe I’m starting to guess what happens to guys like me, if they’re lucky, who stay in urban education. Maybe we become those principals with the fierce eyes and the cutthroat dedication to our students’ performance. Maybe we even write books for educational publishing that outline our program and philosophy. Maybe we give seminars and get involved with teacher-training at the colleges. But always with that fierce look in our eyes, that look that says: “Get between me and these children’s test scores, and I’ll cut your throat!”

Good god, that’s not for me. I feel like the Adam of education. I look around at my brethren and I tell them, “I have seen it! ‘Twas a paradise I knew as a boy.”

Schools have to be based on children playing, don’t they? Yes, there must be discipline, but that starts with the adults, who must have the discipline to hold the world at bay, to make the space where their children can play together in an atmosphere of warmth and safety. Who believes, out in this godforsaken land, that what kids really need is a little time and room to play? Who has time to believe this when the children can barely read, barely do math, barely stay children another day?

But I have seen it, brothers and sisters.

And what was it, really, but a community raising its children the best that it could? Is that paradise so lost to us that to expect it of our communities and our schools is to expect the miraculous? Maybe it is too much to expect. Maybe we are too used to seeing our young men die in the street and our young women turn tricks there. Or maybe we thought those young men and women were not a part of our community. What were we teaching them in our schools before they were turned out? How many of them had enough time to play?

And how much more fierce will my stare have to be if I am to carve out the space to play for the little children of my ghetto school? I don’t think I could bear it. And I don’t think I could bear it if I succeeded and I had to look around at all of the other schools spitting our children back out onto the streets.

So put it this way: It’s fight or flight. Maybe it’s worth it to try, maybe I’d be lucky enough to succeed. Maybe someone else might get something from it. Maybe it’d make a difference. But I still don’t know if I can be one of those principals with eyes as fierce as silver badges.

When my eyes become that way, whole cities will move.

Until then, I make no promises to urban education.