here's what's on my mind today...

at this job so much more than the last two, i am getting a sense of how completely the students' lives are overshadowed by gang violence. every one of them has lost someone close to them. every week someone knows someone who is killed. already this year more people have died in Chicago than in our armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan combined, and every one of them is known to some of our students - it's a small world they live in and all the violence is in that world. then this past week a police officer was killed, which is always a huge, huge deal in chicago - more so than other towns, chicago worships its police officers. the whole newspaper front page is always dedicated to the fallen hero (he's always a hero of course) and pics of the man and the funeral etc. are everywhere. so of course, on thursday, the police came to our school around 10 in the morning and arrested one of the students in connection with the murder. great. his life is over, whether he is set free or not - the police do not forgive in these cases and they'll torture him. :( i think of him just being his carefree self and now he'll be in some way erased. later that same Thursday i gave a major test and two of the students had a complete meltdown during the test - screaming and yelling, had to be removed from the test and have their scores invalidated. all the students get so completely agitated and wacky every time someone dies or - in this case - is arrested right out of school. a few weeks ago one of my students had a party where a guy was killed. the hostess of the party was blamed and she was receiving death threats. somehow she kept coming to school - extremely brave of her under the circumstances - but her work took a nosedive. she's a senior expecting to graduate but she is not going to at this rate. their lives are so disrupted, disturbed, distorted, dismembered by all this violence. when i showed some paintings from the 20's and 30's, one of the paintings depicted a large group of people enjoying a nightclub and another group at a barbecue - and several students independently wrote on their papers that these were great images of "a time when African-Americans could get together without fights breaking out." they are so sure it's because of their race and that it's inevitable - that "there will always be violence" as they say whenever i raise the idea of a solution to violence. it's incomprehensible to them that 90% of the world does not live in a situation like theirs - or that this is not because of some inevitable fact of birth. to them violence is such an all-pervasive and permanent fixture of their lives.

my own chicago tour

So... I chose some high schools that were spread around the near-south, southwest and west sides, and had google make me an itinerary to drive by all of them.

Took me close to three hours... went down to the grand old campuses of Dunbar and DuSable, which have graduated all sorts of famous people since the mid-19th century and are now being re-envisioned as "small schools" within one building... drove across to the Latino neighborhood out by Cermak & Cicero... then up and under the Ike to another Black neighborhood just this side of Oak Park (that was freaky, when I took a wrong turn and tumbled out of the projects & churches into mansions and lawns like Alice tumbling out of the rabbit-hole)... and then on back home.

Wow.

First of all, there are a lot of poor people in Chicago, and it isn't a pretty sight. Faces and bodies beaten and battered, lined with care, jumping at noises or slumping in corners. I have spent a good bit of time in poor neighborhoods in the U.S., but not recently... I guess I'd forgotten.

Of course there were families hanging on stoops and children playing in fire hydrants, but also blocks & blocks of dead factories and boarded up shops, only the liquor stores open for business.

The Latino neighborhoods were much less depressing - plenty of beauty shops and taquerias, small neighborhood enterprises and larger shopping centers too. I asked R why it's like that and she said it's pure racism - people won't make loans to would-be Black small business owners, and don't open stores in those neighborhoods.

Anyway.

I had two reactions... well I had a lot of reactions but I'll discuss two. First, it was hard to tell what I was actually seeing and what was just my own projections. I tried to make myself look for the little details that convey genuine information - flowers in window-boxes and lawn ornaments or plantings in the front yard mean the neighborhood isn't really that bad; bars on the windows, stripped cars on the streets, garbage everywhere mean it is. (I didn't see many blocks that were that bad - and heck, I lived on blocks like that in NYC!)

Second, driving that vast area - according to Google I drove forty miles - made it really clear what my place is in the scheme of it all - specifically - very small. The people on the stoops and corners, in the taquerias and auto body shops, they aren't waiting for me to come and save them. Their lives will go on much the same whether I teach in their neighborhood or not.

I've talked w my therapist (aka OLIF) about how to have good boundaries with my work, not try to save the world at the cost of my health and sanity, etc. This little drive actually really helped with that. It was clear that I should choose a job based on what will be fulfilling for me.

I love to teach students who struggle with different kinds of obstacles or challenges, but I will choose a job with those students because I love it, not because I harbor delusions of being some kind of savior or messiah. There are miles and miles and miles of those students and I will not make a dent in the big picture (if I do it will be through activism in some other realm).

But hopefully I will have a fulfilling and interesting job for the rest of my life, and hopefully there will be some whose lives will be better because of me, and that's good enough.

Still processing all this...