You Might Be Here. (Field Notes #1)

I'm excited - and a little apprehensive - for the next four weeks. We'll be doing field visits at other schools, spending two weeks each in the classrooms of two previous residents. The schools are different from our own, and more like those - indeed may be the very ones - where we will teach next year. We are given official school "report cards," which I study with a few grains of salt - knowing they are only rough gestures toward a picture of students I can't yet know.



Children are more dynamic than numbers, but these numbers should startle you. They are as telling of their audience as they are of their subject. At CAHS, where we're doing our residency, the students are mostly low-income, but their ethnic make-up is unusually well-balanced for CPS - roughly 40% Hispanic, 25% African American, and 25% White (mostly Polish, Russian, and Eastern European). At the Excel school at Orr High, where I will be on Monday, the students are 97.3% low-income and 86.2% African American. At Little Village, where I will spend the weeks surrounding Thanksgiving, the students are 99% low-income and 98.9% Hispanic. These curious statistical pies - composed almost entirely of one solid slice - are the norm for Chicago's schools, if not always its neighborhoods. A city whose public school students are 8.2% White and 85.9% low-income. A deeply flawed city, one I love very much.



Unlike some of my fellow residents, I don't really know what schools like these are like. (The suburban high school I spent my most formative years escaping had its own, very different, racial and institutional dynamics.) Though we've read and talked about them for months, I don't know who these students are I'll be teaching. What I do know is that I can't wait to meet them, and I've decided that's a pretty good start.

Among my instructions for meeting my new students, to be added to the "texts that need a close reading" list: "Don't worry about the metal detector - they don't stop adults."

For the purpose of finding my way, my mother's words yesterday were much more meaningful to me. She told me, "you are a survivor." Reading that, I found myself crying, and realized I was crying with how good it felt for someone to see that in me. That is the feeling I want for my map.


____________

The photos are by Stephen Shames, from his series on child poverty in Chicago, circa 1985. There are fewer photographs from the American ghettos of the 21st century. Perhaps our media is too saturated with images of the terror we are cultivating abroad to make room for the terror of our children at home. And yet the poverty, hopelessness, and violence persist, unrecorded.