Here’s a piece I wrote in one of my grad classes.  The assignment was to write about a significant event in your life in three pages or less.  Here she is.

Family Dinner
Pleasantries. Oh, the pleasantries that evening. My family dinner table was not one that usually entertained a lot of manners.  Mouths full of food talking, elbows everywhere, reaching over each other to grab some box-prepared meal before Michael ate it all.  Bickering. There was usually a lot of bickering.  But I came home knowing that Mom and Jessie would be out of town, so the usual sources of dinner explosions were not around.  Just me and the boys.  Oh, and Heidi the dog, begging under the table for food as usual.  Good old dog.  If all went horribly wrong, at least she would still love me.

Michael was sitting next to me as promised.  Thankfully he had forgiven me for all the torment I put him through as a child.  He had LOLed at me on Instant Messenger earlier in the week.  He was sitting next to me now.  He’s a good brother.  Makes me laugh.  Has my back when it matters.

Matt finished eating and ran up the stairs to go play video games without much of a word.  Now was the time.  I thought back to the night before, at the concert in the dorm cafeteria.  It was such a cheesy setting for the biggest realization of my life so far. But it was there, with my friends around me, rocking out next to the tray return, that I knew this was not just some college experiment that would be a major turn on for some future boyfriend.  And for the first time, it didn’t feel threatening.  It didn’t feel uncomfortable, unholy, conflicted, or any of that.  It felt like home.  So I called up Michael and asked him to help me out with my conservative Catholic father.  As usual, he laughed.  “Oh, I wouldn’t miss this for the world, Rach.”  I knew it was more about the entertainment factor than the moral support, but hey, he was there. I didn’t have to do it alone.

I took a deep breath: “So … Dad.  I told you I wanted to talk with you about something over dinner.” He was shoveling another bite of Stovetop in his mouth as he looked up at me expectantly.  Good old Dad.  So kind.  So proud of his daughter.  So excited I was at his alma mater earning my degree. He was more excited than I was the day they moved me into my dorm, while I sat in the back of my mom’s minivan smoking a cigarette, already annoyed at my new neighbors.  I didn’t think he was going to be so excited about what came out of my mouth next.  Yes, college had taught me many things.  Biology.  Chemistry.  US political history.  How to be a lesbian.  Oh Lord. This was going to be difficult.

“Yeah, Rach, what’s up?”  He had this crumb on the side of his face, hanging off one of his whiskers.  I stared at it intensely as I tried to form the words.  How could I explain this to my dad?  The man who gave me life; the man who had such blind faith in me that he put me on the pitcher’s mound at age 10 and beamed with pride as I walked four batters in a row; the man who took a picture of me with my first piano trophy at age 9, carried it with him through 3 different jobs and still had it on his desk 10 years later; the man who took me to Sunday school and catechism and taught me how to ride a bike; the man who had borrowed the money for half my college tuition.

How would I explain the way I felt the first time I met Janelle, before I even fell in love with her? How months later, after spending the evening stoned and laughing with my best friend about her latest escapade, I finally worked up the nerve to go home and write in my journal: “I think I like girls.  There.  I said it.” How that first kiss, sweetened by strawberry chapstick, the sweat in the small of my back on an August night on the lake, and the anticipation of breaking all the rules, woke something up inside of me that I didn’t even know I was capable of feeling.  How would I explain to him that this had saved my life?  What are the words for telling your dad all that?  “I’m dating a girl” was insufficient. But then, my parents and I had never been really close.  No need to go into the details.  Alright.  I’m going to open my mouth. Whatever comes out, comes out.

“Dad, Janelle’s my girlfriend.”

“Oh yeah, she’s nice.  You met her in your dorm, right? How’s your other girlfriend, Stephanie, doing anyway?”

“No, Dad, not my girlfriend.  My girlfriend.” His forked stopped halfway to his mouth.  He stared.  Oh man. He doesn’t get it.  Why doesn’t he get it? This is awkward.

“You know, like Michael has a girlfriend.  Like … we’re sleeping together.”

What? What did I just say? Oh God.

“Oh God,” said Michael.

“Oh God,” said I.

“Oh God,” said Dad.  His fork dropped.  Then. Nothing.  Silence.  For a good 15 seconds.  The dog sneezed. We all stared.  I avoided Dad’s eyes, but they landed on that creepy picture of “Jesus Laughing” my mother loved so much.  That didn’t help.  I was ready for an explosion. I was ready for Dad to douse me in holy water from that little bottle Mom kept on the mantle.  I was ready to make a break for the door.  I was ready to borrow the money for the rest of my college tuition.

Then, in his best Fred Phelps impersonation, Mike broke the silence: “Not my daughter.”

And then we all laughed. And then I cried.  And my dad cried, and I gave him some long impassioned speech about how I was in love and love was never wrong and a bunch of other cheesy things a 19-year-old idealist would say to her father when coming out to him on a weekend home from state college.  An hour later, my dad and brother and I were hugging and talking about God and feeling pretty okay.

Granted, it took him a couple years to actually acknowledge any of my girlfriends.  He never even told my mother; it was news to her three and a half years later when I came out to her in the family minivan.  The ladies came and went, and there were a few random guys in there (who my dad ALWAYS loved.  Even if they were the most nondescript, marginally attractive guys on the planet), which confused the man even more. He is still trying to figure out, a decade later: how to come out as the parent of a queer child.  He will get it eventually.  We all have our story.

My friend clued me into this great new website Outhistory.org:

Historian Katz describes OutHistory.org as “a dynamic, developing  website that makes the history of sexuality newly accessible to a  diverse audience. It has the potential to reach a wide group who  never before had access to reliable work on LGBTQ history.” In its  early stages the site will focus on the United States, but OutHistory  is working to expand its geographic scope.

I don’t like the part where he is talking about rats. I crossed paths with one sunbathing on the sewer cap, munching on an old napkin, on my way to the Y today. Gross.

I hadn’t heard of Chen Lo so I googled him and found this. He does work in NYC schools doing “creative liberation” work. Sounds hot.

School starts back up tomorrow. Looking forward to meeting my new students. Hoping I have more time to write now that I’m settling out of all these transitions.

Usain Bolt kicking everyone’s ass in the 100 m. This guy’s unreal! He broke the world record with an untied shoe and very cocky end zone antics while he was still running.

And this one, of Lolo Jones when she caught her foot on the 9th out of 10 hurdles and blew her gold medal to finish 7th. Ouch

I’m not an olympic athlete these days, but I am starting to do yoga on a regular basis, and I can almost put my heels on the ground in downward dog! Woo! Small victories, people.

See the story and hear the audio here

I particularly like the parts in the video showing the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization housing takeovers and Detroit youth talking about their visions for their city and what they would do with the empty structures and lots.

There’s also a segment where Mike Wimberley is walking down Forest Ave on the East side, showing the open air markets and performance spaces they built to encourage independent business, local commerce, and community culture. There is a peace zone in the same neighborhood where people can go to work out their problems as a way to combat the violence that is so abundant in a city with one of the highest murder rates in the country.

These are all good ideas that promote a sense of community and healing for people in a city that has been pushed to the brink of implosion by capitalism. The docu-music-video is an inspiring piece; the track offers good analysis and promotes a spirit of struggle and resistance, and the visuals are really powerful.

But how do we translate these ideas into action that will bring us closer to systemic change? What further organizing strategies are being presented to transform the city on more than just a neighborhood level (or on the neighborhood level; who is organizing the markets and who is being outreached to? Who is using the peace zone? What strategies are being used to mediate conflict? What are the solutions coming out of these sessions to solve the problems that people bring there that are alternative to violence?) I really jive with the ideas that are being presented here, and like I said, the youth talking about their plans for taking over empty lots and spaces is really fantastic. But what’s the strategy to get the building into the youth’s hands? And how does that fit into a bigger strategy of taking control of the city at large so that people who are taking over empty houses (like with the MWRO) are not eventually forced out by the city/police?

Is there a strategy for that?

I want to know more.

I’m struggling with bigger picture organizing strategies these days and wanting to know the next steps. As a teacher, I do everything I can to create a safe, positive, environment where real learning can take place; I’m working to prepare my students for a pretty hostile world. Good things happen there. But after they leave school, they are going to a place that does not mirror what we have created in class. Unsafe neighborhoods and/or project housing, profiling by the police, lack of funds to further their education once they graduate, and a lack of work that will feed them, pay their rent, and fulfill them as human beings are all problems that need to be dressed on a larger level than what we can accomplish as a small band of 40 or so people.

So I pose this question to Detroiters (who I have learned so much from and give me energy and hope whenever I’m here) and everyone else: What next? Where do we go from here and how will these tactics that are being used going to create the revolutionary change on a broad scale that we will need for survival and human evolution?

“American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.“

“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”

“The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.”

“Everybody’s journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.”

“To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the making of bread.”

“I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

And my favorite of the day:

“Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: PLEASE FORWARD WIDELY!
CONTACT: QA’ID JACOBS – 718.812.9660

Jesus Gonzalez 718.812.3760

GOING TO TRIAL:
Black and Latino Teachers & Activists Racially Profiled
& Prosecuted For Attending Their Student’s Court Proceedings

TRIAL DATE – PACK THE COURT HOUSE
WEDNESDAY JULY 16, 2008 at 9am, AP3, 6th Floor
120 Schemerhorn St., Brooklyn Court House

On November 30, Brian Favors, teacher and director of Sankofa Community Empowerment and member of MXGM, Jesus Gonzalezalez, community organizer with Make the Road, NY, Nkululeko Sechaba, President of the Queens chapter of InPDUM, and Mario Cox, an honor roll student at Bushwick Community High School, were all attending court proceedings in support of the students known as the “Bushwick 32,” when they themselves were racially profiled in open court, assaulted and placed under arrest.

Community supporters had gathered in court once again to support the Bushwick 32 on November 30, 2007. Shocked at the terrible representation the students received in court, during recess, their teacher and long-time supporter, Brian Favors discretely urged several defense attorneys to competently represent the students. One defense attorney became defensive and angry and she went back into the court room to speak with the Court Security Officer (“CSO”) with whom she has a personal relationship and parents a child. She told him that she did not like the way Mr. Favors questioned her and that she wanted the “Black man with dread locks” ejected out of the court room.

After court resumed session, the CSO, who was angered by his wife’s story, mistakenly identified Mr. Sechaba as the “Black man with dread locks” in question and shouted for him to leave the court room for threatening the attorney. Mr. Favors then informed the CSO that he had identified the wrong “Black man with dreadlocks” and that no one had been threatened. Mr. Sechaba requested the CSO’s badge number so he could report the racial profiling incident. The CSO refused, shoved the men into the hallway and yelled for fellow officers to “cuff” them. Mr. Favors and Mr. Sechaba were then surrounded and violently assaulted as the police rushed to place them under arrest.

Mr. Gonzalez and Mr. Cox asked why the supporters were being treated this way when they had done nothing wrong. The two were surrounded and pummeled by the CSOs as they too were arrested. After arraignment, the four were released on their own recognizance and face charges of assaulting an officer, resisting arrest, and obstruction of governmental administration.

They head to trial on WED. JULY 16, 9:00 AM at 120 Schemerhorn, AP-3 on the 6th Floor.

Councilman Charles Barron stated “First the police terrorize us and arrest our youth. Then the court officers terrorize us again and deny our constitutional right to enter a court room and support our youth at their trial. If this is not fascism I don’t know what is. I support these brothers 100% and they should be set free.” The community insists that this is only the latest example of the targeting of people of color by the NYPD and the criminal justice system. In 2006, 90% of stop and frisks citywide resulted in no summons issuance or arrest. Several New York Times Articles detailing the controversy surrounding the Bushwick 32 case are attached below.

COUNTDOWN TO TRIAL DATE
PACK THE COURT HOUSE
WHEN: WEDNESDAY JULY 16, At 9:00 am
120 Schermerhorn St., Brooklyn Court House AP3 6th Floor

The “Bushwick 32″ is a group of students who were racially profiled and arrested while en route to a funeral on May 21, 2007. The NYPD mistakenly identified the students as a gang and held them for 36 hours even though the students had letters excusing them from school to attend a popular student’s funeral. Despite the widespread media attention, community support and numerous eye witness testimonies which contradict the NYPD’s account of events, District Attorney Charles Hynes has only until recently refused to drop the charges. Several of the Bushwick 32 have had their cases dropped due to lack of probable cause, while other cases remain pending.

I’m breathing … recuperating, relaxing, rejoicing, reflecting, all that.

This has been a crazy twelve months. I started the NYC Teaching Fellows Program in June of last year. I still attend classes at Brooklyn College two nights a week, and will continue to do so through August of next year. Since joining the program, many people have asked me about it and whether or not they should apply.

My gut instinct is to tell them to run away screaming. This has been an incredibly taxing year. First year teachers got it hard. First year teachers who are also full-time grad students could very well be certifiably insane.

Maybe I’m being a little dramatic (Me, dramatic? Never), but this year has been one of the hardest of my life. I’m used to 60+ hour weeks. I’m used to being in over my head. I’m used to sacrificing sanity and sleep to make something happen. But if someone had told me a year ago what this year would have held for me … well, I probably would have done it anyway (see above: I am part of that certifiably crazy bunch I mentioned), but I would have been really apprehensive about the whole thing.

I love my job and I love my students. I am excited about teaching and figuring out new ways to present abstract algebra to high school freshmen. I love the days when I’m doing paper work post-tutoring and some boys will come in and use my classroom as a dance space, or some ladies will chat with me about their job or their cat or their new found agnosticism or their “asshole boyfriend” or their trip to the dentist or whatever. I love working with them on school shows. I love seeing my lowest achieving math student impress the hell out of me with his knowledge of the war during an anti-recruitment talk. It was incredible doing youth media work and them REALLY getting it that their stories and voices are important. But the thought of doing it all again next year … wow. I hope (know?) this is June burnout that will be extinguished after swimming at the beach and getting through the fiction books my girlfriend bought me on my shelf.

There was an op-ed in the NY Times a couple weeks ago lauding the rise in qualified teachers in schools serving people of color and the poor. They credit fast-track certification programs like the New York City Teaching Fellows and Teach for America as one main contributors to the trend. I almost laughed outloud! I don’t want to discount the contributions of those like me who have entered these programs and worked their asses off in one of the hardest jobs on the planet. But qualified? We enter the school system after six weeks of training, are given up to 100 students—many of whom are operating (way) below grade level—and they’re like: “Here. Good luck.” Really? Bloomberg and Klein have done a great job on their spin campaign to get the general public to believe that this makes me and those like me qualified.

There are real problems with these alternate certification programs, the lack of sufficient training being only one of them. For both TFA and NYCTF, the teacher retention rates are low. Both programs are advertised as a two-year commitment: as long it takes to get your discounted master degree and reach full certification (an additional year is actually required in NYC to get your permanent, FYI). While NYCTF takes a slightly better approach and markets the program as a career change for working professionals, TFA is explicit about their program being a good in-between step for those attending graduate, law or medical school (they have ties to the universities for their graduates to enter once they’ve completed their commitment). All their talk of closing the achievement gap and setting high expectations changes the minute your two years is up.

One of my colleagues is a TFA person, and I think he’s above average for the bunch. He’s a hard worker and shows up every day ready and goes hard, but he sees his teaching gig as more of a community service sort of thing: “giving back to those less fortunate” before he goes off to “bigger and better things” for himself (in this case medical school). This charitable attitude is hardly what is needed to spark a real movement for change in the public education system. It’s also not doing what the program claims it is setting out to do: putting highly passionated and qualified new teachers in to under-staffed school districts to close the achievement gap in public education. It is throwing under-trained—though, you know, sometimes passionate—people into a room with underserved public school students, closing the door, and saying “problem solved for now” while brushing their hands together and walking away. In two years, after that person leaves, they will have to do the same thing with another 20-something, but no matter. It’s just another education experiment performed on poor people and students of color.

From a union perspective, these programs are also contributing to the deskilling of the work force. Treating teaching as a profession that anyone can do with just a few weeks of training is really ludicrous. This, combined with the mandated high-stakes standardized tests (not to mention increased military recruitment) brought to us by NCLB, has made the classroom a really difficult place to hold up the didactic contract (teachers teach, students learn)—let alone to develop critical-thinking, well-informed people that could actually create a people over profit, sustainable, equitable society. Even as a math teacher, where “teaching to the test” could be seen as less harmful than in more humanities-based classrooms, there is no way I can actually get my students through the material they are tested on in the time allotted, forcing me cover information opposed to teach for understanding. This contributes to the industrial assembly-line education system we’ve been stuck in the past century. It’s affecting my instructional practice even in my newly empowered NYC small school environment (oh boy, that’s another post) that is supposed to be working against that trend.

So … I am in an interesting position at the end of the first year of my fellowship. Knowing and experiencing all the problems of these fast-track certification programs, I am still glad for the opportunity I have to be a fully certified teacher. Some of my colleagues in the program are excellent in the classroom, and it’s a pleasure to work with them. There are some cool things happening as a result of the program for students across the city—there is some gray here. But overall, I think these programs are not the solution to NYC’s and the nation’s public school system and can actually have very detrimental effects.

Oh, and as a last and very troubling note on the miseducation of New York City: the Bloomberg-Klein “NYCTF for principals” Leadership Academy has received five more years of funding. This neo-con business school touted as a training ground for new principals—some of whom have very little experience in the classroom—will continue to spread the Welch business model to small schools opening throughout the city. As an employee of one, I can tell you this is very bad news.