Posts (page 2)

JJ is one of the student's that I will teach again this year.  She was in my Mississippi studies class last year, spent most of the semester not doing work and is now repeating the same class.  She's a bit, though by only a fraction, more serious this year.  One reason is that she is now 18 (still classified as a sophomore).  She is also no longer living with her mom (lives with her fiance).  She is also pregnant.  She had a relatively uneventful day in my class but the next bell she was put out  because she was ready to fight some girls who said they were going to get some boys to jump her.  I was on my planning period so I pulled her aside and we started talking about life and how things were going for her.

What I learned
-Lately, her diabetes has been acting up (she's 250 lbs), and is now getting 5 insulin shots a day.
-She met her current fiance about two years ago.  Her then boyfriend (now fiance) has a two year old with another woman.
-When JJ found out about this situation, she set said boyfriend (now fiance's) car on fire.
-The mother of the boyfriend's (now fiance) child was shot in killed in a domestic dispute with another man.
-JJ is now caring for the her boyfriend's other child, in addition to becoming a mother of her own child in the next two months.

This fell out the sky like manna from heaven.  I didn't know people still cared enough about the culture to produce this type of material any more.  Think of a collage of mid-nineties rap albums accreted by an art school kid.  Between this, ta-nehisi's blog, and a prospective Jamal Crawford-Monta Ellis backcourt, I'm spectacularly well.

that will get your inner child within to smile.

Check out his piece on Biggie and the mid-nineties.

You can practically smell the new pair of Suede Timbs coming out the box.

and the craziest part about it is the girls looked really, really good.  Beat Terry out by 20 points.Our passive, smooth-shooting forward shot the lights of the ball, our post who plays like a giraffe on roller skates ended up with 8 blocks.  Everyone contributed and the on floor (and bench!) chemistry throughout the game.

We have a home game against Wingfield on Friday.  It would be nice to see the effort carry over.

...now it swan dived off the precipice.

I've always had a mixed relationship with the game.  Didn't pick the game up until (relatively) late.  Got involved with the AAU circuit and picked up steam by beginning of high school.  Scouts started to take notice.  They said the gangly, hard-rebounding kid had a strong left-hand;  had a work ethic Division 1 athleticism.  Transferred schools and joined the neighborhood powerhouse (as opposed to my cross-town prep school).  Blew my ACL.  rehabbed.  Blew my ACL again.  Hoop dreams deflate like a true fiends weight.  By the time I'm cleared to play, a new generation's been brought in to the powerhouse.  I'm on 6th man status.  Things done changed.

I tried to play a little in college but the knees are creaky and the fire's been dimmed.  I still believe in the game though.   Sure it kicked my ass; still source of some real trauma, no doubt.   You never, however, lose the memory of going baseline and throwing it down two-hands as a ninth grader.  That's some inscrutable shit, fam.  If I could give a kid a piece of that, I feel like I've done some greater good.  Paid my penance for quitting too early.

This year of coaching been at once trying, baffling, and painful.  Last year, I watched a squad put up a championship banner.  This year, I'm watching a train crash in slow motion.  On paper, the girl's look decent.  A quick point with swagger and an unshakeable.  A young forward with the most natural swing on her jumper that you've ever seen.  Another post that's all arms and legs; runs like a gazelle.  A shooting guard, who, while slight and step slow, has a great handle and an incredible basketball IQ.  A senior guard who is hands down the best athlete in the city.  I was never overly optimistic.  We don't have any monsters on the roster, no dandy dozens.  Still, I figured we could at least go 500.

Its hard to say where it all went wrong.  Got blown out our first two games, but they were to the best teams in the city.  We were a young team I thought.  We will gell towards the middle of the season and finish strong.  Things got worse though.  Our forward with the smooth stroke regressed every game.  In her mind, she's a guard being forced to play the post.  In reality, she's soft and is provides the team with no benefits if she's not scoring;  she's averaging 4 points a game.   Our two best athletes have no court sense and continuously make bad decisions when they have the ball in their hands.  Both refuse to move without the ball.  Our undisputed team leader is an dumpy, undersized junior who is coming off knee surgery.  She's got a couple post moves, but forces the team to slow down to a snail-like pace and really rubs off, in a negative way, on the other players.

The real tough part is the coaching staff.  The head coach is a screamer and a manipulator.  The other assisstant berates the players into a stupor every practice and game.  They both have been around for a while, and have a good knowledge of the game, but it is a tough situation for the girls.  Morale is continuosly low.

It all came to a head this past weekend.  Jackson area schools took part in the Pepsi holiday tournament.  Our first game was against Clinton.  It started off relatively competitive, 24-20 at the end of the first quarter.  As the game wore on, two things became apparent.  We couldn't stop Clinton's best two shooters if we wanted to.  Second, we couldn't throw the ball into the ocean.  One point in the second quarter. Uno.   It got ugly in a hurry.  You would never guess that the girls had spend the past week practicing, and doing well, against former college players.  If you can't score the basket, you will not win basketball games.  If you refuse to rebound, get around basic screens, or run your offense, you will get blown out.

Yesterday, we got blown out by our rival, Provine.  Provine, thinking that the game did not start until 1:30pm, gets into the gym thirty minutes after tip-off time.  Without any warm-up time, they jump out to a ten point lead.  The guards don't kill us, so much as their post play.    Their big could basically post up and get whatever she wanted.  If she missed her first attempt, and she didn't miss much, she could simply follow her attempt without any opposition from our posts and get her own rebound.    It was a 13 point game at halftime.  We lost by 25.

At the end of the game, our head coach went on a thirty minute speech about how disappointing this team was, how she was now on blood medication because of the stress involved with coaching them, how her parents were cursing her out for not spending more time with her children, how the team was a laughing stock.  She then said that, at this point, she has given up on the team.  So yea, it's like that.

Bullshitting over Maker's Mark and Bacardi Dark
on the back porch, wondering when change gone come.
Black Panther philosophies & freedom schools
float in the air with the Black & Mild smoke.
As night skulks along, the arguments grow louder
as if our animated defenses of lost causes
could chant down Babylon.

Slowly, the harvest moon fades
and the patina struggles to conjure
enough light to guide us home.

You can go and check out his post to get the full run-down.  Basically, the big homey walked into into Sal's and asked why ain't there no pictures of brothers on the wall.

I'm partial to racial tribalism just like the next Public Enemy listening, former BSU presiding, Afro-American studies concentrating, Pam Grier is the sexiest woman ever to walk the face of the earth believing negro.
So at a surface level, it seems commonsensical enough.  MTC sends teachers to some of the poorest, and most consistently underperforming school districts in the poorest, most consistently underperforming state of the union.  This state also has the largest percentage of African-African Americans.  There are communities that have high concentrations of poor white children in the state of Mississippi; these communities face some of the same issues of academic underperformance.  MTC, however, does not send teachers to these places.  So, If you apply to MTC, you already know that you are going to be teaching poor black children.  The million dollar question: what type of MTC applicant is best equipped to make an immediate impact on these children's lives?

Chimaobi's point hinges on the idea that strong black role models in the classroom (and the community) can provide a tangible counter-example to the limited roles these children can imagine themselves occupying as aduts.   The idea that, I can empathize with you because I am like you resonates.  Not to say, that a white teacher cannot inspire or relate to their kids in a way that will inspire change.  In a recent conversation with Amani and Abe, we discussed how race plays out in the student-teacher relationship.   Certainly, Abe is as empathetic as you can get, and he will do whatever is in his power to help his students.  Still, as he said, there are certain things he cannot do in the classroom, like explicitly appeal to how he hates seeing young black men throw away their future, that Amani could accomplish.  I don't think this makes Amani a better teacher than Abe.  It does, however, make her, in this specific context, more accessible to her students.  In some ways this accessibility can be a double-edged sword, but it is always a valuable asset in reaching children who are often closed to the possibility of a teacher caring about their plight.

The part of Chimaobi's post that really got me intrigued was Ben's question and the subsequent response.  What, in the long-term, could MTC do solve the education gap in Mississippi?  Certainly, the program is limited in scope.  It cannot get policies passed in the state legislature or get new pilot programs funded.  It can, however, choose what type of individuals are ultimately selected into the program.  Which circles back to my original question:  what type of MTC applicant is best equipped to make an immediate impact on the children in these communities?  If we are to take Malcolm Gladwell's argument at face value, it is almost impossible to measure what type of individual would be a good teacher without actually seeing them in the classroom.  Ben, Dr. Mullins and Dr. Mcconnell have been doing this a lot longer than I have, so I imagine that they have a general idea of what qualities they want to see in a potential applicant.  Still, I wonder, if we are casting the net wide enough.   Gladwell says, rather than continuously raise the bar on things like test scores, undergraduate gpas, and other metrics (trying to be the New TFA), what if  we were to, somehow, do a better job of measuring "withness"?  Or, in other words, what if MTC were to do a better job of measuring people who demonstrated the qualities that life-long teachers possessed?

Again, actually accomplishing this objective would be difficult.  Either you have to be willing to take a greater chance on, what I imagine what would look like on paper as "high risk" applicants.  And, one of the things I imagine that the program, and its various financial benefactors, look at is how competitive is each incoming class with regards to undergraduate gpa, quality of undergraduate institution, etc.  Still, I could see the program doing more with local recruiting and brand identification.  At Jim Hill, for example, there are several young teachers who I think would have made great MTC candidates.  One, is a second-year, black male science teacher who graduated magna cum laude from Jackson State, was a McNair scholar, and is strongly considered getting a Phd but decided to teach for a couple of years to earn money for graduate school.  Another, a white female who graduated from St. Olaf, has been at Jim Hill  for the past four years.  At a a recent reception for Jim Hill IB diploma graduates, I spoke with two Jim Hill graduates who expressed interest in teaching during the time between when they graduated from Tougaloo and when they went off to Medical school.  When I mentioned that they should consider MTC, they were completely clueless and had never heard the program discussed at their school.

Here's the thing:  I think that the free Masters degree that MTC provides would be an incredibly valuable tool/incentive for people who have already lived in Mississippi and are going to continue to teach and live in Mississippi.  Talking with the teacher I mentioned earlier who had been at Jim Hill for four years, she thought it was ironic that there had been several MTC folks who had only been at Jim Hill one to two years, yet all were getting a masters in education.  If MTC were to increase the visibility of its brand, it could attract not only high caliber applicants from within the state, but potential teachers who are from the communities we are trying to send teachers.  Potential teachers who might have the prerequisite "withness" to be sucessful in the long-term.   With a free masters degree, many would be willing to put other career interests on hold and consider teaching beyond the initial two-years. The idea of settling down, or at least spending an extended period of time, in the state would not be a foreign, detached concept.  Additionally, it would provide an additional, tautological benefit.  If you can attract the best and brightest from Mississippi colleges, the MTC brand in the state of Mississippi becomes this increasingly prestigious institution that continues to attract the state's best and brightest.

1142 Whitworth feels like the fortress of solitude right now.

What We Know
-He practices his jump shot in a NASA engineered gym that uses Klingon technology to replicates Jupiter's gravity...while wearing lead-weighted gym shoes.

- In 1995 when Del Curry, guard for the Charlotte Hornets, went through a four game, 3-26 slump, he consulted his son Stephen for advice on the form of his shot.  Del went on to lead the NBA in percent of three-point shots made that year.  That same year, Seven year old Stephen made the honor roll and had his birthday party and Chuck E Cheese.

- In 1998, Stephen was diagnosed with a sleeping disorder somndisportism.  While some symptoms are similar to sleep walking, the major difference is that somndisportism sufferers often engage in high intensity athletics while still in REM stage of sleep.  In Stephen's case, he spent the past eight years in the NBA under the alter ego Mamoud Abdul-Rauf.

The earth's yellow sun increases the range on his jumpshot.

What we don't know
-Is he quick enough to get his shot off the dribble in the NBA?
-Is this just another version of the Chris Jackson/Tony Delk/ JJ Reddick Experiment?
-Should we take the 13 points against purdue as an omen of his inherent limitations?