2 posts tagged “another day in jps”

The desire to stay (in JPS/Mississippi/the teaching profession) ebbs and flows at this point.  In my heart, I want to move on.  There's a certain type of intellectual work that involves conversations I no longer have and a process of intrapersonal excavation that I lack the time and energy to seriously commit myself to.  By its nature, and both the most positive and most negative connotations,being a good teacher stretches you thin.  You invest in your students, your school, and your community.  It goes without saying that all the MTC teachers put in long hours, not only in the classroom (and all the hours that go towards planning for the classroom); we also coach sports teams, chair departments, lead clubs, go to iep meetings, get professionally developed, hold detetentions, counsel kids, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. 

In theory, I don't mind the idea of being turned into a one-dimensional man.  Jim Hill, in its most idealized form, represents Jackson's unlocked potential.  Everyone goes to school here:  The Superintendent's son sits next to the child of what would be Jackson's equivalent of Avon Barksdale.  Students who will go off to become doctors, lawyers and middle management mingle with future murderers, junkies, and 28 year old grandmothers.  Here, the high idealism and gross inadequacies of public education slapbox forever.

And then at 7:45 am, the seed of hope is gone; there are no mountaintop premonitions of the Promised Land; the choir will not be doing the 4th verse of lift every voice and sing.  It's seventeen year old ninth graders who can't read, I.B. students who reject their intellectual promise because they can't reconcile being smart with maintaining a cool pose.   It's one hundred and twenty students added to school over the weekend and nine fights in a day.  It's a crisis of leadership at every level, from your own classroom, to the administration, to the school board.

This takes nothing from the nobility of the fight.  We need talented, motivated, deeply principled people at the center of the arena.   I'm not sure if I can negotiate the committment to duty, balancing all the moving parts and being a consistent figure in the school, with the more pensive, meandering parts of my personality.  There's an intense need to retreat at times.  Trying to figure out if that's an omen.

 

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.