I’m not the first Beyond Borders student to join this bandwagon. Joanne’s most popular mantra has to be ‘If you’re not frustrated you’re not learning.’ Countless Beyond Borders alumni have said time and again that their experiences have affirmed this belief and I myself have just recently had an experience that has made me believe in this mantra. Frustration links in many ways to a problem and when someone gets frustrated enough with a problem they try to find a solution.
In reading Jonathan Kozol’s Amazing Grace, frustration takes prominence in my reaction. A simple issue like broken glass in the playground took up weeks on the Kitchener Waterloo local newscast but in the Bronx, these issues are so common that no one even thinks in depth about it because it is described casually,“Nearby, in the afternoon sun, dozens of children are playing in a playground flecked with broken glass” (Kozol 135). It frustrates me that these issues even exist and that there is a completely different standard of living in two neighbourhoods just eighteen minutes apart. Kozol is determined to prove that segregation and inequality do exist in the classroom and that those in society who are fortunate are also victim to believing everyone gets an equal chance. Jonathan Kozol sums up his entire career thesis with this quotation, “An awful lot of people come to college with this strange idea that there's no longer segregation in America's schools, that our schools are basically equal; neither of these things is true.” The sad part is that I never knew how far inequality reaches but my eyes have and continue to be slowly opened to understand the issues that separate true equality.
Kozol describes many episodic stories including one about theft in which “Kimberly describes a night, a couple weeks before, when she and her brothers thought their house was being robbed. ‘It was late and we were looking at TV. We called the cops. They never came. We called my grandmother. My grandmother came. The police never came. They didn’t come’” (Kozol 33). The story about Kimberly’s Grandmother going to an apartment that the police were afraid to go too spoke volumes to me and frankly is atypical to my life. Children in the community in which I live are taught that the police respond to every call and they really are communities’ protector. When questioned by Kimberly’s grandmother why the police didn’t show up, the responded honestly saying they were afraid. Why if the police are afraid to show up does the state government allow housing units to deteriorate into an already violent drug inhibited neighbourhood? This thought is also on the minds of the people who live in that very neighbourhood.
Kozol boldly states that “Racial segregation, as a governing fact of life in New York City, seldom surfaces in public dialogue about the problems faced by children in poor neighborhoods” (Kozol 147). This should frustrate you; it certainly frustrates me. In a world where we celebrate minorities being elected into high offices and women holding high profile positions, where all students are able to enter university, well that’s just it--- it does not completely exist. Does it? Some students (and unfortunately most of these students are minorities) still do not have the same luxury of having an equal opportunity to do anything they dream of. Kozol paints frustrating pictures in his body of work and it should be frustrating because it is most of all eye opening.
One of things that I want to do in my life is to go down to New York and ride the train that Kozol describes in the first page of his book, Amazing Grace, “The Number 6 train from Manhattan to the South Bronx makes nine stops in the 19 minute ride between East 59th Street and Brook Avenue. When you enter the train, you are in the seventh richest congressional district in the nation. When you leave, you are in the poorest” (Kozol 3). I want to live in these streets and teach in these schools. My greatest hope is that each child is given the opportunity to learn and not learn like the kids in Kozol’s body of work but learn like the kids who grow up to be astronauts, professors, scientists, accountants and politicians or possibly Wendy Kopp who grew up and was passionate about the equality of the classroom that she founded Teach for America. At the age of 21, Kopp raised $2.5 million of start-up funding, hired a skeleton staff, and launched a grass-roots recruitment campaign. During Teach For America's first year in 1990, 500 men and women began teaching in six low-income communities across the country” (www.teachforamerica.org).
We need to desperately remember that investing in these children is of the upmost importance because they are our future and these children can and will make a profound impact if only given the chance. This isn’t meant as a happy ending, it’s meant as a reminder of the impact these programs can have on children, families, and communities and what their lives are like when no one offers an anchor to support these same children, families and communities. I wrote this because of a personal interaction I had working with a student; if I could only say one more thing it would be that circumstances do change, life can be different and you can run that mile if you believe in yourself. I am an optimist- I know anything is possible.
For more information:
Kozol, Jonathan. Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation. New York: Perennial, an Imprint of Harper Collins Publishers, 2000.
www.teachforamerica.org
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