Gary

I found out today that one of my students is being expelled.  He's been on a very short leash and finally went a little too far.  The story goes that he had marijuana and several people saw that he was flashing it in class.  When I learned this, there were some very complicated emotions that ran through my head.  The first was that he deserved it.  This was a kid who kept taking advantage of the system, thinking he could get away with anything.  He knew full well that the district was hesitant to kick anyone out because of the fundage that would be forfeited upon his removal from the school.  But his luck had finally run out and he went too far.  How else is he going to learn, I suppose?  I mean, his actions have consequences, just as they will in the real world, and he is going to have to pay for his missteps.  Plus he was a pretty disrespectful and annoying kid in my classes anyway.  Justice was finally served.

But then I walked into the teacher lounge and started thinking a bit more.  One of the teachers I've been hanging out with a lot has taken him under her wing.  Sure sometimes he acted up in her room and may have seemed unappreciative at times, but I know that she was a positive influence on her life.  He has no family, no home life to speak of.  His mom kicked him out and he is generally extremely distrustful toward women.  The fact that my colleague was able to reach him, even a little bit, to the point that he even called her "mom," is an incredible feat.  It's something to be admired.  Here was this difficult child who showed no apparent interest in learning or graduating, being proverbially knocked over the head by a teacher that genuinely cared.  I saw improvement from him in my classes throughout the last few weeks.  He was still a pain, but he was putting his knowledge to good use and was going to pass my classes with good to great marks.  But now...

I get where my fellow teacher is coming from.  She's pissed that she gave him everything she had, fed him attention when he desired it, showed him a sort of love that he hadn't received before, and he as good as spit in her face.  But she tried.  She worked to help this kid.  It doesn't always work, but it does work sometimes.  That "sometimes" is enough.  She worked toward change...

How do I effect change?  That was my thought process today.  I focus on the easy kids, the ones who want to learn, the ones with fairly stable home lives and no extenuating circumstances to worry about.  It's simple.  Anyone can connect with those students.  I need to go beyond.  I need to take a risk and be a solid foundation for these kids.  I need to be that one piece of stability that they may have in their lives.  They may screw with that, too, but it's worth the shot.  It's always worth the shot.  It could fail 9 times out of 10, but that one is a real live human life, who could go out and change more lives himself...

And then I started thinking about expulsion itself.  I understand we have standards and decorum and rules and all that at Madison, but what good does an expulsion do?  It's adding to the problem and it makes me very sad.  Gary is going to go back to the streets and be nothing, even though he has the base knowledge to be something.  He's going to be like his parents before him.  His kids, presumably, are going to be like him.  This expulsion is merely adding to the cycle of misfortune and lower abilities in Detroit and other urban areas.  Yes, I still believe in educational Darwinism, but I pause to wonder how the kids who haven't been taught anything else, who have been left for nothing on the streets, who have been told that government assistance is the way to live and that disrespect is the way of the world and that one should never back down from a fight and that filthy language will be beneficial...what will they do?  I mean, do they know any better?  Isn't expulsion just adding to that cycle?  It's extending the lines even further between the haves and havenots.