5 miles later....

Today was, you could say, a busy day. My first class, as always, wasn't until 11:30, but I had to teach ninth graders at 9:52 am, so I had to be up by about 8 this morning.

The ninth graders attend Dyett High School, one of the more underperforming schools in the Chicago Public School system, chronically underfunded and now well under enrollment (and thus even more deeply underfunded, since funding is based at least in part on enrollment) thanks to the exodus of students to charter schools in the past 5 or so years. What I was doing there in the first place is courtesy of Peer Health Exchange, a national nonprofit in 5 cities nationwide that trains college students to teach comprehensive health lessons to students in schools that otherwise would receive little or no health education. We teach about tobacco, alcohol, drugs, sexual decision making, HIV and AIDS, contraception, nutrition and physical activity, rape and sexual assault, abusive relationships, healthy relationships, and general decision making and communication. We don't tell students not to have sex. We don't tell them not to drink or do drugs. We just tell them all the health and legal consequences, the personal and emotional pros and cons, as well as how to have sex safely if they choose to do so, and trust them to make their own decisions.

I teach the drugs workshop. Thus this morning I was teaching 14 ninth graders about marijuana and cocaine, prescription drug abuse and ecstasy. They were pretty well-behaved, for ninth graders. Then again, they were JROTC students, for the most part, supposed to get structure and extra education. (I personally find it ridiculous that the best structure and education goes to kids being groomed for the military; you shouldn't have to be willing to die for America to receive a decent education. You also shouldn't have to go to a charter school to have a chance of learning something in school; these kids are basically those who are unable or whose families are unwilling to send them to the "real" schools in Chicago. They are, in a sense, on the lowest positions of the totem pole of kids in the area. Public schools should be by far the most efficiently funded institutions in America, and yet they are often among the first things to receive budget cuts during lean times. Most of the federal budget goes towards blowing things/people up in distant lands, after all.)

These kids aren't stupid. They know that drugs are "bad" for you, that they can land you in jail or kill you. They know how to say no to drugs, for the most part. They even understand to some extent that some drugs, like marijuana and ecstasy, are not particularly physically addictive, while others, like crack and heroin, are extremely addictive. They know that drugs can make you act "crazy." They're silly freshmen, and they look tiny even to me, someone who is barely five feet tall. Their faces, particularly those of the boys, are still babyish, not yet adult-like. They're a lot, at least in class, like the freshmen of my old high school. And yet the environment they've grown up in is about as different from suburban New England as you can get.

Charter schools have really good graduation rates. Some boast of sending over 90% of each graduating class to college. These sorts of things are really very admirable. And yet every time a new charter school opens, that's another public school like Dyett that is, in many ways, left to its own fate, another neighborhood school on the chopping blocks. That Chicago Public Schools are, in many instances, terrible is an undeniable fact. Killing them isn't exactly the way to do it, however, diverting people and money towards these semi-private schools. Something about kids being educated by corporate-run schools just seems wrong to me, someone with no love of big corporations. Something about destroying neighborhood education for city-wide education seems strange, too, especially considering the studies I've seen about gang violence. Weird as it seems, apparently having strong neighborhood gathering places that give a sense of purpose, like good schools or neighborhood clubs or whatnot, can reduce gang violence significantly. (After all, what is a gang but a group of young people who feel entirely ostracized and abandoned by normal society? How better to counter this than by giving them community love and purpose that isn't violent?)

If it were up to me, America would be a very different place with regards to education. School days would be longer, perhaps something like 8 or 9 am to 5 or 6 pm, and there would be less work outside of it but much more work done during school, in a school building, so that kids can actually focus on education, the main point of the first 18 years of your life. The only real things you would have as homework would be essays or review assignments. School years would be longer also, maybe with more frequent long weekends but without 10+ weeks of summer vacation. Education would be strong on science and technology but also reading, writing, history, and the like, all the stuff that keeps us connected to the universe but also to ourselves. There would be some kind of gym or recess or something every single day, every year, and school lunches would actually be healthy. Multiple times a week there would be some sort of community service, or gardening, or something about the community as well as the self. There would be art and music lessons multiple times a week, starting from the very earliest ages. Everyone would learn foreign languages just about every day, taught in immersion, starting from extremely early ages. Everyone would also have to learn just some plain old useful things, whether it's balancing a checkbook or learning to cook or doing things with hands--building things, changing tires, all that stuff; maybe a class of this a week. Parents would come in frequently, maybe a different parent every week, to talk about life beyond the age of 18, to get involved with their kids' education. There would be lots of school social activities outside class hours, dances and sports at night and on the weekends, to keep kids in urban areas in particular off the streets, to give everyone structure. Yes, basically all of a kid's life would be school, but school would be so much more than it is now; it would be not just learning but also building, cooking, playing sports and games, serving the community, socialization, and so much more. Everyone would have the basics of everything, from math up through calculus to science of all types to reading Shakespeare to crafting essays to American and world history to politics and civics to gym and healthy food everyday to community service to knowing how to hammer nails and change tires and fix some plumbing and cook their own food to art and music. By the time kids were high school aged, they could start to specialize in what they thought they wanted to do, everything from the creative arts to the trades to learning more about certain subjects. They'd still have to keep up with all the other subjects, though. After all, learning never stops.

America is nowhere near any of this, really. School is basically babysitting while parents work every day, with some incidental learning thrown in on the side. It's useless for most kids, turns kids off of learning anything ever, and seems to impart the idea that nothing in life really matters, besides maybe what's on TV. It doesn't allow for teaching kids how to be people, and it sure doesn't help kids grow in any way; it's just kind of indifferent to everything. A nursery school for ages 5-18.

I've walked about five miles today, back and forth to Dyett and then 5k on the ellipticals at the gym. I've learned a lot more than five miles, however; I've seen freshmen from a whole different world that's still remarkably similar to my world, journeyed to the beginning of time in astronomy, and been to WWII-era Italy in Italian. Pretty good for 6 hours or so in Hyde Park, Chicago, Illinois.