sufficient

a zero-sum game

At the end the summer, my neighborhood group disbanded and I had to find a new one. Mission is one of the 5 core tenets of neighborhood groups at City Church and each group is supposed to have its own missional focus. Two of the groups work with the KIPP charter school in East Nashville and since I had really been missing teaching and being involved in students' lives, I decided to join one of them.

Adults in these groups either become reading buddies with a Kippster for 9 weeks and read a book with the Kippster or spend the hour reading buddies are reading helping teachers out: grading, organizing classrooms, etc. The idea with reading buddies is to provide these kids with a positive reading experience. I've been a reading buddy this semester with a 6th grader who I've come to adore. We read the first 90 pages of Walter Dean Myers' Fallen Angels (way above his reading level).

The first night we had a sheet of questions to ask each other, including "What word would your friends use to describe you." He looked me dead in the eye and responded, "Bad."

"Bad, like Michael Jackson bad, or bad like you get in trouble a lot?" I asked him.

"Bad like I get in trouble a lot." Alright, well at least he's honest. And he does. Over the course of the semester, he let me know that he was in danger of getting kicked out of KIPP because of behavior. He has that mischievous glint in his eye, that "I know I'm about to do something you don't want me to do, but I'm going to do it anyway." His behavior has improved though and he shares his "paycheck" score with me every week.

But he's also very respectful. He always asks me permission before he does anything like use the restroom or get up to throw trash away. And our book has a lot of profanity in it (its main characters are soldiers in the Vietnam War). For the first couple of weeks, all the profanity was in portions I was reading and I just read it. The first time he came to profanity though, he paused and looked at me. He told me he wasn't comfortable reading that word. Honestly, I hadn't even thought about it. As an English teacher, profanity in books never really bothered me- literature is about life and lots of people use profanity. No big deal. My Kippster acknowledged that sure, he uses profanity, but only around his friends and he thought it was disrespectful to say those words in my presence, even if he's just reading them. I asked him if he wanted me to keep reading them, or just skip over them. He said he was fine with me reading them.

I was really impressed with him. As we read, we had to come up with synonyms for a lot of them. Some, that just wasn't possible and he skipped them.

Last night, we had our end of the semester potluck. All the reading buddy pairs had written book reports and illustrated them and they'd been printed in a booklet for everyone to have a copy of. Parents were invited and we ate together and then shared book reports with families. All of the KIPPsters were given a new book to read as well- another Walter Dean Myers book for him.

My KIPPster's mom wasn't there. He swore she was coming. And I prayed she would. We got our dinner and sat down with another KIPPster who had neither family nor reading buddy there. I tried to talk up a storm and keep these 2 boys, who were so clearly disappointed that no one had come for them, distracted. About 6:30, both the other boy's family and reading buddy showed up. Whew.

However, my KIPPster kept his eyes trained on the door, breaking my heart. He's normally upbeat and full of energy, but last night, he was just sad. Finally, at 6:50, he called his mom. Again, she said she was coming. We started sharing reports and she still wasn't there. The other boy's family could tell what was going on and they suggested first one boy share with everyone and then the next. But at 6:55, mom walked in. Thank God.

This post has seriously derailed, so I apologize for its length. Back to my original intention. After the potluck, I joined the other neighborhood group to hear a report from a meeting last week with the Metro Nashville school superintendent and school board representative. Sitting around the table were a number of parents considering whether or not to send their children to East Nashville schools, which, with a few exceptions, are not exactly known for their stellar academics.

We discussed both what they as parents, and more briefly, what we as a community, could do to improve the schools. The most ready solution seemed to be, get a group of parents who are willing to send their children to the same school. Great, I approve. But I still have questions. Based on zoning, when these parents send their kids to the neighborhood public schools when they would've sent them elsewhere, it seems to me this causes zoning to change, the zone to shrink around that school to accommodate more people from that neighborhood actually sending their kids to that school. Which means that kids who might've benefited from more involved parents sending their kids to that school and that school's improvement are now zoned for another school without those benefits. And the cycle starts over.

Someone mentioned that basically, it's a zero sum game. So my question is, what can be done to change that? I like the that these parents want to send their kids to public schools. I think that's one of the things that will contribute to school improvement. But, it still leaves me asking what about the other kids? If it's a zero sum game, someone loses. I'm just not OK with that, since those "someones" are children and the game is of such importance.

Labels: education

posted by CP @ 9:45 AM 0 thoughts