New Teacher Diaries
Show me the colors
Feb 1, 2007 5:46 PM
A young man asked me for a dictionary that he could take back to his dorm. The only dictionary I had was a hard cover and the guards only allow soft-cover materials to return with these young men to their housing unit. Teaching in an environment with court-involved youth requires tremendous discretion. Everything is a potential weapon, from ballpoint pens to plastic cups to sharpies. For teachers on “the outside,” the expression a teacher makes a thousand decisions a day is true indeed. For us correctional educators, it’s a thousand and one.
I was ready to buy the young man a dictionary when a colleague told me about a stash of soft-covered dictionaries for just this occasion: when a student specifically asked for his own copy.
I was excited to hand the dictionary to the young man this morning, glad to witness the uniqueness of a student who pursued words, meanings and ideas on his own. He really wanted one.
“Oh,” he said disappointed, “you don’t have one with a red cover?”
“No, just that one,” I said, taken aback by his request. My smile faded.
“That’s okay, I’ll take it,” he said reluctantly. He frowned and shrugged.
Another young man sitting close by consoled him. “All they gots is blue dictionaries,” the fellow said.
My momentary confusion turned to understanding as I thought back to an incident with markers from my first day shadowing another teacher. How could I forget? A young man had pleaded with that teacher, at first alone but then joined by several classmates, Sir, that blue marker just is too light, we can’t see the board. The teacher innocently obliged, proceeding to use a red marker on the white board. The small group of students relaxed satisfied, yeah, man, red, that’s it. Red will do. They shared a knowing, not-so-secret smile with one another.
A few days ago a young man named John scratched a few words on the desk with his golf pencil — the only writing implement these court-involved youth are allowed to have. I should have reprimanded John immediately, but did not do so. More importantly, I should have read what was on the desk and cleaned it immediately, but again I failed to do so — something I would soon regret.
The following day, two young men, Angel and Jimmy, were so offended by the graffiti on the desk that they insisted that I inform them who had been sitting there the day before. I told them I did not know and observed cautiously as they began to accuse John. You know all them gang members back at the dorms, you saying you don’t know whose tag this is? I quickly intervened to nip the issue in the bud.
Later that day, as I got ready to erase the graffiti, I read what had been written. All of the “b’s” in all of the sentences had been crossed off, as is common for Crips to do, a diss to the Bloods. O.G. Crips, the desk said. My goodness, why didn’t I clean that desk when I first saw it all?
The next day, Angel and Jimmy referred to John as blue, a reference to his gang affiliation. Angel and Jimmy are presumably members of the rival gang represented, naturally, by the color red. They poked and prodded him, and just as he stood up to confront them I sternly offered them a visit from the guard if they didn’t separate themselves. Most of these guys, although lacking in many academic areas, are intelligent enough to understand that they don’t want a prison charge. Assaulting another incarcerated individual could land them additional trouble, even more time. They separated. I exhaled.
As I watched the young man walk out with the blue dictionary today, I silently wished him luck putting a much larger emphasis on the words on the inside than the color on the outside. I wondered if he might come across the word unity or reconciliation. But I knew full well that this issue of color would not go away so easily. For me, I may have to familiarize myself with at least two words again: discretion and Ajax.
Mr. History is the pseudonym for a first-year teacher. A version of this post first appeared on the UFT blog, edwize.org, where “New Teacher Diaries” is a regular feature.
