One Child Left Behind
There is a man I know, quite well because I use to date him, who is an excellent poster child of how schools fail students. He grew up in Atlanta and is a product of the public school system. He is arguable one of the smartest people I know, and often I find myself thinking or telling him that he would be the perfect teacher. He knows the system and how it fails students. The system failed him. He did not graduate from high school.
When he took the SAT a few years ago, with only a ninth grade education, he received a score good enough to gain him acceptance into VERY good institutions of higher learning. However, by that time he had already been incarcerated for living the life of a hustler. I wonder had he completed high school what kind of life he could have today.
As we sit to have conversations about books he read, ideas and theories he has, news, or just the everyday struggles caused by living as a black man in poverty, I find myself wondering how the school failed him. I gave him a call after class to uncover some of these truths. He viewed school as “pointless and a waste of time because it was too easy.” He stated that he just lost interest in the material because it was too easy; he did not find it challenging so he stopped doing the work. As a result he got behind in his assignments. One day he had a talk with his school consular who told him he was too far behind and would never catch up so he should just go and get his GED.
How could someone say that to a child? How could he not demand anything but the best from every student? Why is it that neither the consolers nor any of his teachers stopped to look for the real reasons behind his attitudes toward school? How can I work to assure that this does not happen to any of the students I will teach?
