No Child - The One-Woman Show

I'm not going to spend too much of my time in New Orleans writing on a blog, but I had to say a quick something about the one-woman show No Child that a friend and I went to last week.

The woman performing the show, Nilaja Sun, was (might still be for part of the year) a "teaching artist" teaching theater in a Bronx high school. I won't review it because it has already been reviewed eloquently in many places, including the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. If you have the chance to see it - anywhere - do so. It is the best portrayal of teaching in the inner-city that I have ever seen/heard/read.

A few similarities between third graders in the East Bay and tenth graders in the Bronx:

The curious phrasing of questions: "What time it is?" "What page it's on?"**
Kids kicking over chairs because they have no outlet for their feelings and their feelings are too overwhelming
Surprise expressed when a student mentions having a father
Teachers wanting to quit or quitting on a regular basis
Unreasonable expectations; I think in the show it was the kids having to pass 5 Regent's Exams in 3 days, at my school it was an 80% pass rate on the tests
Not enough time to teach things: in the show, a play was being prepared in 10 weeks, once a week, with some of the days taken over for various reasons. I was told one year that I needed to provide 3 hours of testing each day and "You'd better not cheat those children. I still expect you to provide 3 1/2 hours of language arts, 1 1/2 of math and 20 minutes of PE every day!!" In a 6 hour school day? Are you that unreasonable or just pretending?
Kids losing family members to violent deaths and other kids not even being surprised
The fact that no matter how ghetto the kids are, once you earn their trust, they'll do anything for you

Comments

House Dreams said…

Similar to special ed.
Middle school, High school and K-3Same behavior, same frustrations...and we teachers have the same frustrations, too.

Sounds like a great play.
mmm

9:24 AM

A Loss

(I have been putting off finishing this blog post for months. You'll see why) Today, I was cleaning a bookshelf and I found the journal from one of my third-grade students, who I call Fred in my book , in 2001. I still had it because he didn't come to the last day of school to get his stuff this year and I guess it got put in a pile and somehow I've kept it with me. He didn't come to the last day of school, probably because his family was a mess: dad in prison, mom in an abusive relationship, all the kids (understandably) acting out violently. Fred was expelled from our school in second grade for hitting a teacher. Then he was expelled from the other school, I don't know why, at the end of second grade. He came back on the condition from the administration that he be in my class because I had him as a student in first grade and he listened to me and worked well with me. We had a really good relationship, although Fred was definitely not easy to have in class.

A New Prison, Part Two

Second very long part of the prison visit report. After we got all the paperwork filled out and went through the metal detector, we got visitation slips with the name of the inmate, and made our way over to the other building for visitation. This is not maximum security so thankfully you can just sit next to the inmates, and not be separated by glass or have to use a telephone to talk. First, you get a gate unlocked and go into a holding pen that is of course in direct sunlight (or rain if it's that season) and surrounded by fences topped with razor wire. You wait there until the gate at the other end is unlocked. This holding pen was a little bigger and less claustrophobic than the other prison (I do not have any claustrophobia and I came very close to a panic attack once at the other place) and they opened the other gate more quickly. Then you walk, again in blazing sunlight (or rain) to the visitation building. This one was less of a walk than the other prison but I still

A New Prison, Part 1

My former student, friend, and co-author was moved to a new prison during COVID. We (myself, Mitali, and his Abuela) have visited a couple of times via the video visit functionality they set up, but we've also been trying to visit in person, ever since in-person visits were allowed again. After four of them being canceled (sometimes we were told why, sometimes not), we finally got a visit. I was super nervous about this visit. (I felt better when Mitali mentioned that she was also, because she is an inherently positive and optimistic person!) I am not proud of this, but there was a large part of me that was hoping that the visit would be canceled, just like the previous four were. I felt a little better when someone I know messaged me privately to tell me that they had had very good experiences visiting a family member in that prison. But I still didn't sleep well at all that night, worrying about the guards, the many things that could go wrong, and the projected 111-degree hea

Bronwyn Harris, Author

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