Warning: you are about to fail at life

Dear system gamers,

Alex and Julia bring up two different but connected points. One point is about the wisdom of gaming a shitty system in order to escape it, and the other is about not gaming a good system. I agree with both points. Beware, a novel might follow.

First, as I've said before when we talked about this story (via Liz, who also can tell you a lot of stories about DCPS), Alex, I think that there is a point at which a school becomes so bad that it's better for a child to sit at home and stare at the wall all day than to attend it, and this description is pretty much that point. Middle schoolers are vicious enough by nature; the last thing they need is an adult authority vacuum. One of my former students in our program, as you know, got jumped so often at his school that his parents finally pulled him out and transferred him, according to my other student, and I am very happy to hear that. But what worries me is that he himself could not do that, not only because he's 12 and doesn't have the ability to transfer himself out of his school, but also because he probably wouldn't have wanted to.

I've talked to the kids about their schools--it's almost always the topic I use to get them talking since they have a lot of opinions about it--and the extent to which they're oblivious to their own circumstances is sort of surprising. For one thing, none of them think they are poor. Once, one of my kids, in explaining why he supported Obama, said something like, "Obama cares about poor people, and we're poor. I mean, we're not poor poor, but we're kind of poor." This is possibly the closest any of them has ever come to seeing themselves as most of America would see them, and it's not even totally clear what he meant. They also don't think their schools are "bad," though they acknowledge that many other schools in DC are terrible. They don't think their home lives are problematic even though they have about 10 half-siblings each from various temporary combinations, though they can always tell you about their cousins, whose families are totally messed up. And so on. In some ways, this is good, because it means that they don't feel sorry for themselves or see themselves as victims of a cruel fate or an oppressive society, and in fact, they might not be all that poor, and their apparently crazy home lives might be pretty functional, and all in all, it's not clearly bad that they are happy with their lives. But the downside is that they're too complacent to see that they're somehow in danger. My best student, for example, is quite aware that she is hot shit, and is, as a result, very self-satisfied about her schoolwork. She is kicking everyone else's ass, and what more is she supposed to do at age 12? She has not the vaguest idea that there are other schools out there, like Julia's, where thinking that Africa is a country would not get you to the top of the class, and where you would, moreover, be disabused of the notion that Africa is a country pretty quickly.

When I was finishing middle school, I was in a parallel situation where my parents wanted to move to Wilmette so that I could go to New Trier for high school instead of Niles West. I knew that objectively, New Trier was the better school, but I threw tantrums in protest, citing precisely these kinds of reasons: I already have friends in my school and it would be hard to make new friends, Niles West is not that bad and if it is, that just means I will do really well there, whereas if I go to New Trier, I will be poor and stupid and friendless. I was probably wrong--I did do well at my high school, but I also likely would have done well at New Trier after a period of adjustment because, like my self-satisfied student, I had the potential to succeed in a more challenging school. So even though I was aware enough to notice that middle school was basically a vortex to the Hellmouth, I was too comfortable with my big fish-small pond academic status to act on this observation. Granted, my middle school was not our students' middle school, but I suspect that it's a pretty rare kid of that age in general who has enough initiative and foresight see that his situation is bad and to try to get out, and circumstances might actually mitigate against the best students doing so, since having a niche, even the Spelling Bee Queen (really, play the song) niche, is a powerful inducement to stick around. In other words, the kids who learn to game the system might be the first to become comfortable in it and the last to leave.

So the long answer to your short question is that I don't think it's really possible to convince the kids that their situations are dire and they need to do anything--whether it's study for real or game the system--to get out of there. At best, you will succeed in convincing them that their school sucks so they shouldn't care about it, which they will gladly believe, but which will only get you halfway to your goal, and at worst, you will have them believe that society is set against them and they are so hopelessly behind their peers that they should just go out and steal cars if they hope to make a decent living. I think this is a situation where adults need to make the decisions--to pull the kid out of a chaotic school, to send him somewhere better, and to pressure him to do the work that he doesn't want to do, because the kids won't do any of these things on their own. And our program is kind of taking that responsibility by pushing the kids into competitive high schools they wouldn't default to on their own.

When you describe how you had the epiphany about gaming the system, it wasn't because you thought your school sucked relative to good schools, but because you heard you needed A's to get into college, and the best way to get them was to appear to be good. But that actually sounds to me like the prevailing attitude of students at competitive public schools (or the competitive groups in mediocre schools), which revolve around the anxious pursuit of elite college admission through various questionable means, rather than the attitude of students at crappy schools, where not going to any college at all is a perfectly respectable option. What you aptly describe as learning "when we had to work, when we could coast, when we could cheat" requires a pretty clear ambition to direct these energies, and I don't see that kind of clear ambition in most of our kids, probably because they're still too young for it, just like they're only starting to see how to play this school game. (For one thing, my good student has gotten much brattier since last year. She is starting to see how she can get away with murder because she is a good student, and even I am loathe to punish her because I am so grateful that she understands the lessons and answers my questions that I don't want to do anything to dissuade her from continuing to do this, even though she has such an attitude about it.)

Um, ok, then. That was kind of long. I guess I will wait to talk about why I agree with Julia until my next post. Maybe Becky will tell us about her underachieving childhood in the meantime.

--Rita