"You're Acting Like A Bunch of Monkeys"

Is what I’ve heard in a classroom on account of two incidences, both by substitute teachers. We were offended, to say the least. I mean, after all, why say such a thing to a room with twenty-nine African-American students and one or two Hispanic students? The worst of it all, was that we brushed it all away both times. We all collectively scoffed at her sentence and moved on with our lives, not thinking twice on telling anyone, let alone doing anything about what she said.
This is only one of the few memories I hold of my schooling. There’s much more to come.
It is most pertaining to add the limited perspective I have of the education system. I went to public school just about my whole life. I knew I wasn’t filthy rich, but I wasn’t dirt poor either. But I wasn’t “middle class”. I was somewhere in lower-middle class or something, or in no-man’s land. I was certainly too poor for anyone to really care about me, but not poor enough for section 8.
Only recently have I thought more in-depth about my previous elementary and secondary schooling. I knew I hated school ever since seventh grade. But I could never put my finger on why. I blamed it on what I could understand. What other people could easily understand. I was lazy. I didn’t like learning. I didn’t like working hard and challenging myself. In fact, I don’t think it’s true for anyone. The truth was: school was prison. And not just the: “ugh, I’m trapped at school for eight hours and I want to leave but they won’t let me” prison. It was almost like a simulation.
The basic comparisons were easy. You wore an ID at all times. You go through a metal detector every morning and swiped your ID for the day. You had to have a hall pass signed by your teacher to go to the bathroom, and present it to security if they asked you where you were going (can someone say “freedom papers”). But there were certain things my high school did that was way more strict than most other schools. My Chicago Public School was a predominately black high school (about 95% black), and my high school had some rules that, when I explained to older adults, raised a couple of eyebrows. For one, students weren’t allowed in the halls at all. Students weren’t allowed to leave the lunchroom unless they used the bathroom, and students could only leave a class to go to the bathroom with a hall pass. Then you came immediately back. It wasn’t unusual to get hassled and/or heavily questioned by the security staff on your way down the short hall either. We could use the library, but only if we had signed up for it in the morning. You signed for your lunch period, which they checked on your ID, then you signed the sheet and took a library pass. Students that tried to use the library without signing up previously would be sent away.
We couldn’t come back into the building after we left at the end of the day. I remember a lot of my peers fighting the school about this, because some clubs went on until 6:00, with a break to leave and eat something, then come back to the school.
We received detentions for skipping and being late to class. That’s normal, but the school wanted a 95% attendance rate that they were anal about getting. They treated us as though we were never in class, but praised us as being the class with the best attendance. They took away things for students with even one detention. Because they were considered privileges. Imagine: talking about privilege to a bunch of black teenagers! For my senior year homecoming, it was required to have another student sign a permission slip to attend. A slip that had to be signed by them and their principal to confirm that said student didn’t have any detentions either at the outside school. Needless to say not many people wanted to go through the trouble of actually doing that.
I remember a shocking story of how a girl at my school got tazed while in the school. It was during a basketball game. Students that went to my home school went through the metal detectors as normal, but students from the away school didn’t. Well, turned out that someone from a different school had a taser, and got into an argument with a student from home. A poor girl, who was a bystander in it all, ended up tased somehow. The question then became: why only make us go through the metal detectors and not everyone else? Because you don’t care about everyone else, you care about your students? It certainly wasn’t unheard of. Even if no one in the school administration said it, the message was clear: no one in the school really trusted the students. Some days it felt like security was more worried about if a student had a gun than the other measures to protect my school.
In my recent transition to college, my most shocking discovery was how much my professors wanted me to talk in the classroom. High school had one clear direction everyday: sit down, shut up, and listen. Listen to adults talk to you everyday for eight hours. Some days it didn’t make sense why anyone would want to do that, and I wondered why anyone would think ADHD was a disorder and not just common sense. I had a whole class that was discussion based. I remember staring at those two words on my syllabus for a while when I printed it. I struggled in that class, and maybe even talking to my peers at times. After all, I wasn’t conditioned to have opinions and share them with others. I was conditioned to listen and soak up information. People on campus raved about Socrates, and his ingenious Socratic Method: asking questions to help others seek an answer. I had a history professor that answered questions with another question, until the student found a reasonable answer. Whenever anyone used this method on me, I stared at them like an idiot. I mean after all, a teacher is supposed to answer my questions, right? That’s like, how school works.
Towards the end of my senior year, I was annoyed with even my own teachers. I had realized something else that spelled doom for the school. The teachers didn’t believe in us, the students. It was the little things. Like how once, a few students in my senior class asked an English teacher how many students they believed would graduate this year. Their answer? Not many. It was similar for the ACT test. They told us things like: you only need a 21 or better . . . you only need a 21 . . . only need a 21 . . . only a 21. Like we weren’t capable of doing better. Or rather, doing better than a score of 21 is an after thought, not an expectation. It was things like this that students caught onto. And I knew it discouraged them. I mean after all, what use was there in trying when no one else believed in you? No one else had any more maturity to strive for success on their own accord. We were all still young teenagers after all, and if we knew we could get away without doing work and/or being pushed to do better, we wouldn’t do the work.
The only problem I felt inclined to fix during my high school career was how the special education students were treated. Both the predominantly black middle school and high school I attended treated special ed kids similarly. They were always separated from everyone else, they ate at their own lunch table, they had their own section to sit at during school assemblies and events. While most students were cool with them, no one spent more than a few minutes near them. The special ed teachers were also a bit rough with them. Sometimes they pushed them around or pulled on their clothes to get them to walk somewhere. They yelled at them a lot. It was often that the students with autism would swing their heads around violently, and no one would attempt to get them to calm down.
I remember mentioning it to my friends. They agreed that the special ed kids were being treated badly, or that at least something was off.
“We should tell the principal,” the school had just started a suggestion box after all. But my friend’s faces glazed over, their eyes drifted to somewhere over my shoulder, their mouths in tight, straight lines.
“Who would ever listen to us?” It wasn’t a question I was unfamiliar with. I’ve had my fill of old baby boomers complaining on Facebook about how my generation was too complacent, we didn’t care about real issues and making a change in our communities. I knew it was a lie, we could all see several problems happening all over the city, and we discussed them frequently. But whenever someone suggested taking action, there was always the question of who would take a bunch of teens seriously. We knew people listened if there was a lot of us. But organizing a collective change was a risk, it may work or it may not. It was hard convincing others to do anything without first believing that they actually have a voice.
My question now becomes: what sort of motivational, Malcolm X call-to-action statement could I make that would actually work? How could I try to change this issue I’ve noticed?