Stop.

 I am sitting here, trying to write a paper about the destruction of a race of people, and analyzing my country's response.

Honestly, I don't want to do it. I really don't want to write 25 pages about how throughout WWII and for the first decade afterward, the population of the United States was so overwhelmingly anti-Semitic that we first turned away a group of people being tortured and killed in their homes, and then told them that even once they were safe in our country we did not want to hear about what they had endured.

It's hard to imagine a time when the Holocaust was not widely talked about. I, for one, had always assumed, naively I suppose, that education about the Holocaust had been widespread since the monstrous event occurred. I was wrong.

Not only did widespread public education and recognition of the horrors of that time not begin until the 1970s, it is not even so widespread today as I thought.

Last semester I began my work on the Terezin Project, which I have been involved with for two semesters now. It is a project to integrate the arts into education, centering on the concentration camp of Theresienstadt (Terezin by its Czech name), which was located outside Prague. Theresienstadt was a model concentration camp, where the prisoners were allowed to practice the arts so that Hitler could show the world what a wonderful place he had set aside for the Jews. The camp was even referred to as "The Fuhrer's Gift to the Jews." But in this camp people died, of disease, starvation, and overcrowding. Those that did not die in Terezin were sent to Auschwitz.

There were children in Terezin. 15,000 children.

132 survived.

When I went to work for the project for the first time, I accompanied my professor and a couple other students to Wilson high school, where we did workshops with sophomores. Wilson is considered one of the best public high schools in DC. None of the children we had worked with knew what the Holocaust was until that school year, when their history teacher taught a special unit on it. It seemed crazy to me that kids could have not learned what the Holocaust was until they were 14 or 15 years old. I remember knowing about the Holocaust when I was 6 or 7 years old, and beginning to learn about it in school in 5th grade.

So I am writing this paper. And I really don't want to. I have a very hard time accepting that a group of people could be so narrow-minded, although it is very far from the only time in history that stratification of this kind has occurred in the United States.

I don't want to focus on the negative. I want to look ahead and focus on the hope of a brighter future. We will always need to look at the past, of course, in order to understand the mistakes that humanity has allowed to occur. But what we do not need is to allow our children to live in a world in which that intense cruelty is more than marginally imaginable. Unfortunately genocide continues to occur almost every day; in Rwanda, Serbia, Kosovo, Darfur. And although we look at the Holocaust and continually promise "Never Again," we turn a blind eye to these other situations.

We need to stop. We need to put our feet down and draw an uncrossable line. Even as there is a deep-seated isolationism associated with the American identity, we need to find ways to love each other globally, with more than a national radius. What we really need is to stop pretending that bad things aren't happening, or that they aren't any of our business.

Because that's what allowed the Holocaust to happen.

One in Ten

I heard a stunning statistic yesterday. One of every ten high school students in the city of Washington DC will be incarcerated during at least part of their high school years. One of every ten. 4,500 kids a year that are put in jail.

Let me explain what, first of all, this has to do with me, or this blog, or anything at all.

I want to work in a prisons. Not as a guard, or administrator, but as a teacher. There are programs in a lot of juvenile justice facilities across the country to educate juveniles while they are incarcerated. 

Right now, I work in an elementary school in Anacostia as a tutor in an after-school program. Last year I worked with kindergarteners, which was a little rough at times but not so bad. I mean, they're six years old. At that age, breaking up fights is easy. Just pick the kids up and hold them away from each other until they cool down. Or tickle them until they're laughing and smiling again instead of throwing punches. I work in third grade this year, and it's a little more difficult. I can still pick up kids, which I do when I have to, but they can put up a much bigger fight. And their fights with one another end a lot more frighteningly than kindergarteners' do.

A lot of the other tutors I work with seem amazed at just how poorly our students behave. I will admit, I am slightly stunned myself at times, but I kind of knew what I was getting myself into when I picked this site. When one of my six-year old students told me I was a faggot last year, I was shocked, but not surprised. When he took out a pair of scissors with the intention of stabbing a classmate who had angered him, then I'll admit I was surprised then. No knowledge of how "bad" a neighborhood is could have prepared me for six year olds who try to stab one another. 

There are so many problems in my school that I don't know how to fix. I'm not sure how to respond to my students' hyper-sexualized culture, when girls start shaking their booties like professionals, and one of my male students tells me he is going to take my bra off. I'm not sure how to respond to the sub-culture of violence that prevails in their homes and continues in school, where teachers often turn a blind-eye towards kids as young as 6 or as old as 14 throwing fists, biting, scratching, hitting with any blunt objects they can lay their hands on.

I'm not sure how to respond. So I respond by loving them. A teacher came in to a classroom as another tutor and I were cleaning in preparation for our kids to arrive. It was the worst shape I have ever, in my entire life, witnessed any room. There were papers everywhere, a globe that someone had put their foot through, and discarded homework folders scattered on every surface. She apologized, and then she told me something that stunned me. The students that belonged in that class during the day were a combination of 4th and 5th grade students. They've had 4 teachers since their school year began in September.

In two months, 4 teachers.

She is the fifth, and is remaining there until the 22nd, just temporarily, when she will be replaced again by another "permanent" teacher. She said that when the kids get really bad, all she has to do is say "you're going to make me leave" and they collapse into begging. "Please don't leave! They all leave!"

I can't imagine giving up on kids that easily. Some of their teachers have walked out on them in just a couple weeks. Sure, they're rough. They're a mess, really. But that's why you teach, right? To help kids? To teach them, and guide them. Why would you leave the children who need you the most?

My tutoring program has a fairly poor retention rate for tutors. A lot get shocked or frustrated into leaving. But I'm staying, because one of every ten students in this District ends up in jail. Some of those are my kids. I'm petrified that I'll walk into a jail classroom and find one of my kids' faces looking at me.  So what can I do?

Honestly, right now I don't know. But I know what I can't do- and that is abandon them the way so many other teachers have abandoned them. And I can love them. Every child, no matter how many times they might call me a faggot or insult me because I'm white, no matter how many times they hit other children, or run down the hallways screaming, deserves to be loved, and hugged, and told that they're special. And frankly, that's all I've got. The only way I've figured out how to calm down an angry child is to hug him and pick him up and spin him around and tickle him until he laughs.


I want to teach in jails because I don't want any children to ever think that they've been given up on. 






"A ship in harbor is safe - but that is not what ships are for.  ~John A. Shedd, Salt from My Attic: