that frog girl

It is the day before spring break in the Chicago Public Schools. I have come in to observe some classes, and know from the first moment that this probably wasn’t the best choice of days to try to observe academics…

Finding my cooperating teacher in a computer lab, I follow him and his homeroom class down to the auditorium, where the school band is putting on a concert. Hordes of students of every color pile into old wooden auditorium seats, filing past metal detectors and a half dozen security personnel, armed with walkie talkies and gumption alone.

They can only fit half the population into the auditorium at a time, though they choose a strange way to split it: freshmen and sophomores in the first assembly, juniors and seniors in the second. This doesn’t sound odd until you realize that there are twice as many freshmen as there are seniors in this school. Between drop-puts and push-outs (mostly push), they dwindle one-by-one over the many years they may spend here. My husband talks occasionally about how a high school diploma meant nothing more than having a pulse at his suburban school. But here on the poorer west side of a massive and gentrifying city, it’s a vital sign that you beat the system after all - that over language barriers, possible fits of homelessness and gang wars, you got your butt to school, did enough homework to get by, and slipped under the eyes of all those who would have made your life hell if they didn’t like the cut of you.

The music starts quickly, and the kids settle down and mostly enjoy it. I think to myself that it would have to be band – that a string orchestra would never survive here, as it’s critical that the performers be louder than the audience. It’s a strange-looking band even by those standards though. The waves and waves of flutes in what I remember from my high school days have been reduced to one or two quiet-looking girls. There are a decent number of clarinets and saxophones and trumpets. There’s even a sousaphone, probably sniped from the marching band for lack of funds.

But mostly it’s drums. Drums and drums and drums.

About halfway through the concert those drums come front and center. Four boys - clearly popular boys, from the roar of the girls in the audience - carry their drums from the back to the very front of the stage. They wear them on harnesses, marching band style. Without any direction of any kind, just a nod from one to the other, they begin to play. And boy do they play. They ham it up too, bouncing and swaying and shaking their hips in time to the most crowd-pleasing bits of the song, and everybody loves it.

The boys are smiling, and you can tell that they know they’re really good. It’s a strange thing to see four black boys smiling and confident in a school like this, designed to break people down and bend them to conform. They look so great up there, so powerful and in control that I start to tear up.

I really really hope that they’re going to be OK. That they’ll beat the odds. That they won’t end up shot down on some street, or in prison. That they don’t have too many children already.

But mostly I just hope they’ll be OK.

And all in one flash, I can see all the ways that teaching is going to be one of the greatest joys of my life. And I can see too all of the ways that it is going to break my heart forever.