Last year I was teaching second grade in a Title 1 School which is extremely poor… and loved every minute of it. The first day I met my class, I was showing them pictures of my favorite things and my family to help introduce myself. I have four siblings and a brother-in-law, so when I showed our Christmas card picture of all six of us, my students immediately asked, “you got a lot of brothers and sisters, you all got the same dad?” I told them we did in fact all have the same Dad (except for my sister’s husband, but I clearly didn’t feel the need to go there). They also wanted to know if I was married, nope. And upon finding out that I was not married, they wanted to know if I had any kids, again no. And then why at 20 I didn’t have any kids. As hilarious as their questions were, what they randomly chatted me up about was even funnier.
I had one girl who said Obama could be her stepdad. Fascinated, I asked her to explain. She said that they looked just alike. I didn’t even begin to know how to tackle explaining the concept that you don’t resemble your stepdad, so I just told her I thought she looked more like Colin Powell (because I’m republican and like him way better than Obama). My teacher, I’ll refer to her as Ms. Taylor, was a short, heavy-set black woman. She sat at her desk all day and giggled as she read black romance novels complete with bare-chested black men on the covers. She also spent most of the day texting this older man, Thomas, that she had recently met through blackplanet.com. I knew I had made a break through with her when she started telling me about her dating life. I think my favorite guy to hear about was the one that “had a car” but always said his kids had borrowed it. She said she would always have to get up extra early to drive his ass home after he spent the night (food for thought, she has four young kids…) because his kids needed his car to go somewhere, always. Finally after a few months of dating and never actually having seen said car, she asked me if I thought he really had one. I said “No.” She updated her blackplanet.com profile that afternoon and quit taking his calls. I could tell we were tight when she started asking me for dating advice. I could really tell we were tight when she started following my advice right off the bat. One of my favorite things about teaching black kids is learning how to pronounce their names. My favorites were Shakalia (Sh-a-kay-la) which I mistook for shock-a-lee-a, Cyah (K-i-y-ah), Galexus (ja-lexus) and Javonte. My most favorite though was Cevyn, which I assumed was a special way of spelling “Kevin”, but oh no… it was pronounced seven. I suppose it was due to my having seen the spelling first, but it wasn’t until my sister pointed it out that I realized his name was like the number seven. I think that should be every parent’s goal in naming their child. Give them a random word for a name like Seven, but throw everyone off the track by spelling it as weirdly as possible. For instance, I might plan on naming my daughter Ponytail, but I would spell it Poanitale and put a lot of verbal emphasis on the “i” to keep people from immediately realizing that I named my kid Ponytail and am in fact ridiculous. At least that’s creative, I mean Nicole Ritche named her son Sparrow, Sparrow James Midnight Madden... Maybe she should have spelled it Sparo or Sparoe. Sparo is a little too similar to spyro so I think she should have gone with the Sparoe spelling. At least then when she realizes she should have just left that part of his name off (along with Midnight in my opinion) she could lie and say it’s a family name. And on another note, why even bother to throw James in there? She might as well have gone three for three and given him another fug name.
Imagine how sad I was to find out that only 1/5th of my new school is black and they’re definitely not poor. I’m sure I’ll love them, but it just won’t be the same.
