Today I went to John R. Wooden High School in Reseda to teach
creative writing. It's a continuation school for at-risk youth from 16-18, and
it maintains a seriously flexible schedule to accommodate parents, homeless and
foster kids, and other students who would struggle to graduate at a
"normal" four-year high school. Click here to read more about the impact that LA's
continuation schools have on their students--and to understand what a tragedy
it would be to lose them.
This was my first to Wooden, and actually my first
trip to a continuation school ever. I've worked in LAUSD before, so I didn't
think anything would be able to surprise me. When we pulled up to the school,
the surrounding area looked pretty average:
Garages, lawns, recycling--looks
like a suburb!
The school itself was only five or six permanently placed portable
classrooms attached to the campus of an elementary school. (Sorry for the lack
of pictures, but most schools have strict photography rules.) I did get a
picture of their wonderful John Wooden mural from the internet, though--with
Wooden himself in it!
When I walked into the classroom, it looked pretty
average as well, save for the small class size. The kids and their teachers,
however, clearly had great relationships, and talked to each other with respect
and understanding, and that (unfortunately) stuck me as unusual. It's not that
the teachers I've worked with before weren't good teachers--it's that these
teachers were so obviously different. It turns out the the entire environment
of the school was completely different than I expected, in a good way, and in
one that makes for an interesting comparison between this continuation school,
populated by the "worst" LAUSD has to offer, and other
"normal" high schools in the system.
As I began the lesson, the kids were about as attentive as any high school class, but it was when we started asking them individual questions about their work that their personalities really shone. They wrote poems today, and one girl raised her hand because she was struggling with symbolism.
"What are you trying to symbolize?" I asked. "What's the poem about?"
"My daughter," she said.
It was then that I really understood the demographic I was working with. I helped her out--she decided to use a princess as the symbol in her poem--but my mind was whirring the rest of the class. Especially when 6 out of 7 girls left early for "parenting" class. I also found out that most of the boys in the class were kicked out of their old high schools for fighting, or because they'd been caught selling or using drugs on multiple occasions.
I can't help but wonder: are these kids victims of the differentiation of American society? Most of them were bitter about their lives before they came to Wooden, arguing that their old teachers didn't care, and that the students at their old schools were intolerable in their wealth/attitudes/judgement. If kids from the same school district can't even get along because of societal stratification, how can any of us? The reading for this week, "The Emergence of Postsuburbia," grates on me now because of its focus on things like housing, commercial centers, individualized forms of transportation, and other elements of middle-class living that my students have never been able to take advantage of, and remain bitter about. I look at them and I hope, over the next ten weeks, to get to know them better. I also hope that these motivated but set-back students might spark a change--for their children, or their families, or even just for themselves--that gets them out of their current situation and helps them combat the societal norms that helped get them there.
Cheers!
Amy
Amy
Let me start off by saying that I think it is very admirable that you volunteer at a school for at risk high school students. Incidentally, I also love the fact that you volunteer at John Wooden High School, which is oddly fitting for this blog. That being said, I am not sure if you plan to adjust and edit your blog posts at a later time or whether you plan to incorporate all your blog posts into one central theme in a later post, but in any case, I think you would be best served by adjusting your current blog style.
ReplyDeleteFirstly, you should start by being a bit more descriptive about your trip, noting subtle differences and nuances between the areas you pass through or between your destination and somewhere you are more familiar with. Secondly, these posts should reflect, in some way, the idea of social difference. I do feel that you demonstrated this quality very well in this blog post, as you discussed ideas of at-risk youth and continuation schools, but I believe that your efforts would be best served by you delving directly into how these concepts relate to social difference. Specifically, if Reseda is an area high in at-risk youth, perhaps you could make some kind of connection between the city and the socioeconomic factors at play within the city’s boundaries. That is to say, tie in the class and racial distribution of the city, so the idea of at-risk youth can be tied more directly into the larger umbrella of social difference.
Most importantly, however, is tying your trip to class concepts, while I understand, firsthand, how difficult it was to tie in concepts earlier in the year, due simply to the lack of course material covered, we are at a stage in the quarter where you should not only be able to observe class concepts during your trips, but you should be able to reflect on previous trips and apply these class concepts in a variety of ways. I will not delve into why this blog post does not seem to incorporate any class concepts, but, rather, give you some suggestions of class concepts that I have found highly visible throughout all of my trips. Hopefully, by doing this, you will be able to reflect on and adjust your previous posts before they are graded.
One of the most fundamental class concepts that can be easily and directly observed is the idea of restricting physical and social access to certain areas. This is often seen in high-income areas, where the city has a greater desire to distance itself from, what David Sibley would call, the “uncivilized other.” This can be seen specifically in a city’s use of gated communities, lack of sidewalks or “bum-proof” benches. Another concept that is easily seen is the idea of decentralization, or, more specifically, multi-centralization. This can be easily seen not only through the reliance on automobility and the lack of a centralized transportation network, but also by highly specialized and differentiated “smaller centers.” An obvious example of this would be the centralization of car dealerships in certain cities. One final class concept that can be directly observed in nearly any place in Los Angeles are the ideas of consumerism and, if you go to a specifically affluent area, cosmopolitanism. These concepts can be seen in the explosion of shopping centers in nearly every city.
Hopefully these small suggestions and recommendations will make your blog posts both easier and more fun. Good Luck!