My life is all I have

Ok so check it out. Detention is bullshit. For how progressive and liberal my school is (or claim to be), they (that’s messed up how I refer to MY school as THEY when it comes to this! Lol).. Let me back it up. The school that I’m at holds on to detention like drinking water from a water fountain. You can get detention for anything: for breathing when you weren’t supposed to, for smiling when you were supposed to be screw faced, for enjoying life- or rather singing too loud during lunch when you were supposed to be calm, orderly, and ‘appropriate’. Well, some of those things I exaggerated with, but you catch my drift.

So like my schedule isn’t full enough, I had to give up my lunch break (my only ‘prep’ on Fridays) to be the detention room overseer supervisor. So when the period before lunch let out, I popped in my stuffed chicken in the microwave and headed down to the cafeteria to pick up the criminals students. I got the Jena 6 middle school 8 but on the way back to my room, I had to make two stops: I had to get my chicken (lol), and I had to get the mandatory detention forms from the office that the students need to fill out once they finish their lunch. As we are all walking back to my room, I’m reading the student detention form. WHAT? Write an essay about Abraham Lincoln….????? What???? I get to my room and the first thing I do is set down my chicken, then I take the sheets and toss them in the trash. I tell the kids that they have ten minutes to eat their lunch and then we have work to do.

After each student finishes, I tell them that they need to come up to my desk and tell me why they have detention. One student says because he was chewing gum in the hallway. Another student became teary eyed and told me that she has detention because her mother decided to make her breakfast because today is her birthday. It was the first time her mother had ever made her breakfast before school. On top of that she lives an hour and 30 minutes away by train and she arrived to school 8 minutes late. Two best friends were in detention because the day before, they didn’t come inside immediately after the bell rang.

All of these offenses seemed extremely minor. So minor that I felt like not only was this a waste of my time, but also of theirs. So to turn a major negative into a positive I had them write poetry, starting with the line from one of pharoahe monch’s rap songs, My Life. The first line is: My life is all I have. I told the kids I wanted them to write a poem, a rap, or a song starting with that line. They got to work. Pens skated across their pages. They were into it. It was relevant. It was self-reflective. Isn’t that the point of detention? To get the students to think about their actions and their lives? I felt like I circumvented the unnecessary BS about good ol Abe Lincoln by throwing in some relevant stuff. They want differentiation right? Well here you go.

When it came down to ten minutes left, the kids were still heavy into their work. Out of nowhere, I delivered mine:

my life is all I have
like a KING I am free at last!
for our lives im scared cuz even Brooklyn has Baghdad blasts

my life is all I have!

no phones or gold, degrees or clothes
my life… so controlled yet free
sometimes even I forget it belongs to me
sometimes I forget to just, be

so i.. ‘do’ instead of ‘be’ black
i act wack
i gum smack and talk back
i walk back and arrive late
i have good intentions but it was my mother that made me…
breakfast
and I wanted to go in, but on the yard we had a friendship session

but next week is new…
and this life is too…
and its mine, forever

I saw the eyes that make teaching worth it. I saw the eyes of students that want to control their destiny, their minds, their education. I saw eyes of re-focusing, re-determination, re-mind(ers) of why we are here, our purpose. And it was reflected in their poetry that I asked them to share before heading back to their class after lunch.

Mission accomplished.

I had to write them all passes for being a few minutes late to their next class. Surely I didn’t want to be the cause of yet another detention!