R-e-s-p-e-c-t and Ramblings...

One of my students---LL who's 17 in 8th grade, gang bangs and sells cocaine (and regularly gives me side hugs/pounds and calls me his favorite teacher)--said:

"Mr.Amutah, my car gon' come through and shut yo' car down. I'm a come through and shut yo' lil' speakers down. I seent you yesterday at the light playing that Jay-Z, Mr.Amutah. I seent you."

QS: "Mr.Amutah got that lil' Nissan."
LL: "Yeah, but he clean though."
QS: "Yeah, he clean."
LL: "That's all that matter. Long as you got you a lil' car and you clean."
QS: "Yeah."

It was enough to make me laugh out loud. He's a good kid. Just caught up in the trap.

It made me think about something we're talking about in my world history classes. We're discussing the nineteenth century Enlightenment in Europe and John Locke's concept of the tabula rasa that every person is born with a blank slate for a brain. Their environment determines the person they become. No person is innately good or bad. They're all shaped in time by things around them. LL is shaped by Silver City--the roughest small town in Humphreys County. I can usually tell when a student, whether mine or not, is from Silver City. They generally are a little poorer than other students, have clothes that are a bit more taterred and grades that are a little bit lower than others. They talk about the frequency of shootouts in this town of roughly 330 people on a regular basis. It's nothing that they're unfamiliar with. One of my students from Silver City told me a while ago about when he was hit by a stray bullet when he was out in the streets--perhaps when he shouldn't have been--and how that turned him around. He said it so nonchalantly in the midst of regular conversation that at first I wasn't sure if I heard him right.

It's endlessly troubling that these students of mine were not born in different circumstances but have just been given a raw deal with life. Their environment is all they know. Their small town is where they'll live and die. Life may be punctuated by visits to Memphis or a summer in Chicago but in a 365-day year they won't venture further than 100 miles from their house, if that, for 360 of them. Thus, the most important thing to them is who's riding past them looking clean. Who just went in/came out of jail. Who just had a baby (one of my newly-made mothers in 8th grade was excited to show me pictures of her baby today. It felt strange though. I didn't want to tacitly endorse the situation).

Go figure.