3 posts tagged “harvard”

Makes me wanna gag and hurl. The students at Harvard are by-and-large herded into careers that put people before profits (shoutout to my boy Philip Parham '09 who appears in the video, however). It relates to another discussion going on as well.

This was written journal style my first night in Oxford, this past Monday (June 4). Just wanted to offer some background into what's brought me here:

As I sit in my new apartment at the University of Mississippi, I find time to reflect on what has brought me to this remote locale in Oxford, Mississippi to begin what may be the most difficult experience of my life three days before my graduation from Harvard University.

At some point in my upbringing I knew I wanted to be a teacher. I think I was first bit by the teaching bug when I was nine or ten years-old and a student at Patton Joseph Hill Elementary School in Trenton, New Jersey locally known simply as “P.J. Hill.” It was here at a school where bullet holes pierced what should have been safe windows and pre-teen students fought administrators for the lucrative bounty of one dollar that I realized that I would prefer a career in teaching to any other. This was a fleeting thought, however, and between elementary school and college I went through a broad range of careers. Like many inner-city youth, I soon wanted to be a professional basketball player. From that I went on to focusing on becoming a rapper. Through my interest in rap and the music business I developed an interest in entertainment law, largely because around the age of 16 I learned that the top entertainment lawyers in the U.S. made $800 an hour—which would come out to $40,000 a week for a fifty-hour work week. My career was set. I went to Harvard with this career focus in mind.

While at Harvard, I took a few steps towards entering the music business after graduation from college. I went through the “comp”[1] for a spot on the staff of our campus radio station, WHRB, and by the second semester of my sophomore year I was a member of the radio station’s studio engineering department as well as its Black Urban Contemporary (BUC) department spinning rap, dancehall, and R&B from 3-5 a.m. Sunday mornings. I had established contacts in the rap publication industry through my girlfriend and hoped to work during the summer after freshman year for a record company or rap publication in New York City.[2] I also joined up with the nascent student-run record label at Harvard, Veritas Records, named after our Latin motto ve ri tas meaning "truth." I thought that I was firmly on my way to doing everything I needed to do to have a successful career in the music business and I was not altogether wrong.

Due to what was then a side interest in civil rights issues and Black history, I applied for a spot on an Alternative Spring Break (ASB) trip to when I was a freshman. I had never been to the “Deep South” and was excited when I was accepted as one of eight students to go. We had two great chaperones on the trip. One was Gene Corbin, the Executive Director of the Phillips Brooks House Association, a student-run social service and social action organization at Harvard with nearly 80 programs and thousands of student volunteers. Gene used to run a non-profit in Jackson, that we volunteered at while we were in Jackson that week. The other was Claudia Highbaugh, the Chaplain of the Harvard Divinity School who had family from Jackson and a sublime understanding of civil rights history and its relationship to churches; not to mention a much-needed maternal and supportive nature. While we were in Mississippi we did everything from meet Constance Slaughter-Harvey, the first Black woman admitted to the University of Mississippi’s Law School, to visit Philadelphia, Mississippi, site of the infamous 1964 kidnappings and murders of three civil rights workers historically referred to collectively by their last name--Cheney, Goodman, and Schwerner. Our conversations with various civil rights leaders and visits to various civil rights landmarks left an indelible mark on me.

On one such occasion and trip, we met with Hollis Watkins who was an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the 1960s. On the wall of Mr. Waktins’ office were two posters that showed a map of Mississippi by county. One poster showed each county in Mississippi’s racial makeup. The other poster showed how much funding for public education each county in received. The stark racial disparities were shocking. The counties that were more heavily Black invariably received less funding than the counties that were mostly White. It was not until then that I realized that public education and its problems were not only a New Jersey issue between Abbott Districts[3] and more affluent suburban ones—it was a national and even international issue that kept particular races and classes in subjugated states. This revelation’s impact on me cannot be overstated. The education bug once again sunk its teeth into me and this time it was there to stay. I came back to Harvard, changed my concentration (major) from English and American Literature and Languages to African and African American Studies and Government, changed my summer plans from gaining a job in the music industry to working with an educational and recreational PBHA summer program in inner-city Boston, and changed my career focus from entertainment law to urban public education.

Thus, this is an abbreviated breakdown of why I am here now. This is why I am avoiding the immense paychecks and signing bonuses of many of my peers and friends at Harvard. This is why I am missing the last three days of my college career including my class of 2007 photo, an award ceremony and banquet for my academic department, and a Class Day speech by former U.S. President Bill Clinton. This is why I got chills today when I walked into Holly Springs High School in Holly Springs, Mississippi—the site of the Mississippi Teacher Corps’ summer school where I will get my teaching practice before becoming a teacher in Jackson’s public school system in early August. I have come to Mississippi to address the intellectual, emotional, and—if necessary—material needs of people that I care about and love deeply though I have never met. Human beings that, due to their life’s circumstances, are growing up in social and economic situations I feel mirror my own. I am in Mississippi to bring positive and radical social change to the world. But first, I have to put up my shower curtains….

This past Tuesday marked the one-month countdown to my departure to Mississippi as a part of the Mississippi Teacher Corps. I'm now in my last month of college with no final papers and no exams left. It's smooth sailing from here.

I've begun reading a few different books that my sister gave me this past Christmas as gifts. Standard "How to Teach" and "My First Day" sort of books. More importantly than these, however, I'm finding the time to delve into leisure reading and taking in stuff like Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed and E. Franklin Frazier's Black Bourgeoisie to get an understanding of approaches to social justice, liberation theory, and critical pedagogy within the educational system and understand the Black middle-class, especially in the South, respectively. I own these two books but I'm rapidly realizing that upon leaving Harvard and losing access to its 15 million books--the fourth largest book collection in the world after those of the French, British, and U.S. governments--I won't have free access to many others I'm interested in reading. At one point during my Harvard career, I felt that the best education that this esteemed University could give students would be providing us with access to these immense literary resources and then subsequently facilitating unrestrained (oxymoronic phrase?) discussions amongst students and faculty while providing us with a variety of opportunities for experiential learning--the greatest educational tool, in my opinion. In some ways I still feel like that would have been best....

In making this big move in life, one of the biggest things I'm going to have to take care of (maybe one of my classmates in MTC can help me out with this) is getting a license. I need one. Soon. Due to the fact that I grew up in New Jersey many people look at me aghast when I tell them I don't have a driver's license. They forget to realize that (1) my hometown of Trenton is MAD small...just eight square miles and very walkable and (2) I went to college in metropolitan Boston on a campus easily accessible to airport, commuter rail, train, bus, and subway systems--cars are extraneous.

I'm also trying to figure out where I'm living in Jackson, the city I've been placed in by MTC. My heart tells me that I need to live around the kids that I'm teaching in a neighborhood where I feel like I can personally identify with the residents and their life experiences (bye, bye Harvard Square!). That would put me in West Jackson, most likely. A neighborhood that's been described by fellow MTCers as "a mess of highly impoverished living conditions," that they don't drive through at night and containing limited positives. One of my fellow MTCers even wrote, "West Jackson carries a reputation for violence and gang activity. Many of my students live there, but, again, I don't frequent that side of town." I know that few people willingly live in dangerous, crime-filled neighborhoods but the perceptions of West Jackson bother me for numerous reasons. Not only do I feel that not living in West Jackson would give me a view of my students that was less than ideal while limiting my understanding of their living conditions and lives if I don't frequent their neighborhoods (I guess home visits would be out of the question), but I feel that Trenton also has a reputation similar to West Jackson. People think that walking down the street is immediately going to get you shot, robbed, or assaulted and that everyone who lives there is poor though that's not the case. Statistics on crime and lopsided media accounts in the local paper don't tell you the whole picture. Additionally, I feel like more Black professionals are needed in neighborhoods like West Jackson so that people have role models in their immediate surrounding, not ones that live on the other side of town and just do their teaching as a nine to five. I guess I'll leave my decision of whether or not I should live in West Jackson to next month when I get chances to visit and look at residences out there.