Paying for Grades

The latest gimmick for duping black people into a handout mentality, further undermining our genuine brilliance and drive, is to pay for better grades. This is a farce, and it will not work. As long as education is not pursued for the sake of building basic learning skills, satisfying wonder, and gaining the immense self-confidence that comes from completing an ardous task, there is no reward.

There are many reasons why a public education should stay "free." Compensating children now will undermine their ambition, not increase it. And if you think there is a bullying problem in public schools now...Wait until the science nerd starts hauling in a bigger "pay check" than the woodshop student.

Then again, spending a few million dollars paying the children of the poor for a marginal improvement on their report cards, could muzzle the cry for spending hundreds of millions on job creation for their parents...Hmmmmmm?

National Art Gallery

Last week I visited the National Art Gallery in Washington, D.C. for the first time. It certainly will not be the last. Infact, one visit was not enough time to see it all. Nevertheless, the gallery was magnificent. On display were some presentations that will make an art enthusiast stop and marvel.

Rededication

Tonight, I informed my "friends" that I was going on hiatus from my Facebook activity. I do not have much liesure time, and what down time I do have I found that I was spending it "keeping in touch" on FB, and not updating my own blog. FB is a very user-friendly platform -- to their credit -- but it was becoming habit forming. Infact, I have yet to finish a draft on education that I started close to a month ago. So, here I go, back to my own blog where I hope to attract dialogue over subjects of greater interest to me. Let's face it, FB has not been found to be a magnet for weighty interests. I have not abandoned FB altogether, however...Just going on hiatus.

I am perplexed over how to garner more attention for my site, so if any of you happenstance readers have worthy tips for me, I am all eyes. I am going to try more pictures with captions, and even some video commentary. Stay tuned. Or perhaps I should say, tune in!

Schooling IV: Defiance

This installment of 'Schooling' was prompted by a teacher at the middle school where I am vice principal. She was compelled to rant after being faced with yet another bout of in-your-face student defiance that occurred during her lunch duty. Willfull disobedience disobedience best describes it. My collegue was justly exasperated from it. This problem can be so pervasive in some schools that it takes on a subculture of its own and it can be difficult to discern. It occurs all over the public school landscape, but it is a particularly a troublesome phenomenon on the middle school level when adolescent children began to assert their will more stridently. Teachers are mostly caught off guard despite the lessons on adolescent development we should know. Now let me not approach this topic sheepishly.

If it is true that public schools in general get a bad rap, then it is especially true that "urban" schools get maligned for the failures they manifest. Dozens of movies have been made with the theme that goes..."Predominatly Black and Hispanic schools are out of control." Dangerous Minds and Lean On Me are two of the most memorable examples of cinema depicting urban schools that are all but unsalvagable. Recent documentaries on Frederick Douglass High School in Baltimore Maryland, and Little Rock High School in Arkansas remind us that the problem is not purely ficticious. In fact the issues are prevalent and real. At the core of problems in most of these schools, weather they are large metro schools in Los Angelos or Chicago, or small urban villages such as the middle school where I am assistant principal, is an entrenched subculture of apathy and disrespect for authority connected to poverty.

Sometime we conveniently refer to a variety of societal factors in order to obsolve students for not engaging opportunities that public schools still hold for them. However, few people discuss the impact of individual will on a student's achievement or failure in school. I contend that the law of attraction manifests in school frequently. Just as water and dust find their own levels and collect to create a dominant environment, so to do poverty and apathy. People often over look, or disregard the fact the public school districts are the major employers -- if not the only employers in many low income communities. Consequently, the contrast between community norms and common middle class expectations of most America schools becomes blurred.

In as much as I am an adminstrator of public schools, and a Black person, I am not given over to apathy on the subject, nor am I motivated by self-loathing. Instead I feel compelled to explore answers to these all too familiar phenomenon, and address myself to their installation when I can. That brings me back to my collegue. When there exists in schools an unbridled inclanation by many students to do as they please, without regard to authority, your school has been seriously undermined by social norms that make educational success a virtual impossibility for the school's majority.

When aggregated, student defiance of routine direction from teachers, and their antipathy for rules constitute the majority of infractions in most schools. However, when schools are sizable and obstinance is so frequent that it demoralizes teachers, it can create a stagnant pool for negative norms to culture and grow. Norms that burden a school with the invisible pull of their gravity. In affect, it becomes likely that only a fraction of your most fortuitous students will succeed on par with pupils in schools where a traditional learning environment prevails. Until administrators hold truely high expectations for both the routine and infrequent conduct of pupils, and stand against the enabling behavior of some parents and staff, more lofty aims for academic achievement will be weighted under by a culture that works against them. Novel prescriptions like school uniforms and affirming speeches will never be more affective then a persistent expectation for mutual consideration and respect.

The Saga of Rufus and Leona

by Darren W. Palmer

Leona:
My darling drummer man
Capable ambitious and in command
Snarling, popping and be-bopping those skins
With a passion and purpose haunting and grim.

Your passion envelops me. It speaks of pain.
Pain that cannot be controlled.
Yet your majesty intrigues my humbled soul.

Drummer man, mellow. So alive with the night.
Fill the voids in my tortured life.

Rufus:
Magnolia. Forbidden flower –
Cause of my contempt.
Yet my urge for you will not relent.

Magnolia flower - a latent prize.
The seeds of your pedals I despise.
I’m trapped like a Genie in bottle of pain
With illusions of success calling my name.


Together: (chorus)
Rufus and Leona kindred souls with desperate hearts
Helpless in a society that keeps them apart.

Leona:
Heartsick, desperate me –
Black and blue for all to see.
Angry, defeated you –
Harborer of hate, our love eschewed.

Rufus:
My tunes are all blues now, and my pride
Has hitched a ride.
My faith has found a ridge
Atop the Brooklyn Bridge.

Together: (chorus)
Rufus and Leona full of self-doubt.
Rufus and Leona turned love inside out.

Enlightened Commentary on Islam

Asalamu Aliakum.

"I think everything on this earth is being modernized; religious principles and practices, as well as politics..."

Malcolm X remains one of the best examples of the African-American's struggle for a political and cultural independence within the American milieu. His example is always valued, even in these times. Recently, none other than a top leader of Al Queda attempted to lecture President Obama about his authenticity as a black man in America. Image that! Indeed, a figure of backward humanity, female oppression, and violent insurrection would make such narrow comments about race relations in America. Why? Because (some) Arabs have the same paternalistic ideas about Africans that (some) Whites held -- here and in places like South Africa.

Sadly, too many people, of all races, including muslims, have little familiarity with the true dictates of Islam, as evidenced by the Quran. Were African Americans to be influenced by such comments from Islamic extremists, or others who think like them, our fate would have been not unlike those people of the Sudan or Tanzania - where Africans moved toward an invader's interpretation of Islam, but not toward brotherhood among our people and those around us.

Thank Allah for Malcolm's example. Allahu Akbar!

Martin Luther King's Birthday

I pride myself with being informed about things; particularly Black History. I have read, or have been made familiar with almost every notable personality in the struggle for civil rights and human dignity this country has birthed from Martin Delaney to Malcolm X, and Sojourner Truth to Rosa Parks. However, no one strikes a sentimental cord in me like Martin Luther King, Jr.

A poetic symbiosis of intellect, bombast, spirituality and human dignity, King was an American original. A man for his times and beyond. His magnificent Letter From A Birmingham Jail stands as a profound indictment of America's social order in the mid-twentieth century. His I Have A Dream Speech was a master portrayal of national hypocrisy. And the I've Been To The Mountain Top Speech was a defiant specter of things to come.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was more than just a speech maker, or a sentimental dreamer. He was a twentieth century prophet. I put him alongside Jesus of Nazareth. Yes, that's right, Christ. Because he, too died for our sins.