Class Warfare

I spent yesterday evening, when i should have been doing something productive, downloading music. I know, its illegal and all that. But i figure at one time I owned most of the CDs the music came from, so it was more like reestablishing a collection I'd lost. Anyway, that's what we're gonna tell people. 

the point is that I loaded it into the ipod and put the ipod in the little ipod stero and was playing some music today while isaiah did chores and the little guys "napped". I can't help but notice how much the music I like and the music I was raised on centers around issues of classism. WE listend to billy joel, bruise springsteen, and jethro tull when I was a kid. I like pink, rage against the machin, seether and nickleback now. 

The songs that resonate are all about fighting the established powers and systems to maintain a little peice of what the singer feels is due. 

And then I look at where I'm working. The majority of my students have traveled over seas multiple times. They think nothing of flying to new york or washington for a long weekend. They buy uniform clothes at american eagle and sniff at clothes from the gap. The ones who are of age to drive all got cars for chirstmas if they hadn't gotten one before then for a birthday or something. 

If they work, the jobs are silly make work things in the family bussiness. They see nothing wrong with arguing over a grade in the middle of class and they have no consept that they owe adults a factor of respect jsut because they are children adressing adults. 

And it hit me. This is a class thing. I didn't plan on teaching a bunch of priviledged kids how to maintain the priviledge. Poverty is a trap, but its a trap I know how to get out of. Some how working for half what I could be making to teach rich kids seems like a waste of my time and experience. 

But how do you word that on a damn resume. "I know what its like to be poor and have insane parents, hire me, I can help your impoverished and insane students" They was people who are "enriched" I'm not. I've worked stupid menial and embarassing jobs. I've been a teen mother and a welfare recipient. I just don't feel comfortable in that high brow group that makes up the students and parents of that school. 

And i am increasingly convinced that private school are just paid segregation. The kids at the school I go to are not held to a higher acedemic standard, or a behavioral standard. They are getting a poor preparation for college and bad advice when it comes to timing things like taking ACTs and SATs. THey can't write or formulate an opinon without first being told what the right answer is. Private schools are not held to state teaching standards, so we teachers do pretty much what ever we want to. 

I am doing my best to give them a glimpse of what science is. I am having my bio kids write papers. I am insisting that the kids in chem actually memorize some polyatomic ions. Thier gonna have to just do the math when we start the mole. But I won't be there very long, and I can about guarentee that the only way that school will get a science teacher who stays is to find one who is retired and drawing a pension elseware, or to find a career scientist who has content knowledge but isn't able to teach in public schools. Or find someone who jsut doesn't care. But it is hard for me to tell people that I work at a school that is acedemically oriented to prepare kids for college, when it isn't true.