Peace, I just wanted to share my experience with the public school system and why I quit teaching after 14 years of dedicated, decorated service. My name is Supreme Understanding or Dr. Sujan Dass in the world of education, Google me bitches. I’m just kidding, I’m a regular person, but I’ve put in a lot of work in this field of education. First and foremost I love our children, all children who struggle-Black, brown, anybody who’s been thru poverty. It’s like that at white schools too, they only put my in the white school for one year, but all my other years were in the hood.
Everywhere I’ve been able to bond and connect with the children because the children are our future, y’all know the song!…and the children we need to be most concerned about are the most disadvantaged, those that are poor, those born in poverty, in impoverished neighborhoods where books are written about how fucked up the neighborhoods are and the schools in these neighborhoods. To the point where it’s called a ‘savage inequality’, America’s school system presents us savage inequalities, what does that mean? Has it gotten better or worse, have we left no child behind or not?
Hell, if my story tells you anything, there’s a reason why i quit these schools. It’s not the place you want your babies, and I’ll explain to you why. This school system was designed to perpetuate the status quo, back when this was a farming society we based the system around the Prussian educational system and agricultural work schedule. During the summer seasons you out of school to help harvest, now we maintain the same schedule and the same type of education, meaning you’re not learning things that are useful to your everyday life, especially if you’re born into poverty. I worked in schools where students were beaten up and bombarded by teachers who come from middle class backgrounds cuz they come to class unprepared to learn, they don’t have pencils or paper.
Those teachers never care why they don’t have paper and pencils,
I was one of the teachers that did care. I worked in an environment where the type of kids I was teaching are the same type of kids I ran with when I was in school. And when I was public school, after being kicked out of high school when I had to go to one of the worst schools in my city, I saw why kids don’t graduate in the hood, cuz the system don’t give a fuck of if you do or not.
My high school guidance counselor was a white woman named Mrs. Vertelli, she became the assistant principal through a long career of telling Black students, as a guidance counselor, not to go to college cuz ‘we ain’t college material.’ She told me to find a job immediately, cuz I wouldn’t make it any other way. That’s what made me want to go to college, Just to prove otherwise. And she became the assistant principal after that. I was supposed to come back, after having survived and achieved all these beautiful things, and deliver the commencement speech graduation ceremony at the same high school I graduated from and she was the one who blocked it; she knew I was gonna call her out.
Luckily, had good teachers and bad. Teachers oftentimes don’t realize they are participating in the system, so I’m not gonna blame the teachers alone, even though there’s a whole lot of teachers who don’t really give a fuck about the kids and y’all wrong for collecting them paychecks. They get paid pretty good, I say that as a retired teacher, working for the system for 14 years you get a opportunity to do things for your students that can make a difference. You get 3 months vacation, you get the time to live in ways that other people don’t, but the sacrifice you make is taking care of people that other people won’t. When you with kids for eight hours, or more, a day then you with them more than their parents. They parents don’t get to see them that much cuz half the time the kids are asleep. So the parents only got a couple hours with them, you got eight hours with them. Are you changing and shaping they lives? Are you talking to each student? Are you specifically targeting the ones that need the most help?
Or are you breaking them down and making them feel bad humiliating them? I worked in a schools, even with good administrators, that break down because they just don’t exist to serve the children.
Case in point, when I worked in the white school, if one of their grandparents died they get therapy. If one of the white kids start flipping out and stabbing people, he’ll get counseling, put him in a padded room so he can have fun and be better. But in our school, I’ve seen a child jump out the window, break his leg trying to kill himself, and when he got back to school they suspended him.
You know what they did after that?
You think they gave him therapy, or talked to him, pull him to the side? Maybe one or two teachers did, but systemically, it did not happen.
He didn’t get referred nothing. And when he, a fifth grader, jumped out of the window AGAIN, they expelled him. This is the way we treat Black children, we punish them for the same thing that white kids get therapy. That’s not accidental, not cuz some teacher or weak-ass principals decided, that’s cuz of the system and how it’s designed.
After working there for 14 years I had countless opportunities to advance, be in administrative positions where I’d be responsible for the whole school: teachers, students, and everyone’s performance in the building. The reality is, that’s a snake pit, who wants to work in a den of darkness?
Once you make it to a position of leadership then you’re accountable for all the bullshxt they want you to do, and it’s Never about the babies, the students. Every school leader knows it’s not about the children, maybe they got into for the children but they not working for the babies now, they working to meet the needs of stakeholders, people with money and power that decide how your school should function and what should happen with your babies. Meanwhile the babies getting routed to prison. This is a very real thing called the school-to-prison pipe line. You know what that is?
The school-to-prison pipeline is the way in which Black and brown children, specifically young Black males, are targeted for special routing like they are being corralled into the prison itself. They do it thru special education, their behavioral designations, medication, they do it by not teaching young Black men emotional coping, life and survival skills. They only put them thru experiences that will bring out the worst in them. So young Black males put thru this school system will either become conformist, where they gotta fit to whatever the system dictates, even if it means they gotta be a little bitch. And some of our boys don’t want to be little bitches, some of them don’t want to be a passive victim. So he might rebel, how do he rebel, by cussing the teacher out? Not right away, he might get out his seat a little bit, walk around, ask a funky question, might be talking in the back. And what does he get for that? Does he get taught about Right and wrong in a way that will encourage and help him? Does he receive education that will become interesting and make him want to learn? No he gets punished, reprimanded and made to feel like shxt. This is what happens in every school, whether it’s black or white teachers, because it’s the design of the system. This comes from me working in that system for over a decade and seeing this go down. Why do we do it?
We do it cuz we broken too , we broken all the way up to the level of the leadership. The leadership doesn’t even believe in the children, they don’t fight for them, even though the babies are being done wrong. What about higher up?
Higher up, the more empty of a soul you can be, the more successful you can become. They bringing in the kinds of people who run systems into the ground, it’s obsolescence by design. Same way they make your toothbrush so the bristles fall out and you gotta but a new one every two months. That’s the same way they made these schools, so your babies can end up in prison, miseducated, having to dance for their money. Has anybody learned how to balance a check book in school yet? Has anybody learned how to budget their money in school yet? Let me know when they do, until then our best bet is to educate our children at home.
Peace
has the topic of critical thinking ever been taught in an elementary or high school yet ? they teach children to accept as factual anything that’s written in a text book — the opposite of critical thinking — not only imbibing all these biased interpretations, and flat out historical fallacies , but having to study and memorize them. They give our kids grades. “A” for repeating what they were told in minute detail, “B ” for regurgitating the data adequately, C if you dont like the low vibes of the whole shit and would rather enjoy life. There are better schooling paradigms that can exist, and they will exist. Asap
Peace Great Mind,
Let me start first by saying I agree whole heartedly with this point that you point out Dr. Supreme. Through my own personal experiences I have seen exactly what you explain here. Coming from a working middle class family living in an urban area, I attended public school system, others might say “Fool System”. I had a hard time, my home life was not conducive, domestic violence was the norm in my immediate family, I would get sent to my aunty for after school help with home work etc until parents get off work my aunts husband was kicking her ass too. I felt trapped. So when i went to school the next day, other children are happy, I’m sad, the women in my life are being brutalized. I’m thinking about the Tyson fights I keep seeing every night. I really can’t think about nothing else, and if i get a bad grades I’m getting bum rushed onsite. I remember getting the honor roll one night, a had won a purple ribbon. I remember thinking my moms going to be proud, but she was mugged that night at gun point while holding my baby sister, so my house was crawling with the FOI (We didn’t call the police back then.). My honor roll took a backseat to the robbery. It just had no place that night, nobody cared. My grades got worst, I spiraled downward. Elementary I was caught with a survivors knife “Rambo Knife.” Middle school I got lucky by the grace of Allah. They were going to put me in the lab cluster for fighting too much. Dr. Omar Reid assessed me and seen I was just standing up & defending myself. That wasn’t the first time I was misdiagnosed. Fast forward, a little later I was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia. The Doctors did a few further assessment’s like IQ Test, the visual “What do you see here?” cards etc. The main told me “Your fine. Nothing is wrong. I suggest you enroll into college.” Completely blew my mind! After all this time, I let others trick me into believing I was Insane & a hopeless loser that was dumb. Never let others define you! I just had to learn how to learn. Not saying I had a learning disability, or ADHD. But when my mother or any other tutor took time and actually showed me patience, I could dig it. Public schools could care less about patience. The doors are chained the text books are out dated and morale is low. Medal detectors are beeping and the birds are chirping. The fish are jumping but they just ain’t bitin’.