“A lot of times we try to dismiss our smarts and pretend that being smart isn’t cool.” The principal was younger than I expected, maybe early forties, and he was tall and handsome in that bearded, craggy way. He seemed especially solid, the bags under his eyes and his hulking shoulders showing both the weight of the world he carried and the strength he brought to that task.
He stood at the front of the room where 55 or so of the ~70 students who could have been there sprawled in rows of chairs. “Don’t do that,” he said, looking hard at each student in turn. “Don’t do that to you.”
At least that’s what I wanted him to say, but he didn’t. It was a Friday, toward the end of the day at the end of a week near the end of the school year, and instead he said something about how being smart IS cool, which even I know is lame, and as he went on I looked around at the fourteen- and fifteen-year-old high school freshmen in the audience and I could see he was losing them.
Subtle shifts of posture, heads hanging down towards phones covert in their laps, girls leaning together to whisper, boys with their hoodies pulled up and then down over their eyes: I looked around the room and I saw disengagement, I saw boredom, I saw a roomful of students who go to a school where only about 60% of them will graduate in four years—two out of every five kids in my view would not put on a gown and cross a stage—and of those who made it to a diploma, just one-quarter of them would be considered college-ready by CUNY’s standards. (And yet HALF of graduates would go on to post-secondary programs, which doesn’t exactly bode well for their success there, and I say this from direct experience.)
Somewhere in the room was (or maybe not—69% of students at this school are chronically absent*), was a high school freshman, let’s call him Josh, who had written this story:
One summer day it became over 100 degrees me and a couple of my friends name Justin and Danny decided to play basketball on the courts across from my building.
We started a game called 21. The first person to 21 wins the game.
So, I had 15 points Danny had 12 and Justin had 9. I scored another point which gave me 17 cause every basket is 2 points except for the three pointer. I went to the free-throw line to shoot my 3 free-throws. I missed the first one, I made the second, and I finally missed the last one.
After that my friend Justin had the ball I stole it and scored again from three pointer.
“Swish” that’s the game! I won!”
“No you didn’t!” said Justin.
He pushed me. Then me and Justin begin fighting. Me and Justin started fighting because I won the game.
“You a sore loser” I said.
I felt bad and he asked me would I like to rematch so I except his challenge and we played again. Finally, me and Justin got along and started playing again.
I’m reproducing this not to pick on this one kid—here is where I should write “for all I know, it’s not representative of his true ability,” but I’m not going to, because that would be a lie—but because this is an example of what we see in our schools. And this kid’s story is hardly the worst of it—sure, it’s poorly written and grammatically incorrect and shows little understanding of narrative arc and/or other basic tenets of storytelling, but he wrote something. That’s a measure for success in this particular program: this kid made it to enough class sessions that he got something written and he made a piece of art to go with it and he ended up in the book of student work we published and presented to these kids that Friday afternoon.
Other stories (but not all) in the book were more cogently constructed, of course, and themes varied from the banal (basketball games, video games) to the upsetting (foster-home abuse, suicidal thoughts; death, death, and more death, including two stories of being witness to drive-by shootings; and one particularly striking story, three pages long, entirely about getting lost on the way to a therapist’s office, long detailed descriptions of the bus ride, the people on the bus, the panic the narrator felt at being lost, the various places she found herself in the city, and only this one line in the first paragraph about why: “I had to get therapy because of issues I had going on.” The story ends with the narrator finding her mother and going home, the appointment missed, the conclusion simply, “That’s when I knew my moral of my story was to follow my instinct and try to pay more attention,” i.e. to her own whereabouts and/or the bus route she was on.)
As the principal went on about how bring smart is cool and the kids sagged in their chairs, I had one of those moments when I looked around the room and I thought to myself, why bother?
Earlier that morning I’d taken the B train 26 minutes north to Harlem where I met the program coordinator, let’s call her Jen, and her husband, Will, who had been roped into duty, at the office. We loaded boxes of student books and bags of student surveys and pencils and artwork into the back of their car and drove into the far Bronx, the GPS occasionally faltering and streets clogged with the usual city craziness. We went to the local public library because the school we were serving doesn’t have a library of its own, and the library staff had set up 60-some chairs for the students and long tables with tablecloths for the pizza and laid out summer reading brochures on every chair. The library director, sweating through his dress shirt but resolutely keeping his jacket on, ran down the street and came back with four helium balloons he gave to me with instructions to secure them just so, which involved me crawling under a table. He disappeared again and came back with folders thick with library cards, one for each student in the program, all made especially for this day, and sorted and organized by class. The library’s AV guy, a former student from this school, had to go find another TV because the remote for the first one was missing, then a laptop so we could queue up a slideshow we’d made for the students, with pictures from all of their Behind the Book classroom sessions and a personal video message from one of the authors. Ten giant pizzas and sodas were delivered, the delivery guy running back to get more cups and more plates, while I followed Jen’s careful system to marry up artwork with books, each book labeled with a post-it note with the student’s name, Jen's cheat-sheet name checklist worn and rumpled from being gone over and over again.
We played the slideshow. The library director, now perspiring freely from his forehead, too, stood in front of the students to tell them about all of the resources their new library cards made available to them—"the teen room is downstairs,” he kept saying, downstairs also being where, on our way in, we’d passed a very motley assortment of likely street people, one guy holding an unlit cigarette and saying to two others, “Make sure you split it with them,” me both very much and not at all wanting to know what it was. The teachers called out directions and instructions, just barely audible over dozens of whispered conversations and occasional shouts followed by shhhhs. We handed out student books, the teachers by knowing students' faces, me by conscripting a kid** who looked like a social leader and asking him to point out student after student for me, “Junious isn’t here, that’s Andy in the red hoodie,” correcting my pronunciation of Issah and Lovell, “Diamond is that one, the purple hair, yo Tajai, TAJAI, here, take this,” on and on until we were done. The principal came and spoke, holding a copy of the students’ book in the air to punctuate his sentences. Row by row students were invited to come sign copies of the books for the program authors, then get pizza and soda and go back to the deeply mysterious and intricate social rituals and interactions that are a hallmark of this age, just fourteen, fifteen, the youngest kids in their school, all hormones and insecurities and bluster and adult bodies mixed in with those still developing, the noise levels escalating and then suddenly the program was done and the kids were seen out onto the sidewalk and the room was quiet again.
We adults left policed the room to pick up the flotsam and jetsam of napkins and cups, surveys ignored and discarded. We organized the leftover materials, all the books belonging to absent students/students “not allowed at school right now,” and I followed Jen, Will, and three teachers across the street and down the hill to their school, Will dragging a loaded wheelie cart behind him. The school had no elevator so we carried everything up a short flight of stairs to the area just beyond the metal detector, the guard waving us by, and the teachers discussed commandeering some kids to help carry the materials to the third floor, one teacher still limping slightly from being caught up in an incident of shocking violence perpetrated by a student earlier in the week. Jen, Will, and I said our good-byes and the teachers all hugged us, already talking about next year’s programs, and we made our way back to the paid parking lot and waited in the hot sun for an attendant, then to the Cross-Bronx “Expressway” where the usual hellscape of traffic was augmented by a soupcon of Friday afternoon misery.
Why bother? Why did any of us, why did all of us, bother?
On our way home in the car, Jen called the office to make sure the wheelie cart wasn’t needed back until Monday. She spoke to the director of programming who asked about the event, and Jen waxed rhapsodic, gushing about how excited the students were about being published authors, how one of them had taken her brand-new library card downstairs and immediately checked out a book. She was thrilled that the principal had come and talked to the kids, and full of gratitude for the library staff for all their work and care in doing the set up for the event, going the extra mile to help us print something last minute and make sure the AV worked. “It was great,” she kept saying, and pissy old snarky pessimist me was there in the back seat of her car thinking “Really? Was it?”
I’m coming up on 10 years in service to Behind the Book, so let’s all agree here that I believe fervently in the mission and the organization and the work we do. I have invested tens of thousands of dollars of my own money in these programs, hounded friends and relatives and strangers for tens of thousands more, volunteered dozens of hours in classrooms, in meetings, at events, and etc. Here’s why.
That principal who came and told the kids that being smart IS cool? He’d made the walk from the school to the public library, uphill on a muggy day, and he doubtless has more worries than there are stars in the sky. He didn’t come to make some sweeping speech that would rally their hearts for a minute, the way he might have if this was a movie. He came to do the most important thing, the thing he and his teachers do every day: show up. His presence said, You matter to me, I am making you my priority, I have room on my shoulders for you.
That library director had his staff ready for us and ran out for last-minute balloons because he wanted to signal that that this was a festive occasion, that this moment was something special. Four helium balloons, two white and two orange, a quick oh, let’s make sure to leave the bathroom door unlocked while they’re here, speaking volumes, saying We care, we did this because you matter, because you deserve someone to celebrate you.
Jen organizing visits and coordinating people and places and things and making checklists and knowing each student’s name and her story, figuring out the express bus that gets from the 2/3 stop to the school in just 15 minutes, Will humping boxes and navigating the Cross-Bronx on a Friday afternoon, they’re saying We’re here. You matter.
Me, my presence all but invisible to the students, just some frumpy white lady in the background, I’m there because I bother, because we bother, because “bother” means both to take the trouble to do something as well as to be upset or disturbed by something, and it’s the latter which prompts me to the former.
Josh may not grow up to be a writer; he may not even graduate high school. But I believe this day, this culmination of yet another program, all these endless meetings and texts and planning sessions and on-the-fly adjustments, and organizing and fundraising and getting up early or staying out late, is worth the bother. These kids, these library people, these teachers, this principal, our authors, our staff, our volunteers: they are worth showing up for, they are worth standing in front of and saying, in word or with deeds, You matter. I see you. You matter.
When the students came to sign copies of their book for the program authors, Paul Griffin and Sofia Quintero, most of them were puzzled by the process: what should I write, they’d ask me, my first name? My last name? You’re autographing your work, I told them over and over again, you’re signing your autograph. This didn’t always help clarify things, as while 9th grade is old enough to know what an autograph is, in this case it might be too foreign a concept to connect to one’s self.
Still, they all stood patiently in line to go through this process, and I will always remember two things:
1. To facilitate the autographing process, as each student walked up, I asked, “What page are you on?” The answer almost always came without hesitation, no checking required: they knew exactly where their work was memorialized.
2. In the aftermath of the cyclone that is 55-ish 9th graders on a Friday afternoon there were discarded everythings everywhere, including a cup of cream cheese (???), but the one thing no student left behind, the one thing of everything we handed out that was not left carelessly on a chair or tossed on a table, the one thing everybody took home, was their book.
So, yeah: it was great. It was great because it was people coming together to care for our young, the ones who need it most, to be present for them and to cheer for them. This wasn't an event about grand speeches or tears or a well-lit panorama of bright shining faces: this was about real people, doing real work, every single day, even/especially when it's hard. My hat is, ever, off to all of those who serve, to all who give back, to all who turn and offer a hand to another. It matters.
Finally: I am up late writing this not just because I need to get this on paper but also because I got home from the day and only made it until 7:30 before I went to bed. I woke up at 10:30, feeling much refreshed, and while I am sure I will go back and edit this again and again later, I want to share it as-is because doing so reflects my authentic voice, the one that is messy and pedantic and blathering and with errors in grammar and syntax but hopefully manages to do the things I care about most: show up, and say, Hey you, you out there: You in the back, you in the hoodie, you shyly scrunched down in your seat, you with no apparent understanding of verb tense, you without a story written: you have stories to tell. Your voice matters.
Thank you to all who serve others, who give their time and effort and care to say to another, You matter. It's worth it. Let's bother.
You matter.
I’m here.
We’re here.
*This is defined as missing 18 or more days in the previous school year or being on track to do so in the current one.
**This kid turned out to be the one who wrote about his experience in foster care, where he was beaten and abused. Just after books were handed out, I happened to be standing near his teacher and overheard him come up and tell her he had hoped to be anonymous in the book. She frowned and said, "I thought that was just for the [bulletin board]."
"No," he told her, not quite pleading, "for the book, too." She made a sympathetic face at him like I know you know there is nothing I can do right now and he accepted that gracefully, but kid: I hope you will come to feel comfortable owning your story. Here's an excerpt:
As I hope you can assume, I began to hate myself just as much as I can hate life…I began to have thoughts very consistently about ending my life. […] I then began writing music, poetry. Hell, I even began to play the bongos so that I can spend more time in school away from the source of my pain.
Hell, I even began to play the bongos: kid, oh please, keep writing, keep talking, keep turning life into stories. You're worth it. They matter.
This is the piece he made to accompany his story.
He stood at the front of the room where 55 or so of the ~70 students who could have been there sprawled in rows of chairs. “Don’t do that,” he said, looking hard at each student in turn. “Don’t do that to you.”
At least that’s what I wanted him to say, but he didn’t. It was a Friday, toward the end of the day at the end of a week near the end of the school year, and instead he said something about how being smart IS cool, which even I know is lame, and as he went on I looked around at the fourteen- and fifteen-year-old high school freshmen in the audience and I could see he was losing them.
Subtle shifts of posture, heads hanging down towards phones covert in their laps, girls leaning together to whisper, boys with their hoodies pulled up and then down over their eyes: I looked around the room and I saw disengagement, I saw boredom, I saw a roomful of students who go to a school where only about 60% of them will graduate in four years—two out of every five kids in my view would not put on a gown and cross a stage—and of those who made it to a diploma, just one-quarter of them would be considered college-ready by CUNY’s standards. (And yet HALF of graduates would go on to post-secondary programs, which doesn’t exactly bode well for their success there, and I say this from direct experience.)
Somewhere in the room was (or maybe not—69% of students at this school are chronically absent*), was a high school freshman, let’s call him Josh, who had written this story:
One summer day it became over 100 degrees me and a couple of my friends name Justin and Danny decided to play basketball on the courts across from my building.
We started a game called 21. The first person to 21 wins the game.
So, I had 15 points Danny had 12 and Justin had 9. I scored another point which gave me 17 cause every basket is 2 points except for the three pointer. I went to the free-throw line to shoot my 3 free-throws. I missed the first one, I made the second, and I finally missed the last one.
After that my friend Justin had the ball I stole it and scored again from three pointer.
“Swish” that’s the game! I won!”
“No you didn’t!” said Justin.
He pushed me. Then me and Justin begin fighting. Me and Justin started fighting because I won the game.
“You a sore loser” I said.
I felt bad and he asked me would I like to rematch so I except his challenge and we played again. Finally, me and Justin got along and started playing again.
I’m reproducing this not to pick on this one kid—here is where I should write “for all I know, it’s not representative of his true ability,” but I’m not going to, because that would be a lie—but because this is an example of what we see in our schools. And this kid’s story is hardly the worst of it—sure, it’s poorly written and grammatically incorrect and shows little understanding of narrative arc and/or other basic tenets of storytelling, but he wrote something. That’s a measure for success in this particular program: this kid made it to enough class sessions that he got something written and he made a piece of art to go with it and he ended up in the book of student work we published and presented to these kids that Friday afternoon.
Other stories (but not all) in the book were more cogently constructed, of course, and themes varied from the banal (basketball games, video games) to the upsetting (foster-home abuse, suicidal thoughts; death, death, and more death, including two stories of being witness to drive-by shootings; and one particularly striking story, three pages long, entirely about getting lost on the way to a therapist’s office, long detailed descriptions of the bus ride, the people on the bus, the panic the narrator felt at being lost, the various places she found herself in the city, and only this one line in the first paragraph about why: “I had to get therapy because of issues I had going on.” The story ends with the narrator finding her mother and going home, the appointment missed, the conclusion simply, “That’s when I knew my moral of my story was to follow my instinct and try to pay more attention,” i.e. to her own whereabouts and/or the bus route she was on.)
As the principal went on about how bring smart is cool and the kids sagged in their chairs, I had one of those moments when I looked around the room and I thought to myself, why bother?
Earlier that morning I’d taken the B train 26 minutes north to Harlem where I met the program coordinator, let’s call her Jen, and her husband, Will, who had been roped into duty, at the office. We loaded boxes of student books and bags of student surveys and pencils and artwork into the back of their car and drove into the far Bronx, the GPS occasionally faltering and streets clogged with the usual city craziness. We went to the local public library because the school we were serving doesn’t have a library of its own, and the library staff had set up 60-some chairs for the students and long tables with tablecloths for the pizza and laid out summer reading brochures on every chair. The library director, sweating through his dress shirt but resolutely keeping his jacket on, ran down the street and came back with four helium balloons he gave to me with instructions to secure them just so, which involved me crawling under a table. He disappeared again and came back with folders thick with library cards, one for each student in the program, all made especially for this day, and sorted and organized by class. The library’s AV guy, a former student from this school, had to go find another TV because the remote for the first one was missing, then a laptop so we could queue up a slideshow we’d made for the students, with pictures from all of their Behind the Book classroom sessions and a personal video message from one of the authors. Ten giant pizzas and sodas were delivered, the delivery guy running back to get more cups and more plates, while I followed Jen’s careful system to marry up artwork with books, each book labeled with a post-it note with the student’s name, Jen's cheat-sheet name checklist worn and rumpled from being gone over and over again.
We played the slideshow. The library director, now perspiring freely from his forehead, too, stood in front of the students to tell them about all of the resources their new library cards made available to them—"the teen room is downstairs,” he kept saying, downstairs also being where, on our way in, we’d passed a very motley assortment of likely street people, one guy holding an unlit cigarette and saying to two others, “Make sure you split it with them,” me both very much and not at all wanting to know what it was. The teachers called out directions and instructions, just barely audible over dozens of whispered conversations and occasional shouts followed by shhhhs. We handed out student books, the teachers by knowing students' faces, me by conscripting a kid** who looked like a social leader and asking him to point out student after student for me, “Junious isn’t here, that’s Andy in the red hoodie,” correcting my pronunciation of Issah and Lovell, “Diamond is that one, the purple hair, yo Tajai, TAJAI, here, take this,” on and on until we were done. The principal came and spoke, holding a copy of the students’ book in the air to punctuate his sentences. Row by row students were invited to come sign copies of the books for the program authors, then get pizza and soda and go back to the deeply mysterious and intricate social rituals and interactions that are a hallmark of this age, just fourteen, fifteen, the youngest kids in their school, all hormones and insecurities and bluster and adult bodies mixed in with those still developing, the noise levels escalating and then suddenly the program was done and the kids were seen out onto the sidewalk and the room was quiet again.
We adults left policed the room to pick up the flotsam and jetsam of napkins and cups, surveys ignored and discarded. We organized the leftover materials, all the books belonging to absent students/students “not allowed at school right now,” and I followed Jen, Will, and three teachers across the street and down the hill to their school, Will dragging a loaded wheelie cart behind him. The school had no elevator so we carried everything up a short flight of stairs to the area just beyond the metal detector, the guard waving us by, and the teachers discussed commandeering some kids to help carry the materials to the third floor, one teacher still limping slightly from being caught up in an incident of shocking violence perpetrated by a student earlier in the week. Jen, Will, and I said our good-byes and the teachers all hugged us, already talking about next year’s programs, and we made our way back to the paid parking lot and waited in the hot sun for an attendant, then to the Cross-Bronx “Expressway” where the usual hellscape of traffic was augmented by a soupcon of Friday afternoon misery.
Why bother? Why did any of us, why did all of us, bother?
On our way home in the car, Jen called the office to make sure the wheelie cart wasn’t needed back until Monday. She spoke to the director of programming who asked about the event, and Jen waxed rhapsodic, gushing about how excited the students were about being published authors, how one of them had taken her brand-new library card downstairs and immediately checked out a book. She was thrilled that the principal had come and talked to the kids, and full of gratitude for the library staff for all their work and care in doing the set up for the event, going the extra mile to help us print something last minute and make sure the AV worked. “It was great,” she kept saying, and pissy old snarky pessimist me was there in the back seat of her car thinking “Really? Was it?”
I’m coming up on 10 years in service to Behind the Book, so let’s all agree here that I believe fervently in the mission and the organization and the work we do. I have invested tens of thousands of dollars of my own money in these programs, hounded friends and relatives and strangers for tens of thousands more, volunteered dozens of hours in classrooms, in meetings, at events, and etc. Here’s why.
- If one person does it, one more will. That one brings another and then another.
- Showing up is showing you care and that is 99% of what matters.
- Holding a door open so that someone might be able to walk through is always worth doing.
That principal who came and told the kids that being smart IS cool? He’d made the walk from the school to the public library, uphill on a muggy day, and he doubtless has more worries than there are stars in the sky. He didn’t come to make some sweeping speech that would rally their hearts for a minute, the way he might have if this was a movie. He came to do the most important thing, the thing he and his teachers do every day: show up. His presence said, You matter to me, I am making you my priority, I have room on my shoulders for you.
That library director had his staff ready for us and ran out for last-minute balloons because he wanted to signal that that this was a festive occasion, that this moment was something special. Four helium balloons, two white and two orange, a quick oh, let’s make sure to leave the bathroom door unlocked while they’re here, speaking volumes, saying We care, we did this because you matter, because you deserve someone to celebrate you.
Jen organizing visits and coordinating people and places and things and making checklists and knowing each student’s name and her story, figuring out the express bus that gets from the 2/3 stop to the school in just 15 minutes, Will humping boxes and navigating the Cross-Bronx on a Friday afternoon, they’re saying We’re here. You matter.
Me, my presence all but invisible to the students, just some frumpy white lady in the background, I’m there because I bother, because we bother, because “bother” means both to take the trouble to do something as well as to be upset or disturbed by something, and it’s the latter which prompts me to the former.
Josh may not grow up to be a writer; he may not even graduate high school. But I believe this day, this culmination of yet another program, all these endless meetings and texts and planning sessions and on-the-fly adjustments, and organizing and fundraising and getting up early or staying out late, is worth the bother. These kids, these library people, these teachers, this principal, our authors, our staff, our volunteers: they are worth showing up for, they are worth standing in front of and saying, in word or with deeds, You matter. I see you. You matter.
When the students came to sign copies of their book for the program authors, Paul Griffin and Sofia Quintero, most of them were puzzled by the process: what should I write, they’d ask me, my first name? My last name? You’re autographing your work, I told them over and over again, you’re signing your autograph. This didn’t always help clarify things, as while 9th grade is old enough to know what an autograph is, in this case it might be too foreign a concept to connect to one’s self.
Still, they all stood patiently in line to go through this process, and I will always remember two things:
1. To facilitate the autographing process, as each student walked up, I asked, “What page are you on?” The answer almost always came without hesitation, no checking required: they knew exactly where their work was memorialized.
2. In the aftermath of the cyclone that is 55-ish 9th graders on a Friday afternoon there were discarded everythings everywhere, including a cup of cream cheese (???), but the one thing no student left behind, the one thing of everything we handed out that was not left carelessly on a chair or tossed on a table, the one thing everybody took home, was their book.
So, yeah: it was great. It was great because it was people coming together to care for our young, the ones who need it most, to be present for them and to cheer for them. This wasn't an event about grand speeches or tears or a well-lit panorama of bright shining faces: this was about real people, doing real work, every single day, even/especially when it's hard. My hat is, ever, off to all of those who serve, to all who give back, to all who turn and offer a hand to another. It matters.
Finally: I am up late writing this not just because I need to get this on paper but also because I got home from the day and only made it until 7:30 before I went to bed. I woke up at 10:30, feeling much refreshed, and while I am sure I will go back and edit this again and again later, I want to share it as-is because doing so reflects my authentic voice, the one that is messy and pedantic and blathering and with errors in grammar and syntax but hopefully manages to do the things I care about most: show up, and say, Hey you, you out there: You in the back, you in the hoodie, you shyly scrunched down in your seat, you with no apparent understanding of verb tense, you without a story written: you have stories to tell. Your voice matters.
Thank you to all who serve others, who give their time and effort and care to say to another, You matter. It's worth it. Let's bother.
You matter.
I’m here.
We’re here.
*This is defined as missing 18 or more days in the previous school year or being on track to do so in the current one.
**This kid turned out to be the one who wrote about his experience in foster care, where he was beaten and abused. Just after books were handed out, I happened to be standing near his teacher and overheard him come up and tell her he had hoped to be anonymous in the book. She frowned and said, "I thought that was just for the [bulletin board]."
"No," he told her, not quite pleading, "for the book, too." She made a sympathetic face at him like I know you know there is nothing I can do right now and he accepted that gracefully, but kid: I hope you will come to feel comfortable owning your story. Here's an excerpt:
As I hope you can assume, I began to hate myself just as much as I can hate life…I began to have thoughts very consistently about ending my life. […] I then began writing music, poetry. Hell, I even began to play the bongos so that I can spend more time in school away from the source of my pain.
Hell, I even began to play the bongos: kid, oh please, keep writing, keep talking, keep turning life into stories. You're worth it. They matter.
This is the piece he made to accompany his story.
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