update on a former student

Sometimes this job is too hard on my heart. So my former CTM. The 49.5 one. The soft as warm butter one. When it rains it pours...

A while back this kid told me he had a girlfriend. At first I didn't believe him. Turned out it was true. And she wasn't bad looking. When he showed me her picture, I set him up for the old diss.
"Hey, she's pretty good looking...what's she doing with you?" It was perfectly timed. Everyone in the room laughed. He laughed at it. It made him feel good that I validated the looks of his girl that he got in front of everyone and I cut down his looks which made it even cooler that he was with her. This fool was so in love. He asked me to correct/read a love poem that he wrote to her. The poem was such a teenage love letter. It started with "You are my..." It was the full, wholehearted, unreserved, unabashed love that teenagers in love for the first time can only have. That compounded with his painfully sad home life made his time with her even more important and powerful.

At one time he got the girl pregnant and they lost the baby. The boy was totally fucked up by the whole thing and I probably wasn't as sensitive and understanding about his situation. Then his family pulls him from the school and he just sits around cuz he wasn't really gonna go to adult school. The kid has no academic skills. Is mentally and emotionally underdeveloped because of his home life and being picked on through most of his life. The kid had to be 6'5 or so and he would get picked on. He would come to school sometimes wearing the same clothing and sometimes smelling. Well his girlfriend got sick and died in her sleep. I know this kid well enough to know something of his heart. He is a fucking mess right now. I found this out second hand from one of his friends on Tuesday.

When I see and know kids that have no skills, nobody taking good care of them at home, no direction, and just lost, it weighs heavy on my heart. This world is an incredibly painful, sad, and unfair place. I thank God for all that I have and am angry at men for the world that we have created.

When I talk to people about the problems in innercity education, they often want to attribute the problems with the kids to the parents. It's always the parents' fault. While parents are sometimes to blame, that is only one analysis, albeit an important one. I personally blame society. It's on all our hands and on all our heads. Everyone that is alive has a part in making this society a more just and equitable society. The kids are fine. It's the adults that are fucking things up. We are not making a world that includes people and allows them to be a part of a community and society. We are not properly socializing our families, communities, society, and the world. Instead we destroy communities and families and people at the bottom are left with few means. In treating people less than human and not including and socializing them, we create people that act anti-social and destructive.

This kid was not properly socialized. His environment was too rough for him and he was too soft for most places. He was starting to be social at my school, but now I worry that he has no "safe" space to be a kid. I want to somehow get him to at least hang back out at our school (Counter to school rules) and maybe get involved with the mural project going on upstairs in the school. I like that my school provides that space for kids. But realistically, I doubt and wonder if that will really happen. It is hard for me to accept when I think that there really isn't hope for some kids.