What I love about working with teenagers is being able to see them grow over time, or even just over the course of a conversation. My kids’ willingness to just blurt things out means I’m hearing their thoughts—and sometimes I really don’t need to (“Miss Camille, I gotta go take a huge doo-doo”, Great, thanks for sharing), but often that means I’m getting insight on how they’re figuring things out.

So my zine class this session is mostly this crew of younger girls of color who are some of the most bad-ass women I have met in my life under any circumstances, like they know I am their biggest cheerleader and intentionally get them riled up about sexism and racism so we can yell and call people on their bullshit and hopefully make something creative out of our yelling. Then there’s two boys who I’ve worked with really closely since last year who have a tendency to yell about everything whether or not they really have a sense of what they’re talking about.

I showed them the video Walking Home about street harassment, because most of the girls are writing about judgment of teenage girls, body image, weight, sexual harassment, etc. They all started arguing, first along the lines of “Guys always do blah blah blah,” “Girls always do blah blah blah” that was too general to be productive and was just getting everyone mad at each other. So I made a rule that we had to talk from experience (their teachers stress being able to use text evidence in essays and responses, so that was how I framed it but where their lives were the text) and we started getting more productive.

The girls all started sharing stories about street harassment, but the boys stayed defensive so I asked them to talk about why the conversation bothered them. At first they were saying they didn’t want to talk about sexual harassment, but then it turned out that they really didn’t want to be associated with dudes who harass women and that they were responding to being lumped in with sleazy dudes. So I asked them what they do to not be jerks like that, and they were really adamant about thinking it’s fucked up how a lot of guys treat girls.

THIS IS THE SUPER RAD PART: One of them shared a story about one of those exercises where everyone steps forward if some question is true (like an ice-breaker exercise), that he remembered from several years ago, where every single girl stepped forward for a question about having been harassed by strangers in public, and he told us all how much that stuck with him and made him realize how seriously all the women around him have to deal with harassment. He then announced, “One of the things that I hate the most is domestic violence,” and started talking about his community intervening in a domestic violence situation. So I brought the conversation back to make sure everyone caught that connection, one that many adults fail to make, that street harassment and domestic violence are related and that there is a whole spectrum of ways women, and especially women of color, have to fight for ownership of their own bodies. I asked them about what they can do as dudes to support the girls and women around them, and they talked about calling out other guys for harassing girls and being willing to fight (physically and non-physically) if need be to get guys to cut out sexist behavior. Those boys might now be teaming up to make a comic about that realization of how the girls around them are treated by men.

It was awesome to see them move from defensiveness to anger to creativity over the course of about 10 minutes. We all got heated, like kids were shouting at each other and getting mad at me too. And I loved it. Cause it isn’t often that class is a space you can bring in your own life as your text, or feel compelled to start yelling about the subject, or can express that much emotion, so I felt like maybe I’m starting to do this all right. Mostly I was excited to see how much they were willing to share with each other, both their experiences and their emotion and energy and ideas. Instead of being competitive with what they’re working on, we’re making plans to collaborate or let their zines converse with one another. They’re making plans already to distribute their zines around the school, or make posters to put up, and most of them haven’t even written much yet. They were already going, “We need a campaign against sexism!”, “Let’s protest harassment!” so we’re going to start with what they’re writing and finding ways to spread those ideas they’re heated about around the school.

So I don’t even have words for how cool they all are. Like, nothing I could say is gonna cut it.

After school I worked with some freshmen to start putting on paper the things they don’t like about the school, like structural things that the administration and teachers could change. Things like certain actions of teachers that make students feel disrespected and untrusted. They yelled and I took notes, and we told the principal that we will be handing her a manifesto sometime soon (can I coin the word “FRESHMANIFESTO”?), and they even threatened a flash mob in her office. Among many brilliant things they brought up, I had never before thought about the relationship between body image of girls of color and school dress codes. Like I’d had conversations with girls of color before where they’ve said that girls who are more curvy (and almost always black and/or latina) are more likely to get in trouble for dress code violations or perceived violations. But today they pointed out how sometimes wearing something like leggings is a celebration of finally feeling okay with your body and your black-girl-curvy-fullness, and it feels fucked up to then get disciplined for breaking the dress code but seeing skinny flat white girls not getting in trouble for wearing the same thing.

In conclusion, they are the shit. And this is me saying that after two 10-hour days in a row.

Highlight of my day was mediating a conversation between three freshmen boys who I work with a lot, because the hip-hop dance crew they’re starting and running all on their own couldn’t agree on something in their routine, so they were going to break up. So we sat in the cafeteria while everyone else had left, and talked about how to work as a team and compromise and set goals together and stay on task so you can get work done and time management and creativity and sizism in dancing and organizing strategy and being a leader without being bossy. It was great. They were so sweet and rad and seeing teenage black & brown boys stay at school on a Friday til it’s so late that we start locking up the building, just so they can talk about how dedicated they want to be to dancing and how to inspire other kids by performing (their words, not mine, but I got a lil teary-eyed), was exactly what I needed at the end of a white-people-sucking-my-strength week.

Today is the last day of the zine class I’m teaching. This time around we only had 8 sessions start to finish, so I’m not sure everyone will be done with their zines today but they’ve at least done some writing and arguing and flipping through zines and thinking about the fact that they can write something that someone else would read. All of that’s the important stuff anyway, more than having something totally finished. And we started out with some basic media literacy work, and they had lots of good stuff to say. They’re writing about awesome stuff like getting in trouble at school and how fucked up money makes people and using music to get you through really difficult things and how young women of color are shown in the media and being from a black immigrant family and all kinds of awesome stuff like that.

They’re a really rowdy group of kids and we were really slow getting work done, plus most of them are in some sort of special ed so they’re not used to hearing how awesome and brilliant they are and having people tell them that they should write down their stories because they’re worth reading. Next week is break but I’m gonna set up an open mic one day after break so whoever wants to present their work can be famous and we can cheer for them. (The incentive is that if enough kids volunteer to read, I bake cookies to have at the open mic.)

Yesterday one of my bad ass freshman girls and I were working on the beginning of a social studies essay she has to do. She had to read bits of articles about the US constitution and was right away going, “This says ‘all men are created equal,’ but they really only mean white men! All these articles are about equality in the US but that’s not even true!” Working with her is fun because she and I get each other riled up looking at racist and xenophobic stuff in her readings and in the news, and we bring other kids into it and all get yelling (such as last week when we made plans to snuff the Alien & Sedition Acts and go back in time to kill Columbus).

She also told me about being on the bus recently after school and hearing a lady yell at another girl, who the lady assumed went to our school. The lady called the girl “retarded” just like all the kids at our school. So my student stepped in and yelled at the woman for calling the girl names like that and talking shit on our students, because our students might be at a weird little school but they’re still really smart. She didn’t even know the girl she was defending.

So many of my freshman girls just drop gems like that, stories of being badasses or just stuff where they can call out racism or sexism or just bullshit no problem, and I’m just like, someday I wanna grow up and be that cool. They’re all fierce as fuck and they’re only freshmen, and I can’t wait until they’re seniors and their badassery has grown and there will be this gang of brilliant tough young women of color callin jerks out and running this town and New Haven won’t know what the hell hit it. We’ve been piloting a couple different young women’s leadership programs with them and some day soon they will be runnin shit.

I had an awesome time with three freshmen after school today getting a thesis statement written about the Alien & Sedition Acts. Srsly. I really like when other students step up and help their classmate understand something, or pitch in when I’m working with a student. Sometimes if one student needs to get caught up on something, I’ll ask another student to teach them and then fill in any gaps they might be missing. So I was working with one girl on an essay she had to write, but the other two students joined in and helped out too, which was awesome.

We needed to work on understanding what alien and sedition mean (apparently they didn’t get definitions of those words in class?) so we busted out the Bible (what one of my crews of reading kids named the student dictionary I carry around). All three kids had just been telling me about how much they hate school and how it’s a waste of their time, and I was hearing them out, so when we needed to define sedition I gave them that as an example, like what if they went around telling everyone else how school sucked so they should all quit going to class. Then in talking about what alien means, they got really riled up—one of them is an immigrant herself, and the other two are from immigrant families.

Then we got going talking about the kinds of racist bullshit people say about latino immigrants, like about telling Mexicans to go back to their own country. They knew that a bunch of the US was stolen from Mexico, so then I was like, “Look, that’s exactly why we study history! Since you know the history of that happening, and clearly if someone says Mexicans should go back to their own country theydon’tknow history, you have something to use against them.”

One of them had described a video on youtube of two white girls in Arizona complaining about Mexican immigrants and saying shit like this, and she said, “I’m gonna go to Arizona just to snuff them. If anyone said that to me, I’d snuff em.” So I said, “Okay, we’re gonna snuff them [kids all got excited] with words [“Awww, Miss! I wanna snuff racist white people with my fists!”]”

The example I gave them to explain the Alien & Sedition Acts was based on what they were saying about how school sucks and tying that to white teachers getting suspicious of students speaking Spanish, since many of the teachers don’t understand what they’re saying and might assume they’re saying something bad or rebellious. And how it’s messed up when teachers assume that just because the students can speak in a way they can’t.

We also talked about the language that teachers use and assume students can navigate as well, but how the students of color can usually speak in several different ways but are expected to conform to just one in class. Meanwhile the teachers don’t have to know how to speak in a way besides a “standard” middle class white approved one. So I suggested that maybe when the students have to take benchmark tests periodically, maybe the teachers should have to take similar tests written in Spanglish and Ebonics. They got really excited about the idea of giving their teachers standardized tests since they have to take so many of them.

What I had planned for us to do before I knew all this would be what we’d work on was reading this article about students in Detroit holding a walkout and being suspended in response, and going through to figure out some vocab words based on context. So it was funny that everything was all related and we were able to connect a lot of dots, and see all these things right in front of us connecting through history and talk about why it’s important to study history, especially when so much of it is written in ways that are unfair to people of color. It ruled! My kids are the bomb!

The Rich Person Face. That’s the face you make when you’re around snobby white people and you want to be overly polite to them as a joke, and then smile back at them with the same crinkly snobby phony smile that they’re giving you. That’s the best I can describe it. There’s a chuckle that goes along with it.

Today I launched a tutoring project at school that I’d been slooowly setting up all school year, that involved hiring my pick of several students to work after school. Of the kids I hired, one gets good grades and positive attention and the other two get in trouble. Today was the first run, and the one who gets good grades wasn’t around so all the work was on the other two with me helping them out.

And they were awesome and amazing and respectful and mature and knowledgeable and put rules into place with their classmates they were tutoring and asked me for help when they needed it.

Which meant I got to tell their teachers, I TOLD YOU SO because I knew they could do it. I mean, their teachers supported giving them a chance too, but had some doubts. So now I am a very proud afterschool lady.

In my afterschool program, we’re working on learning word roots & prefixes, and how to pick apart a word you don’t know to figure out the gist of its meaning based on word parts you do know (I could go waaay into this if anyone is interested) (I have neon flashcards) (and cluster diagrams). Today one of the roots we were working with was “pos/pose,” as in expose, impose, propose, dispose, etc. We set up cards to say “oppose,” but once we got the definition sorted out, my students were still confused about how to use it. So I asked if we could come up with examples of how they’d heard the word used before.

A freshman gave the example of Obama getting elected saying he opposed things like the war in Iraq, but he actually didn’t really. Then we got totally off topic talking about politicians being hypocrites, saying they oppose something when they won’t actually go against it.

Then we were working with the word “reform,” again looking at other words with that root and talking about possible definitions. I gave examples of places they might hear the word, like school reform, immigration reform, welfare reform, and again we got off topic because that got them pissed about immigration reform and US immigration policies and, again, Obama’s hypocrisy.

So instead we (they lead the conversation, really; I just listened) talked about how racist immigration laws are, and they brought up rad things like how it’s fucked up for Americans to say anti-immigrant stuff when Europeans showed up in the Americas in the first place (“This was our land first, y’all just showed up”). And how Puerto Rico should be independent of the US. And how bogus Taco Bell is, and how bogus US food is in general (“Here, you go in a restaurant and they just give you meat, microwaved meat, and that’s it. Where my family’s from, they give you vegetables.”). It was amazing. And somehow, we got ourselves back to talking about word roots again, and how to make learning them useful.

Then I got into an argument with one of my favorite students about homophobia and whether it’s cool to say “no homo.” It went on til the afterschool session was over and I had to send them out to get snack, so I told him we’d keep fighting later and he just said, “Okay, bye Miss Camille!” cause it was still a cheery fight. He was scandalized that I’d 1) said fat people can be totally cute, and 2) used a fat woman as an example. We had a good afternoon.

Today one of my students finished reading a book for the first time ever, at least as far as he could remember. It happened during my program after school. I made everyone in the room cheer for him, and I was so excited for him because I’ve seen since last year how difficult reading is for him. We were talking recently about the trouble with finding books that you can relate to and stay interested in, but he’d told me he really liked this one.

I told him I’d get him a present because I was so happy for him. I had to do christmas shopping anyway, so I got him a notebook and a sketchbook (he’s a really good artist) and a set of decent drawing pencils. Proud afterschool lady!

• Someone who works at our school has been telling students not to bother taking the SAT because they won’t do well on it, and same with where they should apply to college. So far I’ve only heard this from black students, and they’re on top of it enough to take the SAT anyway and apply to the colleges they want to. I’m gonna help them do a call out and also study for the SAT.
• I got to watch a student do a play-by-play of that same staff member’s racist behavior—“Nah it’s cool, go next door to all the white kids, you weren’t helping us anyway.”
• Multiple conversations (5 or 6?) about how hard it is to find books, especially young adult books, about young people of color and that my kids can relate to. I’m giving out books as I find them.
• Also had a conversation about how sometimes it’s useful to read books that they specifically can’t relate to, as a means of escape.
• Got some good tips about how to play pranks on your parents and grandparents who are learning how to text and what internet abbreviations mean. Like if you tell them WTF stands for “welcome to facebook,” they’ll use it in the wrong context and it’s hilarious.
• Couple of my friends are making plans for linking up community gardens in a couple POC neighborhoods to distribute food better. When I talked about it yesterday with one of my students and he was into it, he pointed out that it might also be a way to make some money off gentrifyers in your neighborhood.
• Taught that same student the word “gentrification” the week before, when he read it in a book. I had worked on a campaign against Yale-New Haven Hospital gentrifying his neighborhood, so that was an example he knew firsthand and has brought up a few times since.
• Grandmas rule.
• Also, Nas rules.
• Light-skinned black women are assumed to be prettier than dark-skinned ones but that’s bogus.
• My zine class is doing projects mostly on violence in their neighborhoods and in some cases linking violence to music, in both positive and negative ways. Like figuring out how to be a black woman who likes hip-hop but recognizes negative stuff going on in it too.
• My zine class also did most of the work of calling out a student who’d called classmates queers as an insult.
• Trying to figure out how racism made a foundation to justify slavery and genocide.
• Tried to give a quick explanation of who the Black Panthers were/are.
• Really draining conversation with a student who’d getting really frustrated with his academics, because he’s really struggling and isn’t sure what else to do, which it’s my job to support. Toward the end of it when I didn’t know what more to say, I told him, “I don’t care about your grades, I care about your awesomeness at life!”
• Black kids using the n-word is really complicated, and too many white teachers don’t understand it and are intimidated by that, so they just respond by banning it or disciplining students for it.
• Academic awards based just on your GPA are kinda bogus.
• At the same time, it’s nice when the kids who win those awards aren’t pompous about it and can still get along with the rest of the students.
• Students at our school making a curriculum for anti-bullying education can also use the same words and ideas to describe the US.
• If you learn a decent number of big words, you might win more arguments with your parents.

Really good (sometimes bad) two weeks.

I had a weird, chaotic day that started decent but tiring, and ended shitty but really tiring. I ended up in one of the afterschool programs covering for someone with no notice (and that person was supposed to be covering for someone else), and the kids were all pissed because they thought they didn’t have to stay after, so they all took it out on me and I had no patience. So I snapped at them like I normally don’t do, and of course felt bad about it later. Like I actually made a kid talk to the hand, cause I just couldn’t deal with anymore whining and arguing.

BUT, the highlight of my exhausting day was that one of my freshmen called me “Miss Boss” instead of Miss Camille, referring to the fact that yesterday I recognized the single line of “I’m A Boss” that he yelled out. And when I heard him say that line, I tried to convince him that Meek Mills & Rick Ross wrote it about me, and of course no one believed me. He was just impressed that I identified it by a single line.

Oh no some white lady did NOT just go off on how 15 year olds never care about how society works because they have no reason to, but they will in a few years when they can vote, need to get a job, and have a college degree but lots of student loans.

Motherfuckin please.

White people, collect ya folks and get them to shape up if they wanna keep “occupying” our park—a park where, coincidentally, most of my students switch buses going to & from school, and where teenagers hang out, ride bikes, and breakdance.

My kids can school anybody on how society works. They tell me what it’s like to have to work after school, because I was lucky enough to only need to work during the summers. They tell me what it’s like to move to the US and learn English, or to have to go to your mom’s doctor’s appointments to translate, or to be stopped by the cops for being young, black and male, or to go hungry or only eat cheap food, or to pay bills without being able to fall back on borrowing money from your mom like I can, or to have friends who have been killed, or to have family members in jail, or to take care of younger siblings, or to have a parent who is sick. I have had some fucked up things in my life, and I still know I’m damn lucky. I am not about to tell a 15 year old that they don’t know or don’t care what goes on around them.

And don’t tell them they’ll know what the world is like when they finish college and can’t get a job. Unemployment overall in the US is 9%, but for teenagers it’s 26%, and for black teenagers almost 50%. Youth already know unemployment. My kids know that many of them have been failed by the public education system; my job is to help them get caught up and support them through the baggage that comes with it. Many of my kids will be lucky if they go to college, especially if it ends in a bachelor’s degree; it is not a sure thing, and it isn’t something they’ve been guaranteed or feel entitled to. They don’t need someone telling them that they’ll know what the real world is like once they finish college; they’ve got too many people telling them they’re not good enough for college despite how fucking smart they are.

A tenth grader with a fourth grade reading level and learning disabilities, who gets called stupid and lazy and gets written up by white teachers when his pants are sagging, who never sees himself reflected in his class curricula but is never asked why he didn’t do his homework, and whose school life and home life are conducted in confusingly different languages, is already pissed. Being mad about how the world works is not something he’ll do when he grows up. As adults, we should be affirming that anger and helping to find ways to direct it into solutions.

My main project for this week is going up against someone who’s been telling some of my kids that they won’t score high enough on the SATs so they shouldn’t bother, and they should just settle for the community college here instead of applying to state schools. They came to me about it, telling me this person has said similar things to other kids of color before, and trying to figure out how they can still apply to colleges without this person’s support. Another one of my kids told me about how a white teacher kicked out him and his friends, all black and latino boys sitting together, assuming that all of them had caused some disruption when they say they didn’t.

In both cases, I felt HONORED to be someone that those kids could be that honest and raw with. With the first group, they openly told me they thought that staff person was racist and being unfair, and with the second group, I saw the boy who brought it up to me stand up to his teacher, and told him after that it was awesome that he could speak up like that. I told both groups of kids that I have their backs. I got to witness their anger and feel honored. I would never turn around and say they have nothing to be upset about with society; why would I want to ignore and disrespect them like that?

My kids are so perceptive and critical it’s amazing; even if reading and writing are difficult for them, they can pick apart what’s going on and tell you about it if you’ll listen, which many adults won’t. They are wonderful and bad ass and loudmouthed and FIERCE. They are already building solutions to issues in their communities and at school, and standing up to the school administration when they need to, and asking why don’t often learn about things in school that seem relevant to them.

Just because some adults had the privilege as young people to be apathetic doesn’t mean that all youth do. Many don’t. Adults need to start asking kids what the world is like and how society works, and listening.