"You got your homework, Constantino?" I asked the short, but stocky sixteen year old sitting before me in the packed, bare-bones classroom. We were in Watts at the DV John Community Day School, a special continuation facility run by the Los Angeles Unified School District. I was a guest teacher. Constatino, like the others, was on his way to prison.
When I asked about the homework, Constantino (who looked like a young version of Cantinflas) suddenly flew out of his chair and took a swing at me.
I managed to jerk my head back in the nick of time. The punch missed my chin by a hair. The kid looked at me menacingly for a moment or two, then let out a wicked, mocking laugh.
"I told you, I don't do homework, puto!" He said, dismissively. A chorus of "Oohs" and "Ahhs" broke out from his rowdy crew of paisas who were all sitting together. I shrugged like the whole thing was no big deal.
"Whatever, kid. No work - no points." I said flatly as I moved on to the next student. I had to act like it didn't phase me. Any sign of fear or weakness would destroy my control of the class. The points I was referring to, by they way, were mostly an illusion. In theory, the students earned "points" towards their return back to regular high school. However, no students was ever sent back. It was a catch-22.
Constantino was a smart kid. Too smart. He knew the point system was BS - that's why he rolled his eyes when I threatened him with it. Constantino was admitted to this fine institution because he had decked his math teacher at Jordan High. Now, until he was locked up for assault, he was my problem.
The DV Johnson Community Day School is located in South LA, a short distance from the famous Watts Towers. The students were sent there because they were awaiting trial on a case.
Watts Towers
DV Johnson was a way-station for them until they were sent on to juvie or prison. Some stayed for months on end, others just a few short weeks. Their crimes ranged from minor felonies related to drugs, assaults to more serious cases of robbery and mayhem. Most of the kids had gang affiliations. In between periods, they liked to entertain themselves by showing off videos of their latest brawls, which they had posted on Youtube. When I started teaching there, there were about forty students. That number quickly bulged to almost 70 in two weeks. We reached a hundred and growing by the end of the month.
The principal had begged me to come Johnson. He knew my reputation as both a cool guest teacher and an idealist who was dumb enough to sign up for anything. The last instructor who tried to teach this wild bunch had left after only two days. I couldn't blame her. Fights broke out constantly. You had to be prepared to not only teach, but to drop everything and be a hands on UFC referee. Most of the kids didn't care about learning anything - they were miscreants to begin with and they knew this place was just a holding cell until the "system" disposed of them elsewhere. To say it was a challenge to get them to do homework would be the world's biggest understatement.
Yet, somehow I had managed to get everyone in my English and History classes to do some work. Everyone except a tall, lanky African American kid named "Kanye" who just sat in his chair sleeping or making wisecracks at me all day long. No charm or intimidation would work on him... or so I thought.
By the way, the kid who threw the punch, Constantino, he wasn't such a bad guy after all. His "attack" was all part of an elaborate game we played each day. After trying to deck me, he quietly slid a piece of paper into my hand. It was his homework. He winked at me and whispered, "You know you're my homie, Diablo." I smiled, subtly.
Truth was, Constantino was my best student. He was a math whiz and did more work than anyone at Johnson. However, being labelled a "school boy" was a kiss of death in the 'hood. Constantino had to act tough to survive. Still, he was very dedicated to his education. I had to give him credit; even though Constantino suspected the point system was total BS - he still did all his work. His dream was to be a rocket engineer one day. But Constantino was headed to juvie for his assault on the teacher, and from there, it was a long way to Caltech.
After working most of the day at Johnson, I'd travel to another universe across town. In the afternoons, I toiled as a tutor to several wealthy families whose kids attended the elite Buckley Academy in Sherman Oaks.
The Buckley School
The school costs a small fortune to attend. Alumni include Paris Hilton and Mathew Perry. The curriculum at Buckley is close to college level by sophomore year, and the school boasts a 95% college attendance rate. The families that hired me to tutor their kids lived in mansions and had full-time maids. The two worlds couldn't have been more different.
One kid I tutored "Dan" had severe dyslexia and ADD, as well as a few other learning disorders. His family lived an amazing home at the very top of the Hollywood Hills, next door to baseball star Matt Kemp. Their house featured a private movie theater and "infinity pool" that disappeared off the edge of their deck into a panoramic view of LA.
Dan was a wonderful kid, by the way. In spite of his learning disabilities, he was also very bright. He was able to analyze complex literature and history, but because of his severe ADD, he'd easily lose focus and testing was very difficult for him. Still, he succeeded at Buckley because his parents spared no expense on him. In addition to the private instruction I gave him, his parents recruited a special learning disability coach and a psychologist for him.
Because of these resources, Dan was able to graduate from Buckley and was admitted to a major university. After a semester, however, Dan was having difficulty, so he dropped out. While this might have been a devastating setback for some, Dan's parents gave him startup money when he returned to LA. With it, Dan and and some friends started their own company making apps.
On the other side of LA the kids I knew in Watts weren't going to college, let alone being given their own high tech startup if they dropped out. These guys were going to a hellhole where they'd get jumped and beaten the first night to see how tough they were.
Another day in the park in South LA
Yes, the reality for the kids at DV Johnson was quite different. Remember that one student I told you about, "Kanye"- the lanky guy who refused to do my work and capped on me all day long? I finally had it with him, so I threatened to talk to his probation officer. So, under threat of earning additional time in Juvie, he finally agreed to write a paper for me. For a week I tried to get him to do an essay on the classic poem "If" by Kipling, but he wouldn't bite. Exasperated, I eventually told him to just write about his daily life.
This motivated him more than I could ever have imagined.
Kanye spent the next week and a half writing feverishly at the class computer. He threatened to kick the ass of anyone who disturbed his concentration. He eventually turned in a twenty page mini-biography. It had terrible grammer, but the prose was actually damn good and the emotion was honest. Kanye's soul poured out on those pages. He talked about his daily struggle trying to survive in his gang. The friends he'd lost. The people he loved, like his parents.
One of the most memorable passages was a hand-drawn map. Kanye drew a diagram of his walk home through the projects. It was a five minute stroll on a direct path. But Kanya's route was a insanely complicated, circuitous journey that looked like the trail of a madman trying to escape a maze.
Kanye explained that every crew in Jordan Downs controlled a different housing unit - he was certain to be attacked if went in front of the wrong apartment. None of the kids I tutored in Sherman Oaks had that kind of stress on their minds.
The difference between how kids of different races and economic class live in this city and this country in general is stark when you see it face to face every day. It's funny that some people don't "get" the achievement gap in education. Maybe it's just me, but it seemed pretty obvious that kids whose number one concern was wondering if they're going to get capped on the way home would struggle with Algebra more than a kid like Dan.
By the way, I don't think the problem is that public education fails kids. The problem is that our public education system is asked to confront a problem that is bigger than it can possibly handle. Schools are where the rubber meets the road for all our social neglect. Poverty is the real issue here, but that's a huge problem that we're not really prepared to solve.
Maybe that's why we spend our time focused on more visceral issues that flash across the internet like terrorism and mass shootings. IMHO, one of the worse side problems of terrorism is that the ruthlessly spectacular nature of it causes us to over-react to it, as if ISIS is the worse problem we face in the entire world.
Terrorism is a terrible danger to be sure, but our tendency to get sucked into the drama of it distracts us from even more devastating and urgent problems like economic inequality and global warming: two issues that will cause far more upheaval, destruction and heartache than ISIS could ever hope to create. Indeed, the slow burning fuse of economic inequality is eroding the very foundations of our society and we need to take the issue much more seriously before it blows up in our collective faces. The recent report by the Pew Research Institute about the disappearance of the American middle class greatly disturbs me.
The American middle class is literally drying up before our eyes. We aren't just a nation of "Have" and "Have Nots;" everyday we are becoming a nation of "Have Everything" or "Have Nothing at All." We're becoming an economically polarized nation like Brazil.
Rio Slum
How long before the distance between rich and poor is so great it can't ever be fixed?
And just as importantly, how many kids have to pass through places DV Johnson on their way to a dead end life before are we stop pretending that things are "fair" or that white privilege doesn't really exist, or that it's ok to live like this in a city (and a nation) that's divided so starkly by race and money.
After I left DV Johnson, I poked around a little and tried to figure out what happened to Constantino - but no one seemed to know what became of him. He, like so many others, had been swallowed up by the system.
I wonder if he's in prison now, or back out on the streets still dreaming of being an engineer one day--the life he could have had had he grown up in Sherman Oaks...
For more random Diablo thoughts and artwork visit www.diablocomics.com
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