I was a substitute teacher reading a poem about Emmett Till.
Then I realized the Black and Latino students were the same age.
Welcome to The Experiment, and hello to all the new subscribers! Bill McCamley’s piece about tending bar struck a nerve. Frank Spring is back with the third chapter of Regulator. (Click here if you need to start from the beginning.) And I write about my time substitute teaching.
As always, we recommend things to do (prehab), read (my friend Loriana Hernandez-Aldama’s book about being your own hero), watch (Sophie’s Choice), and listen to (here’s the official playlist for The Experiment).
But first, let me catch you up on a new development in my life. I have started substitute teaching.
No, I still have my day job at the school district, but thanks to the Omicron wave, we have more teachers calling in sick and a shallower pool of substitutes to draw from. So a few hundred of us in the central administration office have been drafted and sent to the front lines. One day a week, we go where we’re needed. Think of it like Dunkirk, but with people subbing in for the substitutes, and instead of getting British troops from Dunkirk to Dover, we’re getting kids from the first bell to the last.
This doesn’t make me special, and it certainly doesn’t make our school district unusual. A substitute shortage is a national problem, and school districts all over the country are raising pay rates for substitutes and asking parents to fill in. Why, you might ask, don’t we just shut down schools or shift to virtual instruction? Masks and other measures can keep teachers and kids safe in classrooms where they get a better education than virtually, which takes a known and measurable toll on kids’ mental and emotional health. You don’t shut down a hospital because it’s hard to find nurses, and you don’t shut down schools because it’s hard to find subs.
Many of the people I work with got to the district administration through classrooms and know how to command the attention of children and create the cadence of instruction and interaction that carries you through the class periods. I did not. Never taught a day in my life other than delivering the odd guest lecture for friends’ poli sci classes. I was so nervous before the first day I woke up at 3am. That time went so badly — S said I looked “stricken” when I got home — that I didn’t sleep at all the night before my second day.
S said I looked “stricken” when I got home.
To say the second day went better is an understatement on par with “Bill Cosby’s public image has shifted somewhat since The Cosby Show.” I went to the same school as before, a middle school in a quiet residential neighborhood just east of the freeway and close to where my older son went to middle school. But until I worked for the school district, I never knew that this middle school existed.
They handed me a stack of worksheets and attendance rosters and told me the drill. Take the roll, hand out the worksheet, let them read the poem (“Rosa Parks” by Nikki Giovanni) quietly for 20 minutes, then read it out loud as a class and go over questions such as “Which statement best expresses a theme in the poem?” before opening it up for discussion.
I read the poem before the kids came in. Giovanni used free form and the gently propulsive repetition of the phrase “This is for the Pullman Porters…” to take you from Thurgood Marshall and Emmett Till to Rosa Parks, who only appears in the poem at the end where Giovanni ties it up in a loop.
But it was the Pullman Porters who safely got Emmett to his granduncle and it was Mrs. Rosa Parks who could not stand that death. And in not being able to stand it. She sat back down.
As the kids filed into the room, I counted one other White person. And then I realized: This is the 8th grade. They’re 14 years old. Just like Emmett Till was. And there’s a reason two middle schools were built so close together. This school predated Brown v. Board of Education.
When we read the poem out loud, I stopped when the text mentioned Marshall and the Supreme Court case. They looked at me blankly when I tried to tell them about the Supreme Court and segregation and separate but equal. So I tried something else.
“Y’all ever wonder why Kealing Middle School is so close to this one?” I asked.
They clearly had not, but I had their attention. And I pointed out that they were sitting in the remnants of segregation. Back then, you had to build one school for the White kids, and then one school for everyone else, which is how we end up now with two schools way too close together.
“Would it surprise you that this was the White school?” I asked.
Yes, reader, it would.
“But this is a ghetto school!” one boy said. The class laughed in recognition, not in mockery. This is how they saw their school.
“But this is a ghetto school!”
“OK, y’all laughed at that. Can someone tell me why you think that is true?”
One offered that this neighborhood was mostly Black and Latino families.
“Why is that?”
Another mentioned underfunding of schools on the east side of town, which everyone knows means east of the freeway that cuts this city in two. Yet another called out the school’s low academic rating, and it broke my heart a little to hear a student say that.
“Why is that?”
Several called out “racism” and that it’s just always been that way. So I told them the truth, that it was racism, but that someone made a choice that it would be this way.
“Has anyone ever heard the phrase ‘Dirty Sixth’?” I asked.
One kid bragged that he got in a fight on Sixth Street one night. I told them that was where the bars were and where a lot of bad stuff went down. When I moved here in the ‘90s, I heard this section of Sixth Street called “Dirty Sixth” because of the vomit and crime. Turns out, it used to be where a lot of Black-owned businesses were located. The phrase “Dirty Sixth” has been around for more than a century.
About a hundred years ago, this really pretty neighborhood on a hill near downtown was a Black neighborhood, and for that matter, the area in and around Republic Square was known simply as “Mexico” because of all the Latino-owned homes and businesses.
So in 1928, the city adopted a master plan that said people could live wherever they wanted, but if Blacks and Latinos wanted running water and electricity, they had to move out of downtown and into parts of east Austin. Later, in the 1970s, they put the freeway along the dividing line.
We talked about the poem some before I admitted that the one thing I always hated about school were worksheets like this, but there was one discussion topic I thought was worth their time:
“In the context of the poem, how has America changed over time? Consider the poem’s references to Rosa Parks refusing to leave her seat, the murder of Emmett Till and Brown vs. Board of Education, and contrast this with the current climate and race relations within America today. How have things changed? In what ways have circumstances changed for the better, remained the same or even grown worse?”
“Even” is doing a ton of work there.
“Anyone ever heard about Emmett Till?”
Some hands went up, and a few of them knew the outlines of the story, and I filled in the gaps. They didn’t know this was a national story. They didn’t know his mother demanded an open casket so everyone would see what they did to her boy.
“Was it that bad?” one boy asked.
I suggested they pull out their phones and Google “Emmett Till.” They reacted with more horror-movie shock than pain. This was a million years ago to them, before Dorothy got to somewhere over the rainbow and pictures were still in black and white.
“He was 14 years old,” I said to a room full of 14-year-olds.
Let me tell you, the discussion comparing and contrasting the Civil Rights Era with whatever the hell this is was lively. They mentioned George Floyd and “the kid who got killed because of Skittles.” I told them about Ahmaud Arbery, of whom no one had heard. A girl mentioned Breonna Taylor. I offered Sandra Bland. There are too many names to keep in our heads, too many Emmett Tills.
“He was 14 years old,” I said to a room full of 14-year-olds.
One boy, who had clowned me the week prior, said that one sign of progress is that now racists at least have to hide being racist, which led to a discussion of “Let’s Go Brandon.” These kids might not have all the advantages in life, but they don’t miss a trick.
Finally, another boy mentioned another sign of progress. Back then, he said, there were laws about which school you were allowed to go to, where you could live, and all that. Now those laws don’t exist.
“It’s still racist, but it doesn’t have to be that way,” he said.
I can’t wait to go back this week. Want to join me and become a substitute yourself? I’m not saying that I’m going to quit my job and become a teacher, but visiting the front lines has shown me what the point is. These are the kids who need us the most.
Jason Stanford is the co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. He works at the Austin Independent School District as Chief of Communications and Community Engagement, though he would want to point out that these are his personal opinions and his alone, but you already knew that. Follow him on Twitter @JasStanford.
How we’re getting through this
Cleaning sheet pans
Hitting the narrative gym
Making homemade marinara
Scheduling fewer virtual meetings
Pre-ordering this book about Sikh wisdom
Making spaghetti and chicken meatball soup
What I’m watching
I was a boy when Sophie’s Choice came out and only recently got around to seeing it. Meryl Streep, obviously, is amazing. She spoke flawless German, which was her third language in the movie. Some day, I hope, I will see a Holocaust-related movie and not be surprised there’s no happy ending. But it wasn’t the day I watched this movie.
What I’m listening to
My friend Kady Rain is out with her debut, genre-nonconforming album. This song, “Got Away,” sounds like it was a hit in the ‘90s.
I have no idea what’s going on here, but it’s fun to listen to.
This is the second time I’ve put Little Simz on the playlist. This song was playing in the background and made me pay attention.
“Bunny Is A Rider” by Caroline Polachek also turned my head. It’s not high art, just pop music, but there’s something to this song.
Thanks to Noom, I lost 40 pounds over 2020-21 and have kept it off since then. Click on the blue box to get 20% off. Seriously, this works. No, this isn’t an ad. Yes, I really lost all that weight with Noom.
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Buy the book Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick banned from the Bullock Texas History Museum: Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of the American Myth by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and myself is out from Penguin Random House.