Still going, and getting less issue-oriented and more violent and disruptive.

Friday, March 24: What I missed

I don't work Fridays, so the walkout went on in my absence. The students peacefully filed out the door, then sat down on school grounds, following their plan to not leave school grounds. It's been pointed out that this sort of sit-in tactic generally leads to some sort of teach-in or airing of demands - but another school marched by, yelling for our students to join, and I can also understand that they wanted to see if there was action somewhere else. That's what the LA Times first covered: 1500 students gathering in a park. Still peacefully. No arrests. No tickets. Just some detentions for those kids when they came back to school with unexcused absences from class.

Monday, March 27: One, two, three, what are we fighting for? I don't give a damn...

I walked into fourth period and saw a total of five students there. "What, is there another walkout today?" I joked. Indeed, there was. A kid instantly started complaining about how today's protest devalued Friday's since many of today's walkout particpants didn't seem to know what they were fighting for. There was also some class-wide distaste for the involvement of the local middle school, as in "Why drag little kids into this? They don't understand."

We have Hippie Math Teacher this period, who I'm sure has done his share of protesting but is also a teacher dealing with most of his class missing the lesson to be on the street. In addition to the algebra classwork, he gave a writing assignment: tell me what you did and saw on Friday. This is repeat-failure Algebra 1A, so even with such an easy classwork credit, only one student did it: Winnie, (who I am happy to have in class again this semester, and who is much less belligerant these days). She wrote a full page, not exactly an A+ on mechanics but a least a B on content. She wrote something to the effect of, "On Friday I saw hundreds of beautiful Latino people fighting for their rights and the rights of their neighbors. Today, I see dum [sic] people who don't even know what they're protesting."

She further explained to me, when I asked for details, that this walkout was poorly organized and that there had already been fights and some throwing of bottles, and that they were "blowing up" a McDonalds down the street. When a dozen or two kids yelling "Walkout!" passed the school later, a couple of the kids in my class yelled "You're stupid!" out the window. "They're going the wrong way," they told me, "Downtown is the other way."

I left that class early and had lunch, because it was pointless. There was some debate in the staff room about today's events. I repeated the statements from students about today's walkouts being misguided. Another tutor quoted a student who'd said that since these protests had violence, it did make them look like terrorists, which is particularly bad since the bill in question is under the name of "Homeland Security." Some staff disagreed, "It's still meaningful." I don't know. Is it meaningful if the protesters don't give it meaning, or don't know what it means? I have no way of knowing how many of them have good motives and how many just want to get out of class.

In period 5, I got to wondering about how many people with good motives even understood the legislation they were railing against. The English teacher asked a girl who'd walked out on Friday what she was protesting. "If you help an immigrant, you go to jail?" and "They want to kick all the Mexicans out of the country?" Scary prospects both, but not what we're talking about. The kid who was the best-informed (and still outraged) didn't walk out either day! I started to feel a little racist, assuming these kids weren't well informed about their issue. But then, I would expect my Latino SAT students from private schools to know what's up. I was being classist, not racist -- but since so many students at this school don't read on a high enough grade level to understand a news article -- and if they did, wouldn't pick one up, because they think reading is gay -- how am I supposed to assume they're educated on the issue. Word of mouth? Radio talk shows? Cable news? All notoriously unreliable prospects. Face it: I'm a news snob. It's a prejudice I'm gonna have to deal with.

Fifth period English is also when we went into lockdown. The PA crackled, but instead of the usual drone of "Please excuse the interruption," we got "We are in lockdown." Click. A few seconds later, they repeated it, and further elaborated that no one was to leave class. "What if you have to pee?" joked the teacher, and continued giving the quiz. A few minutes later, we could hear sirens, then yelling, then helicopters. Another PA announcement, this time instructing teachers to close the windows and shut the blinds, since the crowd outside was getting so "unruly." More sirens, more choppers, and some of the screaming sounded like people in pain. "I hope no one's getting pepper sprayed," said one student. The teacher put in a movie. One student tried to sneak to the window for a peek. Others asked me to do so and report back. "Nah, I'll see it on the news tonight like everyone else." We were on the wrong side of the school, anyway. "Check the internet," asked one kid. "I just did," I said, "nothing new." "ABC7.com!" he urged, and I complied, since I'd only tried the LA Times. Nothing.

Eventually things quieted down and lockdown ended right before period 6. In the hall, I passed a kid from period 3. "Riot," he said, jerking his thumb towards the front entrance. I stopped by the office to get the scoop. "Did you see it?" they asked. "No, I was in the 100s, no view." "It was beautiful." "Beautiful? I heard it was a riot." Well, technically, since more bottles were thrown, and the school who was coming and hoping to pick up more of our students for the walkout seemed to be trying to tear the gates down. This is also when I heard that some of the walkout kids had moved onto the freeway and were stopping traffic. Better than violence, but I hoped no one got ploughed down.

Off to period 6, where the teacher hadn't shown up and the kids were milling aimlessly around the door while a neighboring teacher called for coverage. A few kids were considering leaving but I advised against it because I knew truant students were starting to get tickets. I heard the McDonalds rumor repeated, this time "threw rocks at" instead of "blew up." Also rumors, still unsubstantiated, that there were other riots and robbery in the neighborhood. One student compared it to the LA riots and I repeated the chestnut I'd heard once: the first day was about Rodney King and the second day was about shopping, while here, Friday's protest had better motives and today's seemed to be about ditching class. He insisted that the '92 riots weren't about Rodney King even on the first day. "Haven't you heard that Sublime song?" I had. It goes partially like this:


Cause everybody in the hood has had it up to here
It's getting harder, and harder, and harder each and every year
Some kids went in a store with their mother
I saw her when she came out she was gettin' some Pampers
They said it was for the black man
They said it was for the Mexican
But not for the white man
But if you look at the streets, it wasn't about Rodney King
It's this fucked-up situation and these fucked-up police
It's about comin' up and stayin' on top
And screamin' 1-8-7 on a mother fuckin' cop
It's ain't in the paper, it's on the wall
National guard
Smoke from all around


I walked back to my car after school, amid trucks honking with people hanging out the windows with Mexican flags. I felt guilty for hoping nothing had happened to my car during the chaos.

The rest of the week

The news media started focusing on the negative, of course. I'm sure they were disappointed Friday's walkouts and Saturday's 500,000-person downtown demonstration didn't give them any ammunition. I turned on conservative talk radio just to get the other side, and heard them talking about how "these students looked like gangbangers to me" and so on. One crank talked about a girl he met who was "half Mexican and half AY-rab." "Did you really say 'ay-rab?'" asked the traffic and weather girl later, in disbelief. The news that night reported on how much money the walkouts were costing the districts, since funding is tied to daily attendance. Hello? Let's focus on either the immigration issue, or the issue that truancy is an enormous problem EVERY day of the school year and no one does jack about it.

Chicano activists who I respect, like Luis Rodriguez, started coming out in full support, like some of the people at my job. I understand his reasoning: the kids aren't missing out on an education, because becoming an activist is an education in itself. Ideally, yes. But practically, students who already read and write and calculate far below grade level need to be in class learning the basics. You've got MySpace: organize something for after school. Most of you don't have any extracurricular activities after school to miss, because you school doesn't have the staff or budget for them, anyway.

But walkouts are easy, and we're talking about a population that can't write their senator (not voting age, sometimes not citizens) or buy ad space (too poor) or use any of the traditional channels. They're non-white teenagers, mostly poor, doing what they think will get the world's attention.

There have been meetings and discussions, attempting to provide positive forums to drain the energy off the walkouts, but Sublime was right: everybody in the 'hood has had it up to here, and kids walkout out because school sucks are, in their own way, protesting from a pure motive. School DOES suck, and that's just another way we are failing all the working people of LA and their children. But that's another issue.

The police have started giving hefty tickets to kids walking out (while, as I mentioned earlier, failing to do anything about everyday truancy). My nonprofit has found a legal aid organization willing to help the kids with tickets. I announced this in one class yesterday, right after I found out, and it (of course and unfortunately) sparked another discussion on the situation. Someone said there was another walkout tomorrow and I asked them, for their own sakes, to find another way to get heard and not tempt fate now that the cops were out. "Don't give them an excuse to mess with you - you know some LA cops are mean and racist," I reminded them.

"They're chorizos," one kid muttered.

"Yeah, so steer clear. And don't talk like that in school."

Chorizo is Mexican sausage. It's also slang for a penis. It was then, when I realized not only that I know way too many Spanish swears, but that I was probably in this business deeper than I'd been admitting. I am giving legal, tactical advice to dozens of kids in the midst of a historic event - that I knew about a day before it happened. All this time, I knew something major would happen while I was living in LA. I worried about earthquakes, about Tookie Williams-oriented riots, about everything but the part of history I wound up in.

As I plan to wrap up my last SAT lesson of the busy season tonight...

(Yes, kids, if you ace the SATs, you too can become...an SAT teacher! Sort of like, "If you know so much about careers, why are you a guidance counselor?" But I digress.)

More questions than answers

The walkouts turned into quite a big thing. I was privy to the flyer being passed around at my school -- Javier showed me -- and it laid out the rule that students were to congregate at the school entrance and not leave school grounds. That way, they could get busted for ditching class (detentions) but not school (potentially arrests). Well, they left alright. But no one got arrested, so I suppose it all worked out.

I've been turning the immigration issue over in my mind lately. As someone who works in a school that was built for 2000 kids but serves more than 5000, sending them in shifts so only 2/3 of them are there at any given time, I see how immigration is overwhelming our current infrastructure. But. I have to wonder whether New York was like this during the big Ellis Island surges. I also have to ask when we started cracking down on immigration such that moving here legally became so hard. And whether, if my great grandparents had to cross a mere invisible land border and not an ocean, they would have snuck over without papers, too.

I can't imagine that the longer-term residents of NYC were excited to see my great grandparents coming down the street, with five kids in tow and speaking Yiddish to each other. I'm sure they thought, there goes the neighborhood, there goes the country. Damn Jews, coming here from their poor countries with all their kids and no education. Aren't there enough people in this country already?

So, since this is a country of immigrants, my gut impulse is to give the current wave of immigrants a chance, whether they have papers or not. Granted, my grandparents graduated high school, and then the next generation went to college. They and their children and grandchildren found decent jobs and contributed to the economy, becuse decent jobs were still to be had in this country back then. I don't think we're the land of opportunity we used to be. Sure, we still have more options than Mexico, or Romania, where my grandmother's parents and some of her brothers came from on that boat. But at the core of the problem isn't that immigrants are messing up our country. The government and corporate interests (same thing) are messing up our country, and immigrants and the native-born are both getting messed up with it.

While I have yet to find a balanced article about the immigration legislation in question, it seems they want to build a border fence, made the native-born children of illegal immigrants illegal as well, and make illegal immigration or helping an illegal immigrant a major felony. Couldn't we take our border fence money and invest it in schools and job training instead? If we're going to get all snotty about our borders, shouldn't we respect that someone born within them is a citizen? (And that native-born-nonwhite-people-still-aren't-citizens thing -- didn't we do that to the Japanese for decades after WWII?) And the money we spend on jailing immigrants -- again, schools, jobs, healthcare, housing?

Finally, on a selfish note, depending on how the bill is written -- and I admit I haven't found a bill number and looked it up an read it yet -- couldn't aiding an illegal immigrant encompass what I do for a living? I don't check to see who has papers. They're in this country, they're gonna learn some goddamn math and graduate high school if I have anything to do with it. It's easy and justifiable to say, in generalized terms, that there are too many immigrants for LA to absorb -- but when you don't know which of your individual favorite students are documented and which aren't, it makes it more complicated. I've occasionally wondered if a meritocracy system like the Dream Act is the answer. If you're contributing, welcome to our country. If you drop out and put a strain on our social services, get the hell out. But I really have no idea.

A slogan of the immgrant-rights movement in Germany when I was there was "Kein Mensch ist illegal." It's better in German, but roughly means "no person is illegal." Existentially, it's true. When did it become practically false?

Once, during my ill-advised period of taking public transit to work, I was waiting to transfer buses on the edge of LA's skid row. (This is part of why this particular public transit escapade was ill-advised.) I was wearing a beanie bearing the name of the high school where I work. A teenage girl was also waiting for the bus.

"Do you go to ______?" she asked, incredulously. (The place is almost 100% Latino, so I don't look the part. Never mind that I was mistaken for a teenager, as that happens alarmingly often.)

"No, I just work there. Do you go there?"

"Yeah."

"But you don't live around there?"

"I did, but we...moved."

Oh.

"Depending on whom you’re talking to, there are 400 to 700 kids living on Skid Row. Kids are part of the fabric here. I see them out my window all the time: Moms making their way through clouds of second-hand crack vapors with 4- and 5-year-olds, sending them off for the day on a big yellow school bus. Teenage girls in teenage-girl gear stand on corners in the middle of a parade of tragedy. They wait for city buses to deliver them from this local facsimile of Calcutta to public schools somewhere in the greater Los Angeles area. At school, they will presumably lie about where they’ve been and what they’ve seen on this fine morning in the heart of what Los Angeles Police Chief Bill Bratton calls the biggest social disaster in America." - Sam Slovik, LA Weekly

Another one from the blackboard at Trader Joe's:

A jumper cable walks into a bar. The bartender says, "We'll serve you, but don't start anything."

"Adulthood is not all that much fun. But the alternative, of course, is to be pitiful, or dead."

The Onion is looking like real news again:

Report: Many Jobs Lack Benefits To Cut
NEW YORK—According to a report published in the February issue of Forbes magazine, employers are reporting difficulty finding job benefits to eliminate. "Health insurance, matching 401(k) contributions, lunch breaks, and various allowances and reimbursements are all fair game for cost-cutting—that is, when they are offered by employers in the first place," staff writer Jason Smills wrote. "By not extending these perks to their employees in the first place, however, American business owners find themselves lacking the crucial ability to take them away." Smills noted that 97 percent of the possible benefit cuts in American jobs had already been made, reducing the potential for greater company profits and executive-level benefits to "alarming" lows

Nickeled and dimed

Hey, I've already worked 40 hours this week! Can I stay home til Monday? No? How about some free health insurance? Paid vacation? Didn't think so.

New words I learned from the Internet today:

hapa: half Asian and half white, or originally, half Hawaiian and half "foreign"

crapulous: says dictionary.com, "1. Suffering the effects of, or derived from, or suggestive of gross intemperance, especially in drinking; as, a crapulous stomach.
2. Marked by gross intemperance, especially in drinking; as, a crapulous old reprobate."

I can't believe that's a real word. I shall incorporate it into my vocabulary the next time I have time to drink crapulously.

For lack of any notables, quotables, or gunplay at work today, I'm kind of liking the Friday Stupid Joke thing. Here's one that's on the blackboard at Trader Joe's:

A man walks into a bar with a slab of asphalt under his arm. He says, "A drink, please, and one for the road."

Heehee.

Joke: An Irishman walks into a bar. The bartender looks at him and notices he has a steering wheel down the front of his pants. "Hey," he says, "What's with the steering wheel down your pants?" "Ach," says the Irishman, "It's driving me nuts!"

"Some of you young folks been saying to me, 'Hey Pops, what do you mean "What a Wonderful World?" How 'bout all them wars all over the place? You call them wonderful? And how 'bout hunger and pollution? They ain't so wonderful either.' Well, how about listening to old Pops for a minute? Seems to me it ain't the world that's so bad, but what we're doing to it. And all I'm saying is see what a wonderful world it would be if only we'd give it a chance. Love, baby, love. That's the secret. Yeah. If lots more of us loved each other we'd solve lots more problems and then this world would be a gasser. "

Louis Armstrong, 1970.

I am throwing out coupons that expired over the summer and filing letters from financial institutions dated last fall. I am finding unread publications from August, December, a CD I burned in November and haven't seen since. And you know? When you've been meaning to dry-clean a shirt for almost two full YEARS, and you've only worn it once, to an unpleasant event, and the shirt was free in the first place, it is time for said shirt to go in the Goodwill bag. And after 2 1/2 years in the corner of your bedroom, it is perhaps time the Goodwill bag actually went to Goodwill.

I swear, I used to be more organized that this. Can I blame the laid-back West Coast lifestyle, or having to work several highly demanding part-time jobs while married to a PhD candidate with even less free time? Does anyone have any life-management tips for me?

Best. Junk mail. EVER. I have received postal spam from the Beverly Hills Country Club. How did I end up on such a mailing list? I'm more likely to be accepted into a gang than a country club at this point. Enjoy - unnecessary quotation marks are theirs.

On behalf of our Board of Governors, the Members and staff of Beverly Hills Country Club invite you to become acquainted with our friendly neighborhood private club [...] Established in 1926 by Merv Griffin's uncle, Elmer Griffin, Beverly Hills Country Club quickly became a "haven of refuge" for executives and personalities involved in the early days of the film and entertainment industries. Many found it a "safe" and private place to meet, socialize and recreate away from the demanding public[...]

Over the years, the Club evolved into a "home away from home" for all our members, no matter their business, social, or recreational pursuits [...] members find the Club a wonderful place to dine, socialize or merely escape the world "outside" that so demands of our time and energy.

Beverly Hills Country Club is not for every one nor every family. If it were, it would not be a privilege to belong. Membership to our fine club is exclusive, but not exclusionary, and is by invitation. As you would expect, membership is limited; it is also much more affordable than you might think. We invite you to get to know us and allow us the same privilege. If you think membership might benefit you, call D___ N___ at 310-xxx-xxxx