Reflections from a Continuation School -- Other Thoughts

Anyway, the first time I met a student who had been recently released from juvenile, I had accidentally dropped my cellphone. He started teasing me:

"Don't be scared, sir! Don't be scared!"

That's what some of the inmates in juvenile hall quietly chant, especially for a new staff member. When I told him that he had reminded me of the kids who tried (and sometimes succeeded!) in intimidating me, that's when the told me about his brush with the law.

From that day, I would make fun of him every time I saw the kid: "Don't be scared, sir! Don't be scared!" Certainly we all know by now how useless such advice is to calm someone, but at least I could make the point that I wasn't intimidated, at least not anymore.

And on this note of the humor and casualness of the whole thing, some of the kids I talked to seem complacent, even proud of having been locked up. At first, it was just a matter of interest to listen to these young people talk about being locked up. Some of the students remembers the teachers from the school. Others talked about getting into staged fights with other inmates, which probation would set off.

Looking back on it, I am more saddened than puzzled, and certainly not proud. Sure, it was nice to feel puffed up ans special. "I worked in juvenile hall." "I stood up to gang bangers." "I have seen the dark side of contemporary life." Yet that popularity is flitting and fleeting at based. More often than not, I just gave students an intelligent audience to laugh about their own dysfunctional failings. They were proud of something that they should have been ashamed of. Now, I have learned that a teacher's popularity may not lead to a student's future prosperity.

I mean, what was the matter with these people? They had so little self-control, that the state had to be their guardian for fixed periods of time? I have learned that there is no point in shaming people about their miscreance; it reinforces their desperate pride in their deviant, defiant behavior.

I was not doing them a service. No, going to jail at thirteen, fourteen, or even eighteen is not normal, nor glorious, nor really heinous. It is just plain stupid. The folly of such immediate choices with long-term consequences seems to escape these people.

Yet why glory in it? Why brag about it? What's so great about the gang life?

It's comfortable in its commonness, for one thing. This is the life that these kids know best, and they identify it; breaking free means breaking people free from old ideas and identities, a very difficult thing to do, something that the public school fails to do, nay reinforces.