to know that you know it;
and when you do not know a thing,
to allow that you do not know it;
this is true knowledge.
Okay. This post is basically all about how much I don't know.
Awesome kids at 826 continued: this week, in-school tutoring was akwardly canceled because it was report card day and they didn't have any school, which we didn't know until we went there. But last week, I helped a girl with her fictional narrative, and it was great, she basically had the idea for the next best-selling YA series. They were supposed to do a short story, but hers was more like a series of chapter books. We spent a long time just talking about it and sorting out her ideas, and then we talked about her characters. She had three female characters and one male, and she wanted to add two more male characters so the numbers would be even. I said, "gotta have equality," and she said, "yes indeed."
Yesterday, I made beef! With peppers! And cheese. I don't know what it was, it was supposed to be a skillet thing. I was looking at recipes and I was like, I could totally make a philly cheesesteak minus the bread, so I bought little steak cubes and cooked them (after dropping about half of them on the kitchen floor) in a skillet. Then I added the bell peppers, then the cheese. I used some teriyaki sauce from the fridge (borrowed from an unsuspecting roommate, sorry not sorry), which actually was a good idea. So yeah. I'm not sure what it is, but it was good. Behold, the snazziest thing I've made yet:
It was great.
It's been really interesting working with 826CHI. Because we help students from Chicago Public Schools, I'm getting exposed to an aspect of the educational system that's sort of been a supplement to a big project we're working on in Core Course. We started the project last week, when we were first introduced to CPS and Chicago's tangled mess of an education system. We watched Waiting For Superman and talked with Jackson Potter, who's the staff coordinator for the Chicago Teachers Union. The assignment we have that's taking over several weeks of core course is called Education Navigation. Basically, we pretend we're the parent of an eighth grade student in Chicago, and we have to choose the best high school for them to go to.
Which is actually a lot, lot more complicated than it sounds. Not only are there a wide range of choices, from neighborhood schools to selective enrollment and charter schools (which yes are completely different), but a ton of factors come into play, and they're not just about your kid's ACT score but about where you live and the socioeconomical issues of your elementary school.
Chicago is a very segregated city, and its schools reflect that. A lot of minorities attend schools that are underfunded and have inadequate resources. There have been a lot of attempts to even out demographics, from the tier system to shutting down schools and reopening them as charters, but those things haven't helped much. The contrast in schools is incredible- some I've looked into for the assignment have little more than a quarter of their kids meeting or exceeding state standards in tests for reading or math, while some have almost 80%. Some schools' ACT average is 29; others' is 16. The type of school you go to has a big impact on the type of education you get, as well as your chances of graduating and going on to college. There is a lot of competition to get into the higher performing schools, while the lower performing schools continue to be underresourced and closed down.
Basically, the type of school you go to can determine the rest of your life. There are some kids who wake up at five in the morning and take a train and two buses to get to a school that will help them get to where they want in life, rather than attending their low-performing, lower-level neighborhood school. Parents drive their kids, and bypass handfuls of schools that were closer but didn't meet their standards. To get into the top-performing ones, there's an application process, and then the rest of the available spaces are given away according to a lottery. A lot of students hoping like crazy to get into an amazing school receive a number and sit in an auditorium with hundreds of other students who are hoping like crazy, and wait for a computerized system to randomly pick their number. In Waiting for Superman, for one school, there were 40 slots that 700 families applied for. A lot of students pin their future on a good school, and then don't get in.
It's crazy complicated. Basically, it comes down to this: is education a right or a privledge? How do we create equal access to it and make sure everyone has an equal opportunity and ability to attend good schools and get a good education? The current system is failing a lot of students, and denying them the futures they deserve to have.
I've never really thought of myself as a privledged person. I don't think anyone does, until they get older and start experiencing enough of the world to be able to compare themselves to others and understand that they way it is for them, isn't true for everyone. But I never realized that there were places where people had to go through this for high school, where you have to look at dozens of options and worry about where exactly you live, and what are you going to do if you don't get into the school that will give you the best opportunity to have a better future. I never went through that. I was ignorant of anything like it. When I was in eighth grade, I knew I was going to Golden High School, the public school in my hometown that my older sister, my friends, and all my neighbors were going to. There was never much of a question about it, let alone of getting in. The only other option was Lakewood High School, which is farther away and offers an IB program, which draws in a lot of top-performing students. But I never really considered that an option. I never asked what the average ACT score was at Golden, what the demographics were, what the dropout rate was. I still don't know those statistics and I don't even know what website they're readily available on, or what resources there are to access them. I never asked, will I get a good education at Golden?
It's not that my parents didn't care about my siblings and I getting a decent education. It's that we never had to worry about it.
Where we live is not a rough neighborhood. Golden has its issues, but overall it's your typical white middle-class community, a community where education is valued and you have access to it and if you want to go a step higher you might go to a place like Lakewood, or to a private school like Mullen, but otherwise you're completely fine.
I had no idea it was like this, that it even could be like this for students. And it's terrible. In Waiting for Superman, one of the young students, a little girl, talked about her first choice for school and said, "If I get in, it gives me a better chance at life." The last thing a student in elementary school needs is to be worrying about is her future. If she wants to be a doctor, she should be able to be a doctor. The fact that that she lives in a certain neighborhood or went to a certain school, should not keep her from doing what she wants. Families pin their whole hopes, and kids their whole futures, on the lottery, on the chance that a ball with their number on it is called. It's devastating to the paretns, because they understand the implications of not getting into a certain school. They understand that because luck wasn't on their side, their kid is now more likely to drop out, have a lower ACT score, or not go to college.
The whole situation makes me feel just helpless. It's a huge mess, which is a huge understatement. I don't think we'll ever get to the point where we completely level the field and every student has the exact same privledges and opportunities. That's just not how life works. There will always be someone who has more or less than you. We can try, the big question is how, and it seems like a lot of what has been tried has just failed the people it needs to save. And it's a huge injustice that the people who it affects, who suffer, are the elementary school kids with tiny backpacks and hands and pencils, who want to become doctors, who are the students I work with at 826CHI. It's hard to think that the students I've tutored won't go on to be something, just because their number wasn't called, or their parents who struggle with English don't understand the application process. It's also hard to think that I had a better chance, because of where I lived. And I was never even aware of how lucky I was.
Everyone at Golden complains about the food and the classes and the teachers. We ditch and cheat on tests and live for the weekend. And we never realize, we get our books the first week of class; there are enough seats for everyone; our teachers care about our ACT scores. We never realize that what we have is something that an eighth grader in Chicago would love to get.
This CPS assignment has really opened my eyes to the way things are for other people, to the injustice that plagues an entire city's education system. Like I said, I never considered myself a privledged person. Privledged people were the kids who lived in the Estates on Green Mountain, whose parents bought them cars for their sixteenth birthdays and traveled to Africa for spring break. Those were the privledged. And my family, who didn't have a lot of money but years' worth of hand-me-downs and vacations comprised of driving sixteen hours to Wisconsin in a packed van, were not. But there are different levels of privilege, and I was privledged to grow up in a safe town where a good education was something that was so assured it was never even questioned. It took coming to Chicago to make me realize that.
I just look at the kids who come through 826CHI, at the incredibly intelligent and creative students who I tutor, and hope that the educational system will put them on a track to accomplish the dreams they tell me about. But the hard thing is, for a lot of them, it won't. And I have no idea what to do about it. I think the first step is just having awareness, which is what this assignment is creating.
Here's a picture from the Sullivan Gallery at the School of The Art Institute, which the Arts Seminar went to and which right now is showcasing undergraduate work. It's from a room modeled like an old gymnasium, complete with creepy old pictures of the weird shoulder and jumping exercises people used to do. The quote is kind of relevant, and true:
"The educator shall free the powers of each man and connect him with the rest of his life."
Awareness has been a big thing for me lately. A lot has happened with my ISP. Last Thursday, I awkwardly carried Patrick K.'s military photos (which were in a huge binder that would not fit in my backpack) through the city to the National Veterans Art Museum, where I hung out for four hours in Patrick's office and scanned them to my computer, then tried and failed to figure out how to view the videos I've taken on my laptop. I went to a little bakery in Pilsen beforehand and grabbed a bunch of different things and brought them for Patrick, just to kind of thank him for all the help he's given me. He was excited about the free food and he'd pick something out and be like, "What's this? It looks good" and I had no idea what I got. The reason why I like that bakery is because you take a tray and tongs and pick out what you want, instead of pointing and telling someone, which means that I don't have to fail hard at trying to pronounce the Mexican words for heart-shaped cookies, other squarish cookies, donut-type things, and pastry-looking things. So I had no idea what was in the bag. But apparently it was all really good.
I had a meeting with Jason, my ISP instructor, and I completely missed it because Patrick and I spent forever trying to figure out how to get my videos to play on my laptop and everything we tried didn't work. I felt so bad because the museum was preparing for a new exhibit that was opening on Veterans Day, and Patrick was crazy busy and he was already saying how he'd be there past midnight, and he helped me for two hours. He was asking me all these questions about my laptop and the software it has, for editing and viewing videos and in general, and I didn't know anything. While we were working he was playing punk rock music and kept asking me who the singer/band was and as always I had no idea. He was like, "ok, guess who sings this, if you can't guess the whole project's off, I can't help you anymore" and of course I couldn't name anyone to save my life. In the end, I had to leave with punk rock music in my head and still unable to watch my videos. Hopefully, at some point I'll figure it out. I kind of have to. The good thing was I scanned all of Patrick K.'s photographs, and I now have all of them on my laptop, which feels a little creepy, but I guess if anything ever happens to his binders or his house, someone will have copies of them.
After that, Arts Seminar had a lecture at the School of the Art Institute at 6 and I left the museum at 5:20, so I got there late and had to find my way into the auditorium by myself. I got to the building and it took forever to get in. I was with two foreign guys who also said they were there for the lecture, but apparently there were two lectures that night so they left me and when a security guard confronted me, I couldn't even remember the name of the man who was speaking, and I was saved by another student.
I had no idea what I was doing. That's actually been my attitude throughout this whole project (or, really, this whole semester). Everything, from interviewing people to the microphone to the sound recorder to editing, is completely new, and I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing, I'm just kind of riding on faith and figuring it out and having Patrick come to my rescue. Basically, I'm this meme:
Lesson of the day Thursday: I know nothing about Mexican baked goods, cameras, computers, editing software, 90's punk rock music, the military, photo scanners, film, and how to get into the School of the Art Institute.
But I've been a little successful! On Sunday, I did an interview on my own for the first time. I talked with Edgar, who was a supply sergeant with the 19th Psychological Operations Battalion from 1999-2006. We met at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he was studying Art Education while he was in the reserves. He was in his last year and really close to graduating in 2003, when he was deployed to Baghdad. It was really nice to be on a college campus again. I got there early and walked around to get footage of the campus/buildings for the film, and tried to get used to the weird looks I got from people passing by.
There was a lot of awkwardness with the beginning of the interview. It's always super awkward when you first meet the person, and you're trying to figure out a good spot to talk. Setting it up is the weirdest part, you're still strangers and the person is most self conscious then, and setting up a shot is not something I'm used to. You have to take direction and ask them to move and sit a certain way and position the camera. It was made especially awkward because the ACM gave me a tripod, and it was missing the base plate, which is the part of the tripod the camera attaches to. I didn't realize it until that morning, when I went to practice so I didn't look like an idiot with Edgar. It's partially my fault, I'd had it for several days and hadn't looked closely at it yet. So I had to do the interview without it. It was okay, we were in a cafeteria so there were tables and I brought a bunch of books I set the camera on, but there's something a little sad about that and I was awkwardly like "I don't have a tripod."
Then, we got all set up and I tried to turn on the sound recorder, and it was completely dead. So we had to totally relocate near an outlet and Edgar was so nice about it but I was like, great. Great. And it slowly got dark throughout the interview, and there was no way to turn the lights on in the room we were in. It looks completely fine on film, but you can tell.
So. It wasn't completely smooth. Afterwards, I texted Patrick and freaked out a little over the audio, I was like, I tried all these different ways to charge it and it didn't work and is it broken and it died when I was with Edgar and that was really embarrassing, and he was like, you just need to change the batteries.
I'm pretty sure Patrick thinks I live under a rock. Or that I'm incompetent.
Making mistakes is completely ok, though. Part of doing this whole thing is so that I learn, and once you make a mistake, you'll never make it again. Now I know all the parts a tripod should have, and I won't go to another interview without extra AA batteries in my backpack. And you kind of have to mess up to learn those things.
At the end of this, I will be a lot snazzier with cameras and editing and interviewing. And that's part of the goal.
The other part of the goal is just learning more about the military in general, which is definitely happening too. I know zero about it. I'm like, what does it mean to be in reserve? What's the difference between a batallion and a company? I don't know what a SAW gunner is. What does E-5 mean? How/when do you know you're coming home to stay? (Edgar got home on Mother's Day in 2006. He said it was the best mother's day gift he's ever given to his mom :) ) A lot of what I'm asking in the interviews probably won't be in the film, sometimes it's more for my own understanding. I still don't know a lot, but I've also learned a ton, considering where I was at a month ago. All I can say is so far it's been really great getting to know these veterans, and to just hear their stories and learn about their art, and get a glimpse into a culture I'm not a part of. I just hope the final film turns out okay. I'm nervous about the editing because I've never edited anything in my life. I mentioned this once, and Patrick said he has the utmost faith in me, which was really great. I just really appreciate the fact that people have been willing to talk to me and be part of my project, and the least they deserve is a good end product.
On Veterans Day, I went to NVAM and attended the opening exhibit of 100 Faces of War Experience. All the art they had before was replaced with 100 painted portraits of men and women who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, who were picked to statistically represent the American experience. They were all created by one artist. Besides the museum's permanent exhibit of The Things They Carried, which portrays the Vietnam war, the entire place was converted to a gallery and you can almost get lost among all the portraits. Each subject had the chance to provide a written statement, and a lot of them talked about being a veteran and the type of questions society asks, and how they address those questions. There were some poems, and one guy said, "I have nothing to say." And that was it. The amazing thing about it is there was such a wide variety of people and experiences; there were officers, medics, administrative workers, combat infantrymen, and a few soldiers who had died. It captured the range of experiences that veterans have gone through, and it didn't focus on just those who were in combat or the important officers, but portrayed everything.
Okay. So I'd known about the reception for a while, and I'd been really dreading it. It's like the art reception at the alderman's office all over again. Patrick invited me to come and I really wanted to go, but I knew that there would be a lot of people there and I am so bad at talking to people (which has already been established). The artist was there and was going to speak, as well as some of the subjects, so I was like, okay, I'll just try to make it til then and I'll be good. I spent the first hour there walking around and looking at all the portraits. I'm glad I did that, because some of the written statements the subjects provided were really insightful, but looking back, I wish I'd made more of an effort to talk to some of the museum's staff, who were also milling around. I also probably could've talked to some of the people whose portraits had been painted and were there. I think Patrick expected me to do that. But of course I chickened out. They all brought their families and their cute little kids and were busy talking to each other. Was there room for me to wedge between them and their wife and be like hey, I don't know you and you don't know me, but can I creep on your experiences? Nope. I timed getting there so I'd have a decent amount of time before the artist spoke, but not so much time I'd die. I figured I could survive an hour, somehow float from getting there and saying hi to Patrick, to the speakers.
I did survive. Everyone gathered after 5 in a room, and the director of the museum talked a little bit about the new exhibition and the museum, then introduced the artist, who basically thanked everyone, and that was it. It took about ten minutes. I was like, wait wait wait, whatever happened to the keynote speakers that were supposed to talk for a while and be my saviours? I was back to the awkwardness. But Edgar was there! And he was standing alone, so I went and talked to him. I saw him earlier but didn't go over to him because he was with other people. Maybe that's my problem. It's the group thing. I can approach one person, even if they're a complete stranger, but if they have other people with them I'm like nope. Because I know when they're with a group, I'll probably stand there awkwardly not saying anything, with their friends/family giving me looks like who are you, until they reach a pause in their conversation and are polite enough to notice me. But when they're alone, and you approach them, they have to acknowledge you immediately. It's way easier to be like "Hey Edgar" than be like "Hey Edgar and your two random friends, let me barge in on your conversation."
So, lesson of that day: groups are scary.
Anyways. A big reason why I went is because Patrick emailed a veteran who was in Vietnam, and by some miracle he was interested in my project. His name is Maurice, and we agreed to meet at the reception when he mentioned he'd be there. After the not-so-talkative speakers and hanging out with Edgar, I realized I should probably try to find Maurice but I had no idea what he looked like. So I just wandered around until Patrick showed up with him, and introduced us. I liked Maurice a lot, and I'm really happy he's going to do the project. It'll also be really great to get a different perspective; both Edgar and Patrick came home in 2006, and their experiences have been relatively recent, whereas Maurice's was decades before I was even born. What Edgar and Patrick have been living with, Maurice has for years and years. He told me how he came back from Vietnam and literally didn't talk about it for thirty years. He just kept it inside, for longer than I've been alive.
Edgar joined us at one point, and he and I had a bonding moment when he brought up the Avengers, and I mentioned the Avengers: Age of Ultron trailer and how I'm going to die when that movie comes out because I'm so excited about it. We talked about the trailer and Joss Whedon, then we were both fangirling over the Avengers and Marvel in general. Poor Maurice had to stand there and listen while Edgar and I talked about awesomeness.
Eventually one of the staff members of the museum came over and talked to us, and then she introduced me to the woman she was with, and told this woman about my documentary. They were on one side of me, and Edgar and Maurice were on the other, and we were all standing in a little circle just hanging out and talking. And it was really great. I felt like I was a part of something. I was like, look at me Patrick, I'm talking to people on my own. Yeah. In end, the night turned out pretty well.
Some pictures from the museum:
The poster for the exhibit:
I finally figured out how to rotate the picture so it's rightside up! Look at me go. Patrick would be proud.
I'm interviewing Edgar again on Saturday at NVAM, and hopefully it will not be as technically deficient. I have more interviews next Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Basically, I've gotten two done, and I have five more to go before Thanksgiving break. Five interviews in a week and a half, that are almost two hours each? On top of my internship and the huge CPS project and another big project for seminar, both due within that week and a half? Sure I'll survive.
Between my independent study project and the CPS project, I have learned about so many things, been introduced to different cultures and different ways of life that I had assumptions of before but no real knowledge of. The whole semester has been like this, showing us the aspects of Chicago that are hidden behind the shine of the Bean and the skyline and the lakefront. My eyes have been opened to how lucky I've been and how, in so many ways, my life has been easy, or at least, easier. Should I feel bad about it? A lot of people would say, you shouldn't feel bad about the good things that were handed to you. Your responsibility is just to recognize that others weren't given those things, and then do something about it. But no one tells you what exactly to do. I'm realizing how lucky I've been that I haven't had to go through some of the things Patrick K. and Edgar have experienced, that I haven't had to live somewhere where I got so used to the fact that I could die at any moment it no longer bothered me. And I've been lucky to live in a place where I didn't need to worry about getting a good education. But then I'm not sure what to do with this knowledge, except share it. Maybe the more people who know, the more people whose eyes are also opened, the better a solution we can come up with. For now, I feel like all I can do is acknowledge that I don't know anything about it, and then learn.
- Laura
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