The Struggle of Miseducation in the Man's Skool

Photo: A Scene in a Library by William Henry Fox Talbot

By Ananda 

Homeroom and another morning free-write I had already decided not to do. I sat waiting for my classmates to finish while I stared at the clock, ignoring the teacher's looks. He walks to my desk and I prepare for a lecture…but today he asked me to get up and go to the counselors office? I walk down the halls, thinking about my missed assignments, reach the outside of the office and see my sister waiting on the bench outside. We both laugh, surprised to see each other. We were very different students, both freshmen and already set on opposite tracks. I was pulled out of my remedial classes often to make an ‘action plan’ to recover my GPA. I rarely saw my sister during the school day–something very serious had to have happened to take her out of AP prep. Jokes and joy turn into confusion. What could this be about? She doesn't know either. The door opens.

The school counselor, Miss Ambros, is there. She once told my sister she “reads too much and people who read as much as her must be using it as an escape to not have to deal with their real issues.” She gestures us into the office, where a woman I have never seen is already sitting and smiling at us. Immediately, I knew we were on trial. Fear, embarrassment and anger all rushed through me at once and in that same moment I knew I couldn’t show it. She introduces herself and tells us we're not in trouble. She asks us about school, about mom and about home.

Home. Our tiny two bedroom apartment–the first place we ever called our own. Loud neighbors, warm kitchen, big couch, the occasional mouse (mom was gonna get more traps soon) and two bathrooms! One for us and one that was just for mom. She worked for years to get us out of Haven House and promised we would have our own place someday. It was hard at first, she always found a way to make rent but there were weeks with no food in the fridge. All my siblings struggled through middle school–all ‘bright’ but ‘undisciplined’. At that time, we only saw her a few hours a day. We got ourselves to school and back. Got home and threw our homework to the side for cartoons. She would get home later that night, see our messy room and unfinished homework and we would get spanked and sent to bed. That was the rule and that's how things went day by day. Sometimes we would do our work, but most of the time we didn’t. My sister wrote about this in a poetry assignment in her high school English class.

So there we were, Miss Ambros printed out the poem and read out the parts she found ‘concerning’ and asked my sister if what she wrote was true. I had passed on every morning free write assignment for the first half of the school year. I didn’t realize our words, or lack thereof, were being monitored. What wasn’t I saying? How much dread I felt over my future, how impossible it felt to keep up with my school work, how I felt like giving up and really already had. My bad attitude around school was constant and something I was expecting to grow out of, like one day it would just click for me the same way it seemed to for my sister and everyone else. Until then I was just a bad student, choosing to fail, waiting to prove them wrong. But this was different, did they think I was failing because of mom? Because she was abusing us? My mom who had survived so much and did everything for us. Could they really take us away from her?

In the following weeks, the social worker follows up with a home visit. Mom tells her about those difficult years–how she worked on her anger on her own. I remember she had even apologized to us for hitting us years before. We get a passing grade and mom gets a child abuse investigation report on her permanent record. School is back to normal and we are free to go along our tracks as planned. I flunk out and get my diploma at a finishing school. My sister goes on to be the only black student to qualify for and pass an AP program in the entire school district her graduating year.