And the Kids?

As the reality of this pandemic sinks in, many are struggling with how to stay hopeful. Ironically, it's not  really all that hard if your basic philosophy is that life sucks.

If my expectation as a child had been that everything was going to be rosy in life, I'm sure this moment would be more difficult than it is proving to be. But from an early age, probably around ten or eleven, I'd concluded that the world wasn't a warm fuzzy place at all, but an alien universe where crappy things showed up all the time without warning.

Relatives kept getting killed in train wrecks, industrial accidents, or dying from cancer. Kids at school were organized into gangs that cheered with bloodlusty chants during fistfights at lunch time. School itself was boring; I learned far more at the library than there.

Male culture, boy culture specifically, puzzled me. The jokes weren't funny and the anti-girl sentiment didn't track with my sense of girls at all. I liked girls but was too shy to do anything about that yet.

Popular culture was okay, but I'd outgrown Davy Crockett and cowboy myths years earlier. Sports were fine so I devoted much of my time to following my favorite teams.

Church was absurd in my view; anyone who bought the Holy Ghost scenario seemed to me to be detached from reality. Plus I was convinced one of the ministers was deranged when he had to be helped from the pulpit.

Mostly I ignored everything external and retreated into worlds of my own creation, imaginary places where I could set the rules and report the results (to myself). God knows how many baseball and football games between fictional teams I narrated in my head. I especially loved the box scores that resulted.

It took many years before I realized there were other people like me, who felt alienated by the mainstream and very much alone as a result. During high school, I knew exactly one Jew, one black kid, one Latino kid, one gay kid, and zero Asian kids. I didn't really have any friends who were girls, though by now I was liking them more and more.

From this background, I landed in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan on a scholarship. My roommate was black and my new acquaintances were from all sorts of backgrounds and orientations. First the first time I felt comfortable in my element.

It had long since become clear what I wasn't -- Jewish, black, Latino, gay, Asian, or female. But now it started to become obvious what I *was* -- much happier in a world where lots of people around.me were different from me on the surface but like me underneath.

Achieving that happiness was easier due to my having loving parents, sisters, and several nice cousins. They basically seemed to tolerate me being a weirdo. Plus I had no expectation of becoming rich or famous, so poverty and obscurity were not disappointments or burdens.

I had a good work ethic and tons of curiosity. The new world of restless intellectualism and social activism suited me just fine.

Into all of this mixture came a dawning realization: I could write and some people even liked what I wrote.  My best friend from high school invited me to visit the college newspaper, The Michigan Daily, as the spring semester of my freshman year got under way.

This was good timing because another thing that had become apparent was that math was not the right major for me. This was clear the first day I showed up for class and everyone else had a sleeve protector, compass and slide rule.

All I had was a knack for simple arithmetic.

Journalism at The Daily offered a new route for self discovery and achievement and soon I was addicted to the thrill of being part of each day's news cycle. I made new friends and by now I was liking girls a lot.

***

This week, I attended a reunion of sorts via Zoom with many of my colleagues from that formative campus experience 54 years ago. The main thing I wanted to say to those other 70-somethings was "thank you" for helping me find my path in life.

At the time I met them, probably no adult -- not my parents, their friends, my former teachers or current professors -- could have influenced me to completely pivot and reorient my life in a new direction.

But my peers helped me do just that.

It was that experience and others like it that shaped my opinions about education, and how young people actually learn what really matters in life. To a very large degree they learn from each other.

Great teachers understand this and they remain alert to each opportunity to encourage peer-learning when it presents itself.

Ten years ago, one of my sons was starting his freshman year at an inner-city high school in a tough neighborhood of San Francisco. He was a talented soccer player, and the varsity coach tapped him in the pre-season to be a starter on the team.

The great majority of his fellow students were from minority families -- Latino, Asian, Black, Pacific Islander, including many undocumented immigrants and English-language-learners.

After a few weeks, and a few soccer games where he'd played well, I picked him up after practice one afternoon and asked him how it was going. He said it was "pretty good" but that there was this one kid in his math class who kept staring at him and who he was pretty sure didn't like him.

He was an older kid and his name was Jesús.

Of course I was concerned, because gang activity was known to be a problem at the school. No one was allowed to wear blue or red, the colors of the Norteños and the Sureños, and an armed guard stood at the one unlocked entrance to the building. Drugs were openly dealt on the corner near school; and cop cars were always around.

A few weeks later, I asked him about Jesús and he said that they were now study partners.

"How did that happen?"

"One day he came up to me and asked me to help him with math. The teacher noticed and said to me later, 'anything you can do to help Jesús, please do. He has a 0.00 GPA and he won't listen to me.'

"So I started tutoring him after school and he told me he loves fútbol but coach won't let him play until his grades go up."

My son, who was the only white kid on the soccer team, had never liked Spanish classes but I noticed that now he spoke quite a few Spanish words he'd been learning on the pitch. His Latino teammates liked him and nicknamed him "The European."

Months later, I was in the stands at one of his futsol (inside soccer) games in the winter league, when I noticed after the game that a large, burly Latino kid from the opposing team went over and gave my son a big hug.

"Who was that?" I asked him on the drive home.

"Oh, that's Jesús. His GPA is up. We're friends."

***

One of my worries about schools remaining shut this fall is how peer-to-peer education like that will happen if everyone is social-distancing and working remotely.

For kids like me 54 years ago, or my son 10 years ago, or Jesús, what will be the coming school year be like?

My concern reaches far beyond politics or who is right about what educators should be doing during the pandemic. It is deeper and more personal than that. 

What about the kids?

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