Summer School #4

Welcome to Scholastic Alchemy! This is mostly a blog where I mostly write about education. Usually, I post some links and commentary about them on Mondays and then later in the week I write something longer about a topic of my choosing. But, it’s summer and we all know that the rhythm and dance of educators’ lives shift in the summer months. Our time becomes more fungible but somehow still can’t fit everything in. Maybe it’s taking on more childcare duties as our own kids are out of school. Maybe it’s finally time to read all those articles and books that have been piling up or to pound out chapters of a long-neglected manuscript. Or, maybe, you’re teaching summer school. Summer school posts are going to be irregularly timed, more personal and reflective, and a bit more casual, befitting the vibes of summer.

I’m back from some cross-country travels, having racked up over 5,000 miles with the Mrs. and kiddos. It’s been a lovely family trip but as anyone with littles can tell you, vacation isn’t really a break. We also managed to plan in such a way that just as we shook off the jet lag on the west coast, we were on a plane to Atlanta to get re-lagged all over again. I’m tired! Our trips now feel like they’re entirely devoted to learning how to travel with kids and then realizing that by the time we take another big trip, the kids will have grown enough that those lessons no longer apply. That is, however, what summer is for. We often only think about learning as something that happens in schools or through school-like work: reading nonfiction, watching a documentary, science camps or museums. Learning, though, is always going on and summer is sometimes kids’ only chance to learn without the structures and pacing we’ve made for schools. I love summer because it was during summer that I often learned some of the most important lessons in life.

In the Bubble

I think about my ignorance a lot. I grew up the way many suburban kids grow up, in a bubble. The goal of the bubble is to keep kids away from people who are different. In the South, the bubble is often drawn along racial lines. I didn’t have any black friends, for example, and there was only a single black kid in my elementary grade and that meant that some years I had all white classes. In middle and high school, I rarely crossed paths with the very few black students in school. Electives, basically, that was it. This was all as the African American portion of my county’s population increased from about 10% to about 20% by the time I graduated high school. This was true for other racial and ethnic minority kids as well. I only knew a single Jewish kid. There was one east Asian kid and three south Asian kids, two of whom were identical twin brothers. I don’t think there were any Hispanic kids at my public school. None I can remember, anyways. Everybody was a lot like me.

The bubble is also an economic one. There weren’t many poor kids, or at least none that I knew of. All my friends’ parents had jobs. Many mothers were stay at home moms, despite that becoming increasingly uncommon in the nation as a whole. Even the smaller homes I visited were large and had second refrigerators in their garages filled with every flavor of soda, juice, and sports drink. Basements were finished and usually reserved for the children to play in. Everyone had multiple televisions. My family did. Everyone was a lot like me. Most kids’ parents bought them cars when they turned 16. Maybe not new cars or fancy cars, but cars nonetheless. I got a used 1999 Dodge Stratus from one of my dad’s friends who had recently won $14 million from the long-defunct search-gimmick site iwon.com. He was upgrading to a Jaguar and gave us a good deal. Not a luxury but still worlds away from what many kids have outside of the bubble. The Stratus leaked oil every day for the eight years I drove it, but it was mine and I took it away to college with me and drove it until it just wasn’t worth fixing anymore.

College was nearly free for me. In my state at that time any student who maintained a 3.0 GPA in high school would get their college tuition paid for up to 120 credits so long as they maintained at least that 3.0 average. This was funded by proceeds from the state’s lottery and I never paid a cent of tuition for all four years. I lived and then worked in the dorms and then lived cheaply with friends. My parents were able to pay my rent, although it was dirt cheap because I always had roommates and we didn’t exactly have the nicest apartment. In college, despite the somewhat ascetic trappings of my life, I was still in the bubble. My state flagship university was more diverse than my hometown or my high school, but the diversity I encountered was manicured. Careful to keep the non-white numbers below that crucial 25% threshold, the students of color I was allowed to encounter in college had a life a lot like mine. Their parents worked, they had money and drove cars, they succeeded in school, and they came from suburbs that were a lot like mine. College was still safely inside the bubble.

Food Stamps

Despite all of this, college was when I learned about the bubble. Specifically, I came to bubble awareness over the summer. I had, after my freshman year, developed a plan that allowed me to take only 12 credits of classes during the fall and spring semesters. That’s three courses. It allowed me a lot of time to do whatever else I wanted to do which was, at that point, a lot of hanging out drinking and playing World of Warcraft. My grades were fine! I kept that academic scholarship. In order to graduate in four years and maintain full-time student status for the scholarship, I needed to take at least two more courses each year, so I took them over the summer. This worked out well for a few reasons. I could live and work in the dorms basically for free all summer as a “conference host” for the various camps and events that would rent out dorm space. Basically, it was working check-in/out, providing linens, turning over the rooms, and so on. Super easy, free rent, and a small cash stipend. Summer courses were also great because the class sizes were smaller. Professors sometimes piloted classes they were developing or taught about something they loved over the summer as opposed to filling in required classes during the regular sessions. Most of all, at least at my big SEC college in the foothills of north Georgia, the town was emptied of students, and you could get a feel for the life of a local. I aspired to be a “townie” — a college student who never left the college town and, perhaps, continued living there after graduation.

Early one August living as an aspiring townie, I drove down to the grocery store to pick up food for family dinner night, a weekly event where one of my various friends would cook a big meal for everyone else in the friend group. It was my turn and I was going to make a big pot of past sauce from scratch. During the fall and spring, the Kroger on Baxter St. was always jam-packed with students. You couldn’t find parking. The aisles were full and shelves were sometimes picked over. Checkout lines stretched deep into the store, especially ahead of football games. Sometimes I’d choose to drive a bit out of town just to grocery shop where it wasn’t quite so busy. Like many other places in town, Kroger in the summer felt practically empty without the tens of thousands of students who would otherwise be in town. I enjoyed parking up front, having plenty of time to peruse the well-stocked shelves, and knowing that I would breeze through checkout.

On that one day in early August, I did not breeze through. Only one lane was open and I was behind a young black woman and her baby and two grocery carts full of goods. The cashier was doing his best to both scan and bag into a third cart while mom bounced the baby on her hip and neatly stacked things on the conveyer belt. I was not in a hurry or impatient. In the days before smart phones we knew how to wait, and I skimmed a local magazine from the rack by the checkout. She neared the end and the cashier announced a total over $350. In those days that was a huge grocery haul. Even today for my family of four I do not spend that much, but I do not have two overflowing carts either. I could (and I can now) buy groceries whenever I want but the significance of that was lost on me until a few moments later. She handed the cashier a small booklet that he scanned and he announced a new total about two hundred dollars less.

“Excuse me,” I interrupted, “if you don’t mind me asking, what kind of coupon is that for such a big discount?” The cashier made eye contact with me and gave a look somewhere between questioning and shocked but the mom just said in a matter-of-fact tone “food stamps,” as she handed the cashier some money. I replied, still a step behind in my thought process, “that’ll do it.” She left, maneuvering both carts out the door while I began stacking my groceries. The cashier only said “dude” and shook his head.

And then, the bubble burst.