Rantings of an Educator

Rantings of an Educator:

Schools in urban ghettos
Are not set up to educate or habilitate
Children with brown skin or thin pockets
They help circulate brown bodies
Onto dirty streets where cold steel waits
To meet red hearts that stopped hoping long ago.

Nobody knows what to do.
How will we care for students who don’t want to be there?
How do we motivate students who have been nurtured
By hate?
Students who aint concerned with teachers
Tellin em aint aint a word
When little grammatical blurbs cannot reason
With a student that sees no reason
to care about him or herself?

How do we convince young women
Who quote lil Kim like the Bible,
That sex is not a religion?
That livin to get a man, or rather a boy
Imitatin a man,
Aint really livin.
That when you have children at 14
It becomes more likely that
Dreams of happily ever after remain just dreams
That fade soon after that after sex glow
she probably doesn’t even know
Because that boy is only concerned with his ejaculation.

We are educating a nation of children
Who will grow and never know their history
about our ancestors who were kings and queens in Africa
Before they were snatched and attacked
And packed like sardines on a ship
Where half of them died
And the half that made it cried out to God
To intervene and end death
So they could live in heaven.

Our children never know
that their parents
And grandparents have dreams
Of seeing their children own nice things
Because their parents spend all their time in fields
Trying to sow those dreams
In soil that grows
Food that never seems to reach the table.

Our children do not realize
that they are victims of viscous lies
that tell them they are inferior.
We give them standardized tests
That tell them they are substandard and subhuman.
Testers do not acknowledge that discrepancies exist
Because there is no standard.
Because testers want to maintain
Their standard of living
For themselves and their kids.
Because students scoring low
Live in sub-standard houses
Where there is no heat for the heart
And no food for thought.
Because the status quo should never fall below
shades of white on pie graphs
that show what black
Brown
and Red students do not know;
and hides the lies that schools are fixed to lift
those who are rich
and white
and some brown tokens
who were let through to prove
what gatekeepers have been saying all along –
that anybody can succeed
if they try.

Sometimes I sit and cry
Because I don’t know why life is like this
For little kids who deserve the world.
I want to teach little girls
that they have pearls and gems in their minds.
I want to teach little boys
That guns are not toys
And that life is precious.
I want my students to learn
Their stories
Not his - story
About how he discovered and conquered a land of savages
And how his hand crafted a plan
That expands freedom to all men
Who were created and treated equal.

I cannot teach these lies
To children who know equal is a sugar
To sweeten the bitterness of reality.
Teachers have to stop
Perpetuating untruth to our youth
We must unveil and correct discrepancies
So that children can have
Positive mentalities
And see their fantasies of other people’s realities come true.