Tim Barrus New York Times
The classroom was a nightmare on a good day.
Reinvent it. I did.
I was one of them. Once. Mainly, we still throw them away.
That trajectory toward success.
Kids I teach don’t so much as consider college a remote possibility. Our goal at the end of the day is to still be alive.
To have survived that day. To begin a new one soon enough. Going forward has a horizon of about twenty-four hours. Often, even that is a stretch.
TYhe New York Times speaks to what the colleges of the future will look like.
I will tell you all about what public school is going to look like. There will be a sale on body bags.
Buy now. Prepare.
Death is coming to school.
Teachers will be infected with covid. Students will be infected with covid. Where do the people who deny this live.
The perfect college. Staying alive is a huge amount of work today’s college students would know little about. Any college. Anywhere.
I teach boys at-risk. We once labeled it at-risk for school failure. There were other demons, too, rarely discussed. HIV. Psychiatric visits to locked down wards and drugs that sometimes work but only sometimes. Relationships that when ended, are finalized with a crushing, often suicidal, gravitas. Rage. At everything.
They all share a history of breathtaking abuse. I see old cigarette burn scars on forearms. Histories of weed and shoplifting will get you detained until you are an adult, and then you will be detained somewhere else. Black eyes from “falling.” There is no end to it.
Rape.
We used to push wheelchairs around a school campus that physically disabled children attended. Covid changed everything. When you think the bottom has at long last fallen out, it does it again and again.
The word “university” is unreachable. Romanticism is unbearable. Running away (we call it elopement) is a lifestyle choice.
Online is experimental. What we have to work with is theory, rubber gloves, bleach. Not technology because tech cam be thrown across the room.
The term I am struggling with is educated privilege.