Show me the colors

A particular young man had asked me for a dictionary he could take back to his dorm. The only dictionary I had to give him was a hard cover, and the guards only allow soft cover materials to return with these young men to their housing unit. Teaching in an environment with court-involved youth requires a tremendous amount of discretion indeed. Everything is a potential weapon from ball point pens to plastic cups to sharpies. For teachers on “the outside,” the expression a teacher makes a thousand decisions a day is very true indeed. However, I imagine for we correctional educators, it wouldn’t be incorrect to amend that expression to a thousand and one.

In this case I was ready to cough up a buck at the 99 cent store and get a shiny new dollar store dictionary for this young man until a colleague revealed to me a small stash of soft covered dictionaries that stayed off of the shelves in our building because students had a knack for asking for them only after having seen them, a kind of impulse-buy if you will. Dictionary? I’ll take one. The reason the dictionaries were hidden were just for this occasion, a young man who specifically asked for his own copy. But had the dictionaries had been on display, I am told, they all would be taken back to the dorms, into the abyss, lost forever.

I was excited to hand the dictionary to him this morning, mostly glad to witness the uniqueness of a student who pursued words, meanings, and ideas on his own without being prompted. He really wanted one. What else makes a teacher smile? As he sat down first period I smiled indeed as I handed it to him.

“Oh,” he said disappointed, “you don’t have one with a red cover?”

“No,” I said. “Just that one.” My smile faded almost immediately, taken aback by the request.

“That’s OK, I’ll take it.” He said reluctantly. He frowned, shrugged, and was consoled in a curiously empathetic tone by a young man sitting close by.

“All they gots is blue dictionaries,” he said looking just as disappointed.

I watched the two share this moment of grief and despair suddenly, slightly rattled by my own confusion. However, this confusion didn’t last but a moment. I thought back to my first day shadowing the English teacher. A young man had pleaded with him, at first alone, but eventually joined by several classmates Sir, that blue marker just is too light, we can’t see the board. The teacher innocently obliged, proceeding with a red marker on the white board. The small group of students relaxed satisfied, yeah, man, red, that’s it. Red will do. They shared a knowing, not so secret smile with each other. As I recalled most of all this same information to another colleague, our Math teacher, he admitted to falling victim to the very same student pleas just today. In this teacher’s case a few young men had asked him –and I imagine with an expression of utter innocence on their faces- to use a red marker instead of a blue on the white board; in this case unlike before, blue apparently appeared much brighter and more “readable” on the white board then red.

My confusion had turned to unfortunate understanding as I recalled the incident with the markers from my first day. It didn’t take a few moments into period two before the red/blue phenomenon manifested itself again and I nodded to myself knowingly, how could I forget?

A few days ago a young man named John had scratched a few words on the desk with his golf pencil -the only writing implement these court-involved youth are allowed to have. I should have reprimanded John immediately but did not do so, admittedly mistakenly so. More importantly, however, I should have cleaned the desk immediately and, again, failed to do something I would soon regret. The following day two young men, Angel and Jimmy, were so taken in with and offended by the writing on the desk they insisted that I inform them who had been sitting there yesterday. I told them I did not know and observed cautiously, as they began to accuse John. You know all them Crips back at the dorms, you saying you don’t know whose tag this is? John never confessed to knowing anything about the graffiti and I quickly intervened nipping the issue in the bud quickly, swiftly, and quietly.

That is until today. Today, Angel and Jimmy referred to John as blue, a reference to his affiliation with the Crips gang. Angel and Jimmy are presumably Bloods, the rival gang represented, naturally, by the color red. Blue, red, Crips, Bloods. They poked and prodded him, and just as he stood up to confront them I sternly offered them a visit from the guard if they didn’t separate themselves. Most of these guys, although lacking in many academic areas, are intelligent enough to understand that they don’t want a prison charge. Assaulting another incarcerated individual could land them additional trouble, even more time. They separated. I exhaled.

I had erased the writing on the desk furiously, vigilantly, before this incident today, but only a day after sitting down to read what had been written. All of the “b’s” in all of the sentences had been crossed off, as is common for Crips to do, a diss to the Bloods. The writing said “six poppin’” and “five drippin’” possibly a reference to the “score” between the two gangs at this institution. O.G. Crips the desk said. My goodness, why didn’t I clean that desk when I first saw it all?

As I watched the young man walk out conspicuously with the blue dictionary, I silently wished him all of the luck in the world putting a much larger emphasis on the words on the inside, then the color on the outside. I wondered if he might come across the word unity or reconciliation. I wondered and wished these things silently, but knowing full well that this issue of color would not be lost in the abyss of the housing unit, as we feared the dictionaries would, but would probably manifest itself even further. For me I may have to familiarize myself with at least two words again: discretion and Ajax.