Personal Narrative: The Surfside School
I grew up in Coney Island, Brooklyn in the 90’s. I lived in one of its many New York City housing developments. As a child I can remember the elevators and stairwells of my building smelling rank from urine. I can still see and feel the bullet holes under our mailbox from a shootout that happened under my bedroom window when I was seven. The chain fences that squared off all the grass areas of our complex. I can still see the poorly painted monkey bars, and the wood-chipped seesaws on the black tarmacs behind our building. Across the street and a little more than half way into the block was my second elementary school. I can’t quite remember why I had to leave the first one, but The Surfside School is where I have most of my elementary school
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memories.
The Surfside School was a fairly medium-sized public elementary school. On the outside it is mostly cream all over with dark green trimmings. Directly connected to it there was a parking lot which we used for outdoor play of basketball, track, cheerleading and gym activities when the weather permitted. Just behind the tallest gate where our basketball hoops were, there was a huge field of tall weeds that always tall enough to tower any living person. Every morning my little brother, one of my parents, and I had to walk on the severely cracked path of denigrated concrete to reach my school.
For the most part, the school was about 90% Black and Latinx students and probably 95% white educators. Technically, we had three schools housed in one building; P.S. 329 (for “traditional” public school students), Sigma (for the gifted and talented students), and The Inclusion school (for differently abled students). The rest of the population, that was the other 10%, was bussed in from other parts of Brooklyn and was composed of white and API students. At the end of my second year there, third grade, I was moved to the Sigma school because of my “exceptionally high” city-wide test scores along with several other friends of mine from the neighborhood. Prior to that very significant move that introduced me to predominately white academic spaces, I met an amazingly inspirational and intellectual Black female educator, Ms. Selema Dawson.
Ms. Dawson had come into our school my third grade year as Assistant Principal. Besides her, I had only had one other black educator, that being my music teacher Mr. Thompson. Ms. Dawson brought so many great changes into the school that were centered around Black students identifying with their Blackness. She held a poetry contest that year where roughly fifteen students were chosen to memorize and recite works from Black poets such as Maya Angelou, Langston Hughes, and a personal friend of hers, Linda Michelle Baron. She chose poems like “Ghettoites” and “Still I Rise” and tried to make us proud of our Blackness. I can still remember rehearsing with her and other Black students feeling a sense of pride I hadn’t felt before with my white teachers. Her genuine interest in enriching our lives with concepts we could culturally identify with was a very empowering moment in my life. Maybe it was the reason I scored so well and moved into sigma; it was definitely the reason I went on to Mark Twain intermediate For the Gifted and Talented and studied drama as a major. She solidified my hopes and dreams of being a performer.
Four years on the other side of this positive experience, there I was, two years into my desired middle school which was predominately white and my new norm. Mark Twain also happened to be in my neighborhood, yet it was further back from my house. It is located on Neptune Avenue which is a less populated area, close to it in any direction are surrounding town houses that are mostly owned and not rented. The adjoining outside area was a city run park equipped with tennis courts, a track, basketball courts, playground equipment and a bay with a pier.
I had a teacher for my honors math class who I am convinced to this day, had a personal loathing for me.
I was one of two Black students in seventh-grade honors math, and the only one in my section. Mr. Driggs was also jokingly named “The Devil” because no matter the season, he was always hot and would force the students to sit in the class with the windows open. The Devil had a tendency of publicly embarrassing me in class by highlighting the things I didn’t know or understand and not allowing me to exhibit the things that I did. I can recall one particularly embarrassing incident when we received our tests back. He menacingly slithered around the room placing our tests scores on our desks and eyeing us from the top of his glasses. When it was time for him to deliver my fate he slammed the test down and shouted as if he wanted the world to know, “FAIL!” It was one of the worst experiences, I tried to refute his statement and said “a sixty-eight is not failing” to which he replied “in honors math it is, you need a seventy”. The person next to me tried to console me but I could feel the anger boiling inside of me like a pot of oatmeal on too high trying to bubble over.
Immediately following this experience, he proceeded with success to dismiss me from honors math and send me to regular math classes in the middle of my seventh grade year. Everyone was wondering what I was doing there and I resented having to be pushed to a lower level. This moment of my life made me lose interest in math and to this very day I avoid it whenever possible out of fears I built up from that horrific
dismissal.
Looking back on both instances, I think of how amazing the strength that even a small experience can have over you. I appreciate the care I received from Ms. Dawson, whom today I still admire. Those experiences have been held deep within me and still guide me in all of my endeavors to go beyond what is “expected of me. And thinking back to my mathematics blues, as much as I am certain race informed many of my interactions with Mr. Driggs, I am considering just how much my reaction to the lower level math was informed by everything I had learned about what it meant to be “gifted and talented”. I wonder if I was simply more concerned with being labeled “ordinary” after all that time of being told I was “extraordinary”. What are the implications of labeling children from so young without guiding them when that label doesn’t apply to everything that they do?
memories.
The Surfside School was a fairly medium-sized public elementary school. On the outside it is mostly cream all over with dark green trimmings. Directly connected to it there was a parking lot which we used for outdoor play of basketball, track, cheerleading and gym activities when the weather permitted. Just behind the tallest gate where our basketball hoops were, there was a huge field of tall weeds that always tall enough to tower any living person. Every morning my little brother, one of my parents, and I had to walk on the severely cracked path of denigrated concrete to reach my school.
For the most part, the school was about 90% Black and Latinx students and probably 95% white educators. Technically, we had three schools housed in one building; P.S. 329 (for “traditional” public school students), Sigma (for the gifted and talented students), and The Inclusion school (for differently abled students). The rest of the population, that was the other 10%, was bussed in from other parts of Brooklyn and was composed of white and API students. At the end of my second year there, third grade, I was moved to the Sigma school because of my “exceptionally high” city-wide test scores along with several other friends of mine from the neighborhood. Prior to that very significant move that introduced me to predominately white academic spaces, I met an amazingly inspirational and intellectual Black female educator, Ms. Selema Dawson.
Ms. Dawson had come into our school my third grade year as Assistant Principal. Besides her, I had only had one other black educator, that being my music teacher Mr. Thompson. Ms. Dawson brought so many great changes into the school that were centered around Black students identifying with their Blackness. She held a poetry contest that year where roughly fifteen students were chosen to memorize and recite works from Black poets such as Maya Angelou, Langston Hughes, and a personal friend of hers, Linda Michelle Baron. She chose poems like “Ghettoites” and “Still I Rise” and tried to make us proud of our Blackness. I can still remember rehearsing with her and other Black students feeling a sense of pride I hadn’t felt before with my white teachers. Her genuine interest in enriching our lives with concepts we could culturally identify with was a very empowering moment in my life. Maybe it was the reason I scored so well and moved into sigma; it was definitely the reason I went on to Mark Twain intermediate For the Gifted and Talented and studied drama as a major. She solidified my hopes and dreams of being a performer.
Four years on the other side of this positive experience, there I was, two years into my desired middle school which was predominately white and my new norm. Mark Twain also happened to be in my neighborhood, yet it was further back from my house. It is located on Neptune Avenue which is a less populated area, close to it in any direction are surrounding town houses that are mostly owned and not rented. The adjoining outside area was a city run park equipped with tennis courts, a track, basketball courts, playground equipment and a bay with a pier.
I had a teacher for my honors math class who I am convinced to this day, had a personal loathing for me.
I was one of two Black students in seventh-grade honors math, and the only one in my section. Mr. Driggs was also jokingly named “The Devil” because no matter the season, he was always hot and would force the students to sit in the class with the windows open. The Devil had a tendency of publicly embarrassing me in class by highlighting the things I didn’t know or understand and not allowing me to exhibit the things that I did. I can recall one particularly embarrassing incident when we received our tests back. He menacingly slithered around the room placing our tests scores on our desks and eyeing us from the top of his glasses. When it was time for him to deliver my fate he slammed the test down and shouted as if he wanted the world to know, “FAIL!” It was one of the worst experiences, I tried to refute his statement and said “a sixty-eight is not failing” to which he replied “in honors math it is, you need a seventy”. The person next to me tried to console me but I could feel the anger boiling inside of me like a pot of oatmeal on too high trying to bubble over.
Immediately following this experience, he proceeded with success to dismiss me from honors math and send me to regular math classes in the middle of my seventh grade year. Everyone was wondering what I was doing there and I resented having to be pushed to a lower level. This moment of my life made me lose interest in math and to this very day I avoid it whenever possible out of fears I built up from that horrific
dismissal.
Looking back on both instances, I think of how amazing the strength that even a small experience can have over you. I appreciate the care I received from Ms. Dawson, whom today I still admire. Those experiences have been held deep within me and still guide me in all of my endeavors to go beyond what is “expected of me. And thinking back to my mathematics blues, as much as I am certain race informed many of my interactions with Mr. Driggs, I am considering just how much my reaction to the lower level math was informed by everything I had learned about what it meant to be “gifted and talented”. I wonder if I was simply more concerned with being labeled “ordinary” after all that time of being told I was “extraordinary”. What are the implications of labeling children from so young without guiding them when that label doesn’t apply to everything that they do?