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    Passin Time at West Side High
    Passin Time at West Side High
    Passin Time at West Side High
    Ebook34 pages31 minutes

    Passin Time at West Side High

    By TJ Seitz

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    About this ebook

    Short story about a student named Kwinton Jones and the inner city high school he attends

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTJ Seitz
    Release dateDec 16, 2013
    ISBN9781311725127
    Passin Time at West Side High
    Author

    TJ Seitz

    On the surface Mr. Seitz appears to be a quintessential middle aged male. TJ is married to his HS sweetheart and lives with his family in a suburban split level house located on the outskirts of Rochester, NY. Seitz has spend the majority of his professional career working as an information technology specialist in the fields of education, criminal justice/law enforcement and procurement. While working full time, TJ also attended college part time (and sometimes full time). To keep himself (relatively speaking) sane he majored and minored in non-technology subjects, earning a BA in English with a writing concentration from Saint John Fisher College and a MA in Social Policy from Empire State College. As an undergraduate student TJ attended writing classes taught by George Saunders and Judith Kitchen (though neither teacher would probably remember him). Distractions like kicking virtual wasp’s nests on BITNET Listservs (predecessors to social networking sites like Facebook), soliciting donations for a Panty Alter fund and hanging out with a heavily medicated professional drummer named Dirtbag interfered with TJ’s ability to write anything particularly noteworthy for either class. He also attended a workshop at the Omega Institute mentored by Marge Piercy and Ira Wood. In reality the stable full time jobs have been serving as functional fronts for TJ’s secret life as a writer. They provided him with money to pay his bills and experiential material to write about. The down side of working and going to college was that he did not have a lot of time to devote to writing and publishing. Adding a problematic first marriage, babies, a divorce, a few bouts with unemployment and colon cancer to the mix did not help much either. TJ is currently working on several writing projects/ideas and recently took a graduate writing class proctored by James Whorton. Mr. Seitz's essays and letters have been printed in both local and national publications. His poetry has been published both in the United States and England.

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      Book preview

      Passin Time at West Side High - TJ Seitz

      Passin’ Time at West Side High

      T.J. Seitz

      Copyright 2013 by T.J. Seitz

      Smashwords Edition

      Introduction – Reflecting on Poverty, Students and School

      The world we are born into basically works like a lottery ticket. Babies have no control over their assumed family’s wealth or social status. I believe that most children who are cursed by poverty are statistically condemned to follow in their forefathers’ footsteps.

      Since graduating from college back in the early 1980’s I’ve wondered many times if inner city schools are just another form of imperialism. To me, they appear to work like a foreign power that establishes itself within another culture, country or society then imposes its policies, practices and belief systems onto the native peoples under the expectation that those inhabitants will simply understand, embrace and follow them without a hassle.

      There is an old saying that I’ve heard many times throughout my tenure, You can’t teach philosophy to a starving man. It’s very applicable to urban schools that are filled to the brim with students who endure the effects of poverty and deprivation daily.

      How can one realistically expect a besieged child to effectively learn or have a desire to learn about stuff that is irrelevant to their immediate circumstances?

      Students who attend inner city schools that serve predominantly low income populations are often hungry, underdressed for weather conditions, and live in marginal housing arrangements. To complicate matters more, add parents or guardians who don’t embrace a formal education and/or are not prepared to provide the necessary support for their children’s academic needs.

      Another rhetorical question I frequently ask myself is, Does the environment of inner city schools shape student behaviors or do the behaviors of students shape the inner city school environment? It’s a Heidegger-ian conundrum that makes more sense for me to just think about rather than answer, sort of like a Zen Buddhist koan.

      Bad test scores and high dropout rates are what you get when the majority of a community does not support its school system. For that cross-section of Society spending the day at school is not about learning new knowledge and skills, it’s a place to hang out with friends and pass time until they are allowed to graduate or drop out.

      I know my students are smart, just not in the ways that education leaders and politicians want them to be. They can figure out how to pass a class without doing any meaningful work. They are natural entrepreneurs and know how to quickly establish a highly profitable, low overhead, cash only business, in

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