The high school at which I teach is not in an affluent neighborhood. On the contrary, we serve an economically depressed (repressed? oppressed? suppressed?) area, and many of our students are well beneath the poverty line by a wide margin.
This has an effect on the overall cultural tone of the school's population. When I say culture, I'm not talking anthropology, I mean it in a sociological sense. Every kid brings his or her own home culture with them; together they create a school culture. If you've ever taught, you know exactly what I mean, but schools all have their own unique feel. Many may share the same challenges and problems, but each develops its own overall attitude, and that attitude changes over time as the culture changes.
Now to be clear, my school is an awesome school. Although I'm going to be talking about some unfortunate problems we have, these are really no different than those one finds at any other school, private or public. I happen to love teaching at my school, and have no plans to retire. I would feel fine about sending my own kids there when they are old enough.
But not everyone feels the same about it. Some unfairly label us as a 'ghetto school,' but I think that is ridiculous. With our majority Hispanic population, we are far closer to a barrio school.
And at this fine institute of public education, I'm sad to say, violence is a major part of our school culture. Now we live in a violent society in general in America, with violent images and messages in nearly all of our popular culture and media. Every school in the nation is made up of kids who have been exposed to violent TV, movies, video games, and music (especially the music,) but the real factor is how much of that message the students take to heart.
And at my school, many kids live that message as dogma.
Where I teach, a great many of kids feel that no one gets anywhere in life without fighting. Not figuratively, like standing up against injustice or sticking to your principles and never giving up, but literally punching and kicking people until you've improved your life.
Kids talk about it all the time. When there is a fight, everyone runs out to film it with their phones to send it to YouTube, and then go over the action afterwards like sports commentators. If a fight breaks out at the end of lunch, every teacher has to spend the first fifteen minutes of class just to try to quell the excitement and discussion.
The most frequent participants are black girls, but there is no demographic completely free from the influence. The only kind of ability that earns you any respect amongst a large segment of the student body is your ability to handle yourself in a fight. Grades, intellect, real world skills, none of that is important as one's fighting record.
But it is not about winning. You can lose all the time, and it doesn't really matter. The important thing is that you were willing to fight. No one cares if you have no real skill at fighting and simply flail away blindly until the deans pull you apart and give you your ten days suspension. But if you walk away from a fight, you are over. It is the worst sin imaginable, and you should really stop coming to school at that point.
And that is the most insidious and destructive part of this whole thing. Because when proving you are willing to fight is that important, it is inevitable that kids will become desperate to start fights for any provocation.
Any slight, real or perceived, begins the fight cycle. One girl doesn't like how another girl looks/smells/talks and decides she needs to fight her. I hear them in my class, talking and planning. "I hate that bitch, I wanna fight her. My homegirl fought her back in 7th grade and now I wanna fight her. She so ratchet." It's not just the ratchet girls who are like this either, I hear this talk from all kinds of girls, all of whom see fighting not only as expected, but required. Otherwise, 'they think you soft.'
So once the offense has been given, there must be blood. The girls will fight, either singly or with one girl wisely bringing her friends and jumping the other.
Now the fight is over. One girl has been declared the winner (or not,) and the other concedes defeat (or not.) See, whatever transpired, the fight isn't over. Because now whichever girl did not initiate the fight MUST seek redress in the form of another fight. It is a moral imperative. The girl must attack the one who attacked her, to recover her honor.
Can you see where this is heading? Because now that girl B has attacked girl A (in retaliation for A's initial attack on B,) A cannot afford to look soft by letting that go. So now A must attack B to recover her reputation.
And this continues in the same manner. I know many of you are thinking that this cannot possibly be true, because that would mean that the cycle of violence would be pretty much never ending. But the thing you have to realize is this:
The cycle of violence is never ending.
There is a continual circuit of girls in constant combat with each other like some kind of Ratchet Girl Fighting League. I would compare it to Fight Club, but the first rule of Ratchet Girl Fight Club would be to talk about Ratchet Girl Fight Club as much as humanly possible.
I am completely serious when I say that many of the feuds end when one girl moves away (our population tends to have a high transience rate.) And even then, the various friends often still continue these fights, presumably out of a sense of nostalgia.
So the girls insist on fighting each other, constantly losing time in school in 10-day blocks (the minimum penalty for fighting on campus,) and living every day like prisoners in the yard, which sadly seems to be what they are in training for.
It's just so tragically pointless and futile. I want to make them see that, to show them that it is an uphill road to nowhere. I've tried talking to them, but I just can't get through to them, and it's so frustrating. I am not the man to get through to them.
We need Matthew Broderick.
Not today's paunchy, sweater-clad aging Broadway star, nor the terrible high school role model Ferris Bueller version. We need David Lightman from War Games.
Now if you haven't seen this icon of 1980's cold war cinema, the gist of it is that Broderick's character makes contact with an artificial intelligence program designed by a reclusive computer genius. The program was originally designed to play games such as chess, and David decides to play against the machine in another available game, Global Thermonuclear War.
But the program is now part of the WOPR, Norad's automated missile defense network, and it begins to react to the game moves with real actions, threatening to accidentally start World War III.
In the end, the only way to prevent nuclear armageddon is to show the computer that any nuclear conflict is unwinnable by its very nature. To do this, they have the computer play itself at tic tac toe to show how futile some scenarios are.
And that's what we need. A circa 1983 Matthew Broderick to play tic tac toe with the Ratchet Girl Fighting League to show them that for some games, the only way to win is not to play.
How about a nice game of chess?
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