The Bronx home to the second greatest baseball team The Yankees, a melting pot of multiple ethic groups, and the birthplace of modern hip hop! A significant portion of my life i’ve spent absorbing the plethora of experiences the Bronx has to offer, ranging from exciting games at Yankee stadium, and also living one block away from the esteemed Grandmaster Flash’s old project building. “Plethora Of Experiences” Neil you only named two things, what about “the melting pot of multiple ethic groups”? We’ll get into that eventually, see I can’t talk about the people of the Bronx without talking about the public education of the Bronx. Out of my 17 years of my life roughly 12-13 Years were spent in public education system, and it was to put into simple terms “shitty”. While I will admit that the years leading up to the Obama administration were bearable, the minute Michelle Obama changed the standard for school lunch everything went downhill. The first problem being that the food changed from being actual food, to “healthy” alternatives, which boiled down to pre-made microwaved food. The Bronx was notorious for it’s bad food in general and these changes made it worse; crappy school lunch was the least of my problems in elementary school. I was deemed a troubled kid young, and encountered my fair share teachers who would’ve loved to not have me as a student. I ended up not spending a lot of time in elementary school, and spending most of my 4th and 5th grade year in therapy. This was counterproductive since I missed out on key moments that kids have during their elementary school years, recess, making friends, gym periods. My therapy sessions ceased since it started to take a noticeable toll on my family financially, and as I transitioned into middle school my life continued to deteriorate. I lacked the necessary social skills to make friends, and developed an anxiety disorder ironically named SAD. Social Anxiety Disorder made it difficult to make friends, since I was constantly afraid of being judged to the point that I would avoid human contact. I tried to emulate my older sister since she was smart, popular, outgoing, and had a lot of friends. My attempts yielded some results, I needed attention so I made a conscious choice to become a trouble maker. I didn’t like teachers anyway so stopping lessons and slowing down the classroom was a win-win for me. High School was the turning point for me since I stopped being awkward, and started to mature immensely. Raymond Keith Gilyard is both a writer and a professor, but most importantly he’s been in the NYC education system, he talks about his experiences in his piece “Voices of the Self”. Within this piece he talks about his firsthand experience with school and his struggle with drugs he brings up one experience and states “Mrs.Brody, called me in for a long talk. She was a nice person, engaging. This was serious talk. No sermonizing. Just a realistic look at things. She suggested I enroll as an outpatient at Greenwich House.” Keith Gilyard talks about his schools efforts to bring him back from his heroin addiction, the counselor is recommending him to rehabilitation center, promptly after this encounter more faculty in the school do what they can in their power to make sure Keith graduates. This made me think about my outlook on education since it still hadn’t changed, teachers/faculty never did anything for me, when I struggled with depression, when I yearned for attention, no teacher came and gave me what I needed. A helping hand, all I wanted to hear was that someone cared, I’ll admit partially it’s my fault since I treated them like crap, but it’s kinda their job to help me out soooo that’s on them. My mental issues still burdened me in high school, but I had friends now which helped keep my mind distracted. I created meaningful relationships and really enjoyed the merits of friendship, unfortunately I still didn’t have anyone to relate to. 12th grade year is when I really distanced myself from school, I essentially missed the whole year, due to lack of motivation for school and life itself. What I wanted was a teacher like Mrs.Brody or the other teachers in Gilyard’s life. I didn’t have this connection until the 12th grade, What was different about this chapter in my life is that my teachers actually cared for me. My first period teacher would call me so I can come to school, even if I was late I was accepted with open arms. For once educators cared about me, after so many years of being neglected, the people I wanted to acknowledge me had done it. Even with their efforts not much changed in me, it wasn’t until half way through the year that their dedication to my success was apparent. After receiving barely passing marks I was done with school, I tried to be interested but I was having trouble immersing myself into the mentality of scholar. Mentally I was somewhere else and around this time is when I was contemplating suicide, the dean of my school was notified by my advisor after she overheard me talking about it. My dean of advisor broke into tears upon hearing this, since she knew me for nearly a decade and loved me like a son. The efforts to make me want to live and succeed were not apparent to me until that moment, every time she tried to avoid giving me harsh punishments, she would give me detentions and hope I learned my lesson. Their love for me made me wake up and realize that I deserve to graduate, just like Gilyard, when and effort was made to improve my life by others, I decided to take it and make my way through the hardship.
As a writer, I’ve consistently struggled with being able to imbue my writing with empathy. How can I make my own personal experience relatable to others, while personalizing my own work? This was a question that consistently plagues my mind as I wrote this piece. I wrote “A helping hand, all I wanted to hear was that someone cared”, this quote was apart of my comparison to Gilyard’s experience in high school. The purpose of the quote was to demonstrate that Gilyard was given something I wanted back in high school, he was given attention. He was offered a helping hand the teachers going out of their way for him was honestly the apex of the story in my opinion. I tried to emulate that by showing my true intention behind my bad behavior, I use the quote to blatantly state that I wanted someone to show genuine concern for me.