front page - editorial archives  - search - community

Class Notes
	A war we should be willing to fight (Published June 16, 2003) By H. WELLS WULSIN

Finally it’s here. Whether the past four years have been filled with late nights studying to make the honor roll or whether it’s been a time to dodge security guards and come to class just enough to squeak by with passing grades — whatever the nature of this epoch, the 206 seniors who as of June 11 are alumni of H.D. Woodson Senior High School can all agree on one thing: they’re thrilled to have finished.

The commencement ceremony marks both an end and a beginning — closing one chapter of life and opening a blank page for the next. One senior, after turning in his final exam, asked to speak with me in my office. He had struggled in physics all semester long, missing too much class for a part-time job, too often daydreaming during lectures. I expected a mercy plea in calculating his final grade, so I readied my standard speech on the strictness of my grade book accounting. But instead, he wanted to tell me how he reflected on the course: "Mr. Wulsin, I just want to say thank you for teaching this class. I know I could have done better if I had gotten more of my work in on time, I really wish I had done better. But I think I learned a few things anyway. Like Newton’s third law — I think that’s my favorite thing from physics. I think about that a lot now."

To hear that kind of mature gratitude is one of the sweetest rewards after a long school year. I’m like some of my students who, looking back, wish they could have done many things better: there could have been more fun labs, more phone calls to parents, more progress reports, more review sessions, more after-school activities.

I relish the best moments of this year — building roller coasters, egg drop containers, balloon rockets or Cartesian divers. But I also remember the low points – such as the density lab that flopped when no one knew how to calculate density, or the baking soda and vinegar "bomb bottle" that someone poured all over the stairwell after class.

Commencement certainly provokes reflection on past and future, but the main theme of the day is simply this: celebration. You can feel it buzzing in the hot noontime air when you arrive at Howard University’s Cramton Auditorium. Out of vans and station wagons pile large extended families eager for the day — parents, grandmothers, uncles, nieces, cousins — many of them missing work or school for this event.

The tension mounts palpably throughout the first half of the commencement exercises, from the "Pomp and Circumstance" processional to the usual speeches and the distribution of awards. The graduates are jittery and anxious, and finally, when their names are called to walk across stage to receive their diplomas, these powder kegs explode. They wave to families in the vast sea of the audience, they shout out to their classmates, they smile wide for the flashbulbs.

Each graduate has about three seconds after the counselor announces their name to get to the long line of administrators and dignitaries for hugs and handshakes. Some walk directly to the destination without fanfare, but most want to savor this short moment in the limelight. So they perform some kind of dance: possibly dipping their hips in a series of slide-steps, or circling a fist in the air Arsenio Hall-style, or "raising the roof" with upward-pushing arms. The crowd goes wild for everyone, disregarding the principal’s stern request at the beginning of the ceremony that audience members "respect the dignity of the occasion by not screaming, blowing air-horns or cat-calling." This is not a time for civility; it’s a time to cheer loud and proud for their loved ones.

After the ceremony, congratulating parents and seniors, I felt deep pride for the students I had taught over the past two years and their passing this milestone. But my mind was also on some of the words from the keynote address. It was a fiery, almost evangelical speech given by John Bryant, who founded Operation Hope to educate young people about money. About halfway through the speech, he closed his folder of notes and looked the graduating class in the eyes, saying, "Racism is like the rain. Either you can put up your umbrella and start walking through it, or you can sit around just getting wet. The fact is, when mainstream America has a headache, black and brown America has pneumonia." The 206 African-American graduates of H.D. Woodson’s Class of 2003 did not need to be reminded that racism exists, but Bryant wanted them to overcome racism rather than be defeated by it.

One of the severest incarnations of racism is institutionalized in our public school system. During the graduation ceremony, our principal announced that 13 seniors had scored over 1000 on the SAT. In a typical high school, 50 percent of seniors beat this score, and many good public schools have a much higher percentage. But at Woodson we can claim only 6 percent above the national average. That students at an urban all-black school do less well than their suburban and white counterparts is not only a problem of education; it’s a breach of civil rights.

It made me think of Bob Moses, the Harvard-educated activist who went south to join the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the early 1960s and fight for the right of blacks to vote. A generation later, in 1982, Moses won a MacArthur Genius Grant and started the Algebra Project to teach algebra in mostly black middle schools. In his book, Radical Equations: Math Literacy and Civil Rights, Moses argues that "the most urgent social issue affecting poor people and people of color is economic access. In today’s world, economic access and full citizenship depend crucially on math and science literacy." Moses first entered the battlefield of civil rights in the political sphere, but since then it has moved to education as a means for economic empowerment.

In the ’60s, to gain equal access in the voting booth, people of all colors united for the sit-ins, boycotts and marches of the civil rights movement. Today, if John Bryant and Bob Moses are right, gaining equal access in the public schools will require a movement at least equal in size and strength. It’s a war we should all be willing to fight for.

***