Dear Fam,

I’m crestfallen today and have been for quite some time. Let’s start from the beginning in chronological order of erosion.

First—genesis. Our babies are born simply because they can be. And at the center of the epidemic, at its fucking heart, is pumping human expectation or more precisely, the absence of expectation into these kids. Why? Because there’s no political capital to be gained from them. It’s literally killing me to wake up every day to a world where I must pacify myself before I pacify those responsible for inequality. Our babies don’t live in the future sense….not because their parents have lost ambition, but because even ambition itself, is a learned skill.

Day after day, the small promises that knit families together are frayed and unraveled: meals aren’t prepared; weekend trips to the supermarket never manage to find the right weekend; school clothes aren’t there in time for another school year, and the academic year itself is lost to sucking up to College Board, impetuously draconian state standards and the ACT exam.

Over time, it has become clearer to me that our children, their smiles, their unqualified love will never be enough to bring them what they need….because poor kids don’t vote. It breaks my heart that love is something to be spoken of in corny ass Keyshia Cole songs, but love is rarely demonstrated for them out in the open.

By adolescence, our children understand that no one survives by carrying long-term expectations into any relationship, by giving of themselves, by remaining 49er/Alex Smith fans, by risking anything valuable for the sake of that relationship. To my pawtnas who argue that the urban school systems of this nation are underfunded, or understaffed, or poorly managed—and in cities like EPA, Oakland, Harlem, Oak Park, Del Paso Heights, at least, there is one equal and opposing truth: the schools cannot save this mess. It haunts me nightly.

The debate over tax bases and class size, efficacy and alternative curricula matters only for that finite portion of children ready and able to learn, to set genuine goals, to adapt their lives to the external standards of culture (and Jed York’s lack of talent and Michele Rhee’s lack of credible data). For these children, the key is a functional family and their place in that family. For them, some semblance of victory was assured before they ever walked into my classrooms.

And what remains for the teacher? You think I should teach again?! I’d rather not fail them a second time. What training, what lesson plan, what act of educational artistry that I could pull out of my Mesopotamian butt will be sufficient to the reality? In EPA—just blocks from Stanford University—as in every other beleaguered city system, the administrators and bureaucrats have for decades wrapped the failure in the latest educational trends, programs and jargon, as if changes in approach or technique could ever matter. Back to basics, alternative schools, privatization, magnet schools, teaching the whole child—all of it is offered up as slogans in place of meaningful endeavor— as if Tiger Woods wouldn’t have cheated had his wife simply handcuffed him to the bed with his 9 iron.

Images of my former students haunt me to this day. I can picture Maria, Jerrod, Brian, Lupe, Sione, DeAndre, and droves of others working on the graphing calculators I taught them to use (to a theme of Warren G’s “regulators” instrumental) while their creativity and intelligence were almost willfully extracted, in a room of once amazingly engaged students to what became a corpse’s silence….by rote-drills and copied information for the STAR and CAHSEE exams. What is left at the end of my maelstrom is a school system playing with test scores in the same way that US News must seek the support of the rich who perpetuate its frivolous rankings.

Finally, here’s a story of a former student of mine named Azalia. If I had asked Azalia whether Egypt or England are countries or continents, then she has no interest and no clue. But if I had asked how the Pharoah’s architects managed to get the crypt inside the finished tomb, or how the ancients got the rocks to stand at Stonehenge, and invariably, she’d give me a working hypothesis followed by an endearingly caustic, “c’mon Mr. D….step your game up, couzo.” I could never accuse students like Azalia of being “hollow”. Just don’t ask her for anything in writing, or expect her effort to sustain itself for longer than fifteen minutes or show itself in any review quiz a few days later. To see these students come alive, to sense the eagerness buried inside them, is to understand just how far the elemental human urge to learn has been subverted, how something so natural to childhood has been brutally limited to a handful of raw lessons suitable to keep my students from roasting each other like a VH1 special.

My slow grinding as a teacher has since ended like an empty tootsie roll. The school system has taken its shots, tallied its misses and closed its files on me and these students. But I’m not delusional, and human children don’t simply disappear and neither does the problem. As a wise man, my grandfather Baba Amir, told me before I boarded the plane for the United States: “Go as far as you can see, and when you get there Arash, you’ll see farther.”

I’m now reduced to questioning… How much farther must our children fall before we all hear (and react to) the thud?

With Love, truly,

Arash