Alma Matters - The Bronx
Bronx High School for Business — some kids
My delightful homeland and playground and jack-in-the-box delivers. Helping a foreign friend in the Bronx find a school for his teens opened my mind to the contradictions of our Byzantine educational complex. How do you get your kids into high school, and how in the world do you choose, if indeed “choosing” is real?
What School- Imagined Scenario 1
On a school tour we see many wonders: two jeanless teens, toilets without seats, poems by Diane di Prima on a desk, a male teacher with purple nail polish and lipstick, curly hair tufts in the hallway from a catfight. Yes, gentrification has yet to suck all the juice out of the Bronx. In this tooth-n-claw high school, girls of grit and boys of gumption calculate sine and cosine, and could easily describe the three branches of government, even though they deem the high bench supremely unjust. These kids aren’t waiting for anyone to tell them how to deal with corruption, ecocide and gloom. Armed with the city’s 49 most common profanities, they are on an express train to adult responsibility and the American dream, or maybe nightmare. En route they will frolic and rap while shredding their jeans and knotting their laces in an utterly original fashion.
How dare the pundits critique the flavorful, wide-ranging learning offered here? The staredown, the shrug, the finger snap, the cold shoulder: surely these rhetorical weapons of gesture could match the Shakespeare quotation and earnest subservience of their Manhattan counterparts. Flipping the script in word and on paper, these kids were precociously adept in reshaping reality to allow them to slip through the cracks. Hurtling uptown in a one-eyed subway train, they break and turn on bars and handholds, their kicks brushing passenger noses and caps. They love, love, love— energy rays streaming trails from every limb. Their life and death rush at them – a firehose of possibility and nothingness.