don’t know about you but

“The soundtrack for my three-minute drive to school every morning is almost always ‘Debaser’ by the Pixies. Trying not to read too much into that.”

I was going to post something snarky like that on Facebook earlier this week but decided against it. One of my post-graduate resolutions is to automatically reject snark if it threatens to obscure an otherwise important point. And I think I may have stumbled onto one of those.

Teaching is, in a word, dispiriting. This is not an admission of defeat or a cry for help. I came into this without an idealistic bubble to burst and, thus, am holding up pretty well, comparatively. But where being one of the few Type B personalities that slipped through the cracks into Teach for America was, at first, something close to blissful, it’s becoming a drag. The legion of Type As that surrounds me is, if nothing else, easily consolable. They cry in the copy center (like, every night), sure, but they also leave our “Diversity, Community, and Achievement” sessions soothed and buoyant. I leave with a distinct sense that, as TFA uses them, “diversity,” “community,” and “achievement” are non-symbols, shorthand for a unique, inspiring language that I can’t understand because it never existed. The Type A folk are on an emotional roller coaster, but those peaks and valleys might be preferable at this point to my own constant, subtle, eminently manageable sense of dread.

Anyway, when “Debaser” came on shuffle in my car Monday morning, I laughed a little, cranked the volume, and drove to school feeling refreshed and cynical. I listened to the song again on the drive home that day—a rough day—and started projecting.

Catchy in an abrasive, not entirely pleasant way, “Debaser” is three glorious minutes of guitar-heavy, antisocial surrealism. The lyrics lean heavily on references to the 1929 Salvador Dalí/Luis Buñuel short film “Un Chien Andalou” (watch it now if you’ve never seen it, but don’t eat first), but the song’s chorus is original, and perfect: “Wanna grow/Up to be/Be a debaser!”

In my previous life (haha) I related to the song the same way every young, white, liberal arts major relates to self-consciously rebellious music: shallowly. “It’s subversive! Neat! Who wants a PBR?” While I’m not going to float some contrived, “my-four-weeks-in-the-Delta-have-changed-my-life” narrative past you, I do think that a song like “Debaser” resonates more deeply when you realize that some things are really, truly worth debasing.

I just wrote a paragraph about all of the odds my students have to beat, but it was very freshman-political-science-major-at-Berkeley, so I deleted it. Long story short, the American education system is actively hurting large swaths of children, and instead of grappling with this in any realistic, painful way, we as a culture still seem to be peddling a version of: “Black kids. Lazy. Amirite?”

The system has failed them. I want them to get an education, grow up, and debase the shit out of it.

you lot! what?

The reason I never update this thing is simple: I usually finish whatever work I have to do for the day  around 11 at night. I have to be in a classroom at 7 a.m. every morning. When push comes to shove, sleep takes precedence over blogging. I’ll chalk it up to maturity.

But things are happening. Institute is brutal but manageable. My first day of teaching—this past Monday—was fine. Not great, but not a trainwreck either, so I’ll take it. These kids need so much help, and I’m almost certainly not going to be able to give them all they need. But I knew that going in.

It’s been kind of a rough week for TFA morale: student assessments keep rolling in and the enormity of the achievement gap is getting all tangible. I’m doing better at coping with this than most, I think, probably because I’ve always been a cynical bastard. What I struggled most with this week was how alienated I felt from my kids. I’m confident in my ability to keep doing this really hard job even without “saving” everyone, but I’m less confident in my ability to keep doing this without being able to interact with my students on some gut level.

Wednesday was better for a lot of reasons, but mostly because of one student, a typically awkward 7th grader who approached me during a class break to ask if I liked zombie movies.

Of course I do.

In a conversation that lasted maybe two minutes, he told me that he “prefer[s] the original Dawn of the Dead to the remake” (seconded) and sternly corrected me when I said 28 Days Later was one of my favorite zombie movies:

“Mistuh Kennedy*, there aren’t really any zombies in that movie, that’s a virus.”

In little asides he’d deliver to me every time I passed by him the rest of the day, he told me his favorite director is zombie auteur George Romero and he wants to go to film school in New York or California some day. Never mind the fact that no 13-year-old should have seen half of the movies he considers his favorites: I’ll get him into college or die trying.

*Yep, in deep southern it’s “Mistuh Kennedy,” and it’s just as adorable as you’d imagine.

i’ve made a huge mistake

I fear I’ve greatly overestimated the amount of free time I will have to update this thing. My first week in Mississippi has consisted almost entirely of 12-hour workdays followed by, I dunno, 2-or-3-hours of food and mingling and pecan ale. This morning, for maybe the first time in life, I woke up at the usual time (7 a.m.) without an alarm clock. And promptly went back to sleep.

Tonight I’m going to a catfish fry in Greenville and a B.B. King concert in Indianola, but in the meantime I should probably go outside because I haven’t driven my car in daylight since move-in day. But I’ll leave you with my favorite southern story thus far: last night a bunch of us ended up at Backdraft, the classiest of the three local bars, where a middle-aged man at the bar asked if we were with Teach for America. We said we were, and he bought us a round of Wild Turkey shots and walked over to spout pure gold for maybe ten minutes. Lecturing us for coming to Mississippi in June, he said, “In the summertime you gotta go north, in the wintertime you gotta go south. Don’t you know shit about the monarch butterfly?”

At some point in this conversation we found out he’s in the Mississippi House of Representatives. Beats the hell out of Sidney Mathias.

hard to explain

Intro posts are always rough. And because I have nothing of real substance to add yet, I’ll just summarize boringly: My name is Tim Kennedy. I am a 22-year-old, very recent graduate of New York University. I’ve accepted a teaching gig with Teach for America and will be moving to the Mississippi Delta in the next month. I have never been south of Virginia. I’m trying not to think about it.

But I am cautiously optimistic. Though I’m not an especially earnest type—and I’ve had trouble getting through TFA’s blandly inspirational literature without eye-rolling—I do feel obligated to give something back to kids with way fewer opportunities than I’ve been given. A lot of this stems from the fact that I have not always been a great student—sometimes with reason, sometimes not. Had I not come from a background with some money, I would never have made it through college, much less been accepted as a TFA corps member. So this is my penance, only without the depressive, religious overtones. I’m looking forward to it. Really.

I hope this site will function, somewhat, as a hub for whatever writing I end up doing during my time in Mississippi and beyond. I was a journalism major in college, and though I have lingering self-confidence issues, I have it on good authority that my writing is generally worth reading. I’ve (sorta) maintained personal blogs in the past, but I don’t want to do that anymore. I want everything I write to be appropriate for the masses: friends, family, professors, coworkers, strangers, etc. You’re fucking delusional if you think this means I’ll clean up my act entirely. But I’m going to try not to be intentionally obnoxious. Wish me luck.