[p4k] Tragedy and Hope
Last week was a challenging and exciting one for Playing 4 Keeps. On Tuesday, we came to Canarsie ready to start researching possible topics for our game. Instead, we were told the school was having a “rapid dismissal” and all after school programs were cancelled. There was a meeting after school where teachers were to be told the bad news before the Board of Ed went public: Canarsie is being phased out. Next fall, Canarsie will stop accepting freshmen and it will graduate its last class in 2011. Over then next few years, vacancies will be filled by three of even four new, smaller charter schools.
Some of the staff was outraged, and as I sat with my fellow GK trainers, we braced for the coming battle to keep up student morale. I’ve never been through this process before, but from what I’ve been told, it’s a struggle to keep students excited about education and stop them from feeling like the school system is casting them aside. We have a strong group at P4K, but we’re going to have to work extra hard to help everyone stay focused on the road ahead. The DoE’s decision has nothing to do with the quality of Canarsie’s faculty or students, and it’s our job to make sure the students realize this. Changes our hard, but learning to adapt to them is a vital part of growing up. I’m sure our students have the maturity to handle this transition.
Thursday, after some discussion of Monday’s announcement, we got down to business. We’re looking to have our game’s issue established before winter break, and that’s fast approaching. We started the workshop by watching some short videos on topics the class had shown interest in. First, we saw an excerpt of a documentary on the Black Panther Party that focused on the pivotal role of women, the BPP’s school breakfast and health clinics, and the FBI’s COINTELPRO program which was designed to infiltrate and destroy the party. Next, the students learned about Abu Ghraib and the use of torture in the War on Terror. Finally, we watched part of Spike Lee’s documentary “When the Levee’s Broke.” We had the students break up into small groups and use the information from the videos as well as other topics we’d discussed over the year as a starting point to think about what issue our game should be about. They were encouraged to pick one of the issues from a list, or decide on their own issue and develop persuasive arguments for why their issue should be picked.
When we came back together as a group to pick our topic, I was amazed by how passionately our students argued for their causes. They really cared about the issues they’d chosen and they were determined to make their fellow students understand why the issue was worth caring about. Two students felt COINTELPRO was most important. One argued that there can be no justice in a society where the people enforcing the laws cannot be trusted. I saw a flash of young Huey Newton and my face hurt from smiling so hard. Gay rights and the death penalty were two other topics proposed, but after the first round of voting, Hurricane Katrina and War were the two issues on top.
War is, obviously, an enormous topic, but the specific facets described were massive military spending, increasingly destructive weaponry, and privatization. I told them those issues are collectively known as “the military-industrial complex.“ When we voted on these issues, however, with precious few minutes left in the afternoon, the vote tied 7-7. The debate raged even more passionately after the vote, and the decision couldn’t be made in the time left. Monday afternoon, however, we’ll have this done and be ready to start planning the game.
