Connect Four

We have a new girl in class this week. She's Dominican, fair skinned, light eyes, traveling through the world with that "I'm so over you" mentality. Mischievous but not troublesome. But yet and still she's only in the program because her parents want her to be there. While so many of the girls have been tossed under our care by mothers and fathers who don't have the time to help them with their homework themselves, she is perfectly capable of doing the work on her own. So I decided to feel her out.

I've done this with each and every one of my students. Ten or fifteen minutes of one on one in the midst of the usual chaos. They're different when it's just you and them, when the cameras are off, when there's nothing to prove. As it's game day and everyone else is into dominoes I challenge her to a game of Connect Four. She accepts, talking trash from before she drops her first checker in the slot. But when I beat her with little effort (I am 32 after all) she immediately wants to go again. I beat her five more times, sticking to the same kind of strategy, sometimes telegraphing my moves, other times playing tricks on her. But unlike my other troops, who are notorious for cheating and quitting when their opponents are too far ahead, she sticks with it. She studies and learns. The sixth and eighth wins are hers (though she cheats a little on the last one).

All the while she tells me about how she wants to be an FBI investigator. I tell her what I know about the job. I tell her the risks of working in law enforcement. I tell her that if this is something she really wants she'll have to stay out of trouble in the years ahead. She says she can't help herself. I ask her about her family and home life. My instincts tells me that it's a place where she's never heard, where she's always overlooked. She confesses that I'm right, shocked. No one's ever broken it down in those kinds of terms for her. No one has ever spelled it out so plain.

Then the dominoes game ends because someone quit because they weren't winning. Her friends are calling her. Our little chat ends. But now I know that she's different. Now I know that unlike all of my other kids she has a goal, a dream. And that's where it's starts...for all of us.

As there's about a month and a half left in the program, I'm feeling a little accomplished today. I haven't missed a day thus far. I've gotten them all locked into a project that they seem to take more seriously than their own schoolwork. And even if other kids in the school have taken to trying to steal the snacks left for my kids in the cafeteria, and the administration had been a little lackluster in holding up their end of their partnership with the nonprofit that signs my checks, all in all I now know that I'm going to make it out of this thing in one piece.

As I have braved these hostile waters of education, other things have begun to spring forth in my real career, new paths and opportunities, a new way of being. Talking to Wood last night he asked me about all of our old running partners and what folks were up to him. I caught him up on the things I knew but reminded him that in general there is no more music industry. Listening parties and open bars for hip hop and R&B are indefinitely on hold. We both got thrown off the ship before it went under. But treading water is far better than drowning.

There's something for me in a place called Seychelles, or at least something with that name. The word popped into my head though I didn't fully know it a few nights ago. I'm wondering what it might be and where it might take me. But that's the beauty of not knowing. It makes finding out an adventure. Avoid Street Kings at all costs. Out ;)