WEEK ONE

"Do you have a culture?"

Keyanna asked me on Monday within an hour of being introduced to me. Ms. Marla, the ceritified teacher in my classroom, started the morning by warning the children against any nonsense or knucklehead behavior. She and I agreed that they should fear us first and like us later. She introduced herself as Ms. Marla, and her two assistants, Mr. Eric and Mr. Jules. Marla, Eric and I spent last week getting acquainted and we all quickly realized that we would get along when we spent our money for school supplies on more than 10 Blaxploitation films such as "Shaka Lulu" starring Sidney Poitier and "Black Brigade" with Richard Pryor and Billy Dee Williams. Marla and I bonded quickly over a mutual love of Yaphet Kotto, the former Lieutenant Al Giardello of NBC's Homicide. I told her that Kotto is actually a devout Jew, and not a convert either.

Eric is 18 and just finished his first year at Clark Atlanta. He grew up in the Ivy Hill neighborhood in Newark, a product of the Newark Public School system, though a complete deviation from the average achievement. He went to the arts high school in the city. Eric plays more than 5 instruments including piano and various woodwinds. He is an incredible step dancer and has a level of energy I haven't possessed since I was probably 12 years old. Whenever Eric isn't doing anything, he has a habit of breaking into a pop'n'lock dance he has memorized. Often Marla and I will watch him, waiting for his body to snap into the steps, whereupon we crack up pointing at his almost unconscious control of his hands and feet. When we were paired together, Eric was very open with me about his inability in the past to make friends with other boys, which he attributes to his lack of a father figure in his life. He told Marla and me that as a child, he and his sister used to look for their father in various phone books -- they only knew his name. The story came up when I explained that I was a child of an anonymous sperm donor, and though we can sympathize about a lack of father figures, our stories stand in stark contrast.

Marla grew up in Mobile, Alabama and moved to New Jersey 8 years ago. She has two daughters, whose father is from Trinidad. Marla is in the final stages of a long and painful divorce, her ex proved himself to be an extremely irresponsible father -- a deadbeat. Marla's boyfriend is from Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso and is Muslim. Marla explained on the first day that we met that her days of listening to hip-hop are over, and that she will not patronize artists who degrade women. Over the week she disclosed that despite her feelings on the subject, she still listens to hip-hop radio with her kids -- and as repulsive as she finds the Lil Wayne "Lollipop" single, she can't help but sing along during the "call me, so I can get it juicy fo' ya" breakdown. This aside, when it comes to her personal music choices, she prefers Jazz and African music. I was delighted to hear this as my love of African music is the most important factor in my decision to study abroad in Ghana this coming Spring. I brought in Fela Kuti, who she was hearing for the first time, when we were decorating our classroom last Friday and she brought in a compilation of Afro-Cuban music which I fell completely in love with. As the three of us danced, Marla would shout "mhmm! I need some Hennessey and Sprite 'bout now" while Eric was pop'n'locking and I was busting out my white-boy-chicken-dance moves.

On Monday morning we met the kids. Our homeroom class is made up of five 4th graders and seven 3rd graders. I am lucky to have a talent for remembering names, and I had memorized who everyone was fairly quickly. To be honest, the names of these children were the most memorable part of my first day. In my homeroom class there was Ibn, Dejane, Keyanna, Nosakhare (his parents are Nigerian), Xavia, and Myia, among others. These were my favorite names of the kids in my homeroom, but memorizing the names of the kids in my other classes was a bit more difficult. Besides the homeroom, we see three other classes of kids from 5th grade to 8th grade. In these other classes I have two different girls named (I will spell phonetically) Ni-Ky-Ah. One girl spells her name Nicaya, and the other (this is my favorite) Nakiaye. Some of the other names I haven't been able to forget are Imeena (pronounced Eye-Mean-Uh, she goes by Meena), Ah-Quell, Al-Fatin, Deja Vu (<- yes that is her real name), and Tyriq. Nakiaye has taken a bit of a shine to me and spent two of her lunch periods chatting with me about the BET Awards and The Wire. I assume she about 11 years old. When she found out that I was a huge fan of Lil Wayne she didn't believe me. She needed further proof and explanation. Her challenges degenerated into a long conversation about the BET Awards which we both watched live the week previous. Chris Brown and Ciara were the best dancers by far, Keisha Cole can't sing worth a dime and Lil Kim was the only thing that made her performance bearable, Rihanna had a beautiful dress and an amazing voice, T-Pain is completely out of his mind, and the surprise appearances of Ludacris and Nelly did nothing for either of us. We generally agreed that the best performances of the night were Al Green, who had the entire audience on their feet in ecstasy, and Alicia Keys who did an incredible performance of her new single, "Teenage Love Affair," after which she brought out girl groups from the 80's and 90's, SWV, En Vogue and the remaining two members of TLC who helped her close the performance with the iconic dance from the Waterfalls music video - the first music video I ever remember watching at my Grandparents house in Palm Beach County, Florida. My mom refused to get cable until I was about 10, and Grampa's porch was where I got my MTV education. Nakiaye found my stories funny and laughed when I joked on her name telling her that the spelling implies Na-ki-yi-yay. She told me I could start calling her Yippee na-ki-yi-yay. The Wire, which aired originally on HBO and focuses on the streets of inner-city Baltimore, has extremely provocative and complicated subject matter. You can imagine my surprise when I found out that this 11 year-old girl had seen every episode in syndication on BET. I learned that BET stretches the show to an hour and a half with commercials, and edits out the excessive use of the word "motherfucker" by almost every character on the show. The Wire is my favorite show of all time, I've seen all 5 seasons more than 3 times and have studied each scene as if I'm writing a goddamn dissertation on the thing. My mother, in fact, is co-editing a book of essays about the show which is tentatively titled 24-7: Believe. As Nakiaye and I went through all of our favorite characters I gained insight into how her mother, a resident of Newark -- a city not unlike Baltimore, would explain some of the more troubling situations the show exposed.

"You rememba when Chris stomped Michael's daddy?! He was like, BAM, BAM!" She pretends to punch and kick an imaginary person to death, "Michael got Chris to stomp him cuz he was touchin' on 'im, right Mistah Jules?"

"Yeah, Michael's step-daddy was touchin' on 'im," Marla answered. She is also a huge fan of the show, and in private she and I quote the more explicit lines from the HBO broadcasts like Clay Davis' memorable rant from season 5, "it ain't these federal bitches all up in my shit, it's muthafucka's from my own city!" Marla loves my impressions of the various characters, and when she and Nakiaye and I get to talking about the Omar and his untimely fall at the hands of Kenard, Marla insists I recite Omar's last words: "Packa Nyoopoat. Sof' Pack."

The most memorable moment of the first week, though, is Keyanna's question from the first day. "Do you have a culture?" If only she knew that the sole reason I have ended up in front of her class, correcting her spelling, is my own pursuit of what my culture is, and how my culture will or will not define the person I want to become. I answer Keyanna, "yes, my culture is Jewish culture, how about you?"

"Um! My mom is from America and my daddy's from Trinidad." Marla asks her in a Trinny accent if she can speak Trinny English and Keyanna answers in a thick accent and delivers a monologue as if she's straight off the island. She walks around the room as the other children laugh hysterically, hunched over, wagging her finger, impersonating her Trinny Grandmother. As the room settles down Keyanna and some of the other kids start asking me questions about being Jewish, a culture they are extremely unfamiliar with. I promise them that later in the week I'll come to class in my yamulke and will answer any questions they have. On Wednesday, I gave them that opportunity as I put yamulke on their "word wall," a bulletin board in class where were spell words that they misspell or ask the spelling of. Yamulke stands out among the other words which range from 'Kangaroo' or 'Dolphin,' to 'Amorous' or 'Intelligent.' Their first questions are about black suits, long beards, curly long sideburns, and a definition of the words Temple and Synagogue -- two words they seem to have never heard before. Finally, I explained that Jews pray in a different language which they were all eager to hear. I realized that I only have a few stock prayers in my repertoire and I give the prayer for the lighting of the candles on Hanukah, as to maximize the "ch" sound in Hebrew, which I knew they would find funny. I intentionally waited until the end of the day to open the floor to questions about Judaism, as I hope to be answering more questions on the subject throughout the summer. I hadn't expected that their interest in my culture would be anywhere close to my interest in theirs.