[University of Michigan, 2008]
“Hey white girl…move it.” I scrambled to my feet, picking up the
books I had just clumsily dropped in the halls of my new high school. As I
scooped up my belongings and continued on my way to class, I saw nothing but
unfamiliar faces among the students and teachers. Walking into
"Pre-Calculus," I could overhear my classmates talking about summer
vacations and making plans for the weekend. I, however, was merely “the new
girl,” the new junior at that, and nobody had anything to say to me. I
sat quietly by myself and observed my surroundings, and as the teacher called
the class to order, my first day at the Baltimore School for the Arts (BSA)
began.
I am a musician. I had my first
piano lesson at age five, and harp lessons began when I was twelve. Music has
always been the most important aspect of my life, so when in the tenth grade my
parents suggested that I consider a high school with a better music program, I
was eager to explore the possibility. Moving halfway across the country,
however, wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.
When news arrived that I had been
accepted into one of the top five performing arts high schools in the country[i],
I was overwhelmed with a decision that would affect the rest of my high school
career—even the rest of my life. But after a few short days, it was decided
that I would move from Trenton, Michigan, where I had lived since the day of my
birth, to Lutherville, Maryland, where I would be living with my aunt, uncle,
and cousin while attending the Baltimore School for the Arts in the city.
In August, my dad and I made the ten-hour drive to Baltimore. As we
pulled into my aunt’s driveway, a house I’d been to twice in my entire life, I
wondered what exactly I was getting myself into. I had left my friends, my
family, and the comfort of Trenton, Michigan for a new school, a new city, a
new home, and a new education. Needless to say, I was quite nervous when it
came time for my first day of school.
Racism, I discovered, is not a
one-way street. 68% of my school was black, and for the first time in my life,
I was part of a racial minority. My pink Gap sweater, which I had carefully
selected as part of my "first day of school outfit," was obnoxiously
preppy among a sea of baggy pants and sideways caps. My proper grammar usage was snobbish and
unnecessary between earfuls of "ain't got none"s and "sup
dawg”s. Even my name—Mariah—must have sounded well-mannered compared to the
three Paris', one Shaneequah, and a handful of Jamal's in my chorus class
alone. I was shot glares, looked up and down, and excluded from classroom
conversations. Nobody invited me to parties, nobody sat with me at lunch, and
nobody liked my sweaters.
But the moment I sat down at that piano, curious ears perked in my
direction. Once-condescending eyes softened up just slightly, and soon I was on
my way to making friends. After my first performance—a Brahms Intermezzo—I
finally gained the respect of my peers. Respect at BSA, I found, was something
earned, not something deserved. After
my classmates heard me play, they began to open up to me. I was finally allowed
to be a part of their club: "For a white girl, you can really play!" they joked. Not exactly a
compliment, I thought to myself, but I'll take it. I was happy to have any
social interaction at all, and the more I opened up, the more friends I made.
And boy, were these kids talented. The school was divided into
divisions of dance, theatre, music and art, and every student was gifted.
Chorus was required for all music students, and as I timidly tested the waters
of my vocal range with the rest of the sopranos, girls towered next to me, belting
out praises to the Lord in entire octave ranges above my small voice. Friday
student recitals revealed students effortlessly producing entire Mozart
concertos from their oboes—from memory—with musicality and passion to boot. These
same students would participate in four-hour jam sessions with their friends
after school, creating soul-stirring music and transcending listeners to private
worlds of introspection, fantasy, nostalgia, or pure wonderment. My peers at
the Baltimore School for the Arts were the Louis Armstrongs and Josh Bells of
the future, and I was slowly accepted and assimilated into their world.
Academics, however, were a
completely different story. For many students, trigonometry and sentence
structure were as foreign a concept as dynamic markings are to a quarterback.
While they shone in studios and on stages, students suffered in the classroom.
In Ron Suskin’s “Rise and Shine” and Mike Rose’s “I Just Wanna Be
Average,” educators consistently fail to challenge students such as Cedric and Mike,
often barely teaching at all.[ii][iii]
At BSA, it was likewise the teachers themselves that served educational
inequality on massive trays of "they just aren't smart enough,"
seasoned heavily with "they need to spend time practicing, not
studying," and disguised on the menu as "We send kids to
conservatories! Peabody…Juilliard!"
In my "Pre-Calculus" class, we were learning advanced algebra. In
“physics,” we watched Finding Nemo
and did the crossword from The Baltimore
Sun. My honors English class was an exception, and we read classics such as
All the Kings Men and explored our
creativity by writing poems, short stories, and even research papers. But
instead of Spanish or French class, I
practiced piano. Instead of a business or computer class, I took advanced music
theory. Instead of college preparation, I had conservatory preparation—though a
damn good preparation, it most certainly was.
After a few months at Baltimore
School for the Arts, I had successfully memorized and performed an entire Beethoven
sonata (not an easy feat for a pianist) and I could sightsing each of the seven
modal scales in any key without difficulty. I was taking private harp lessons
from Peabody Conservatory's Jeanne Chalifoux—who had studied with the most
significant harpist of the twentieth century, Carlos Salzedo—and my piano
technique had solidified to a point where I could readily play any scale, any
arpeggio, and any technical exercise put in front of me. My musical flower had
finally blossomed to its fullest, and my new school had unquestionably given me
all of the water and sunlight that I had needed and longed for without even
realizing it.
In "I Just Wanna Be
Average," Rose uses descriptive detail to paint a vivid picture of his
home in South Los Angeles. He meticulously describes every angle of every room,
making the reader feel as if he or she were actually walking through his house[iv].
If I were to similarly describe the house—mansion—of my aunt and uncle, I would
exhaust at least three full pages of text.
Suffice to say, I lived in the "west wing," had my own
bathroom and balcony, and soon discovered an entirely separate apartment in the
basement of the house, which was rented out to a recent college graduate. My
uncle, the president of the Ewing Marion Kaufmann Foundation and often featured
in Forbes magazine, is an extremely
powerful man. My aunt, the woman I look up to most in this world, is the first
woman to publicly serve on the New York Stock Exchange Board of Directors. My
school life and home life were polar opposites; for lunch I ate peanut butter
and jelly with the son of a convicted felon, in a run-down cafeteria that
smelled of burnt macaroni.
Hours later, I sat down to a lamb dinner with the governor of Maryland, in a
dining room adjoining the area where two Steinway pianos faced each other.
My fourteen-year-old cousin Victoria attended a private school with
an annual tuition three times that of my in-state tuition at University of
Michigan. As Victoria and I grew closer (we're more like sisters than cousins),
the qualities of our educational experiences grew increasingly apparent. In the
mornings, she drank a protein shake in her school uniform while I munched on
cereal, donning a mundane t-shirt with eccentric jewelry. (My Gap sweaters were
quickly shoved to the rear of my closet.) As she carpooled to her private
school in her friend's brand new Hummer, I was dropped off at the light rail
station that usually but not always made it to downtown Baltimore, where I
would walk to my public school. As Victoria rode comfortably in heated seats
behind locked doors, I stood cramped between a smelly, fat man and a woman with
a screaming baby, nervously watching a bum who was eyeing my messenger bag.
Transportation was the least of our differences; Victoria—an eighth grader
still in middle school—was studying SAT words I couldn’t even pronounce and
completing AP courses my high school would never dream of offering. Stanford
lacrosse recruiters were already scouting her, and many students from my school
probably hadn't the slightest idea of how to hold a stick. While Victoria and
her peppy friends drank café lattes from Starbucks to match their side pony
tails and Ugg boots, my classmates were snorting cocaine so they could practice
six hours instead of five before their big audition. Finally, while Victoria
socialized at the shopping mall on weekends, I watched teenagers inject heroine
into their bloodstream to better understand a painting and attended my first
kegger, hosted by the lead in the theater department's spring musical. Somehow,
however, we remained close, and saw each other's contrasting lifestyles as
interesting and different rather than weird or freakish.
"Students will float to the mark you set," writes Rose.[v]
At Baltimore School for the Arts, students were certainly drifting miles above
the ozone layer in their artistic capabilities and creative expression, but
they were sinking downward—and fast—in academics. For while newspapers and
acclaimed musicians, parents and pop stars (such as BSA alumni Jada Pinkett Smith)
lauded the students as musical, theatrical and artistic prodigies, teachers of
math and science were simply giving up on instructing real academic subjects in
the name of the arts.
In “Rise and Shine,” Cedric wanted more from his public high school
education. While other students were punching teachers or goofing off in class,
Cedric worried about MIT and the “fuzzy notion of his future.”[vi]
My classmates at BSA may have been more concerned about auditions that SAT
tests, but I knew that a professional music career might not be for me. I studied from a Kaplan SAT prep book and improved
my score twice. My school may have preferred the language of music to the
studies of French or Italian, but I kept up with my Spanish by conversing with
the Mexican gardener my uncle hired to upkeep their two acres of property.
And just like both Cedric and Mike, my school was in the city. I
experienced firsthand the problems of urban life: drugs, violence and poverty
surrounded me from the short walk to the light rail station to the metal
detectors of my school in downtown Baltimore each day.
Marvin L. Winans Academy of Performing Arts is a public charter
school, just like Baltimore School for the Arts. Of the 72 students that took the
MEAP math test in 2007, only 9 were proficient. 13 were partially proficient,
and 50 students tested below the proficient level[vii].
Having experienced educational inequality myself, I am fully prepared to help
these elementary school students
face and overcome the academic challenges of their school system. Furthermore,
I am excited and eager to help these kids discover and develop their musical
skills just as I did; more importantly, I know that my experience at Baltimore
School for the Arts will enable me to enable them to convert their musical and
creativity abilities into written creative expression.
Notes
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