An Education Disrupted, a Life Wasted

Call her Adrianna. She is a composite character, constructed from a type that I have known in a number of cases in the course of my many years teaching inner city young people. Adrianna was born with an IQ of 125, well above average, tending toward gifted. She began school all smiles, just loving the routine, reveling in her mastery of the alphabet, radiant when she began to put those letters together to make words, triumphant when the words came together as sentences, paragraphs, whole stories, and then the magic world of reading became hers for exploration. And then there were those magic numbers. She learned rapidly, faster than most people in her kindergarten class, to count to ten, then to 100, then by 2’s, 5’s, and 10’s.

And this pattern continued through Grade 2, by which time Adrianna had fully mastered addition and subtraction, long grasped the concept of regrouping, and gone forward to learn from older friends and relatives the fundamentals of multiplication and division. And she was delighting in reading children’s classics such as “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” and “From Tiger to Anansi.” Adrianna also ran across the tale, “The People Could Fly,” which had a powerful effect on her and led her to look for books that told about slavery and the fate of her people in the many decades thereafter. There was discussion of perhaps moving Adrianna on to Grade 4, but her mother decided along with the school staff that she would participate in the “Gifted and Talented” program while continuing her socialization process with people her own age.

Adrianna’s mother, Bertha, was a good woman who toiled as a clerk in a discount store for eight hours four days a week. She had a hard time getting fulltime work, so she accessed the social service system for help; food stamps became especially important, and her children all had free lunch through the public schools. Over the years there were times when she had to fall back on welfare (AFDC, then TANF), but she avoided that whenever she could. In addition to Adrianna, Bertha had two other children, a son name Houston, who was a year and a half younger than Adrianna; and a daughter, Patricia, who was two years older. Adrianna and Patricia had the same father; Bertha gave birth to Houston by another man. Neither male had ever established a presence. Houston’s dad looked in for awhile, and Patricia had a faint memory of having seen her dad. But Adrianna had never known her father at all.

Bertha died unexpectedly from complications of diabetes and kidney failure when Adrianna was in Grade 5. Houston’s dad was located, and although he soon moved to another city, Houston’s paternal grandmother took responsibility for the young boy. Adrianna and Patricia moved in with their maternal grandmother, Caroline. Caroline was a sweet woman who loved the girls, but she struggled with emphysema, and her parenting skills had atrophied over the years. She had no control over Patricia, who by this time was in Grade 7, just 13 years old, but in her budding beauty susceptible to the attentions of boys three and four years older. Patricia became pregnant halfway through her Grade 8 year. She stayed in school until she had nearly completed Grade 10, but by then her baby needed more and more of her attention. She got a job at a fast food restaurant, but the work was just part-time and Caroline struggled when she had to tend to the baby alone. Other family members, cousins and aunties, helped, but Patricia found herself staying at home a lot, too.

Meanwhile, Adrianna held on desperately to the solace of school. She continued her precocious academic path through Grade 7, consistently appearing on the “A” honor roll, reading voraciously, and helping others in her class when algebraic equations were first introduced. But in Grade 8, Patricia called upon Adrianna more and more to help take care of the baby. Caroline was sick a lot, in and out of the hospital, so that Adrianna missed a lot of those Grade 7 school days to take care of her grandmother. Adrianna found keeping up with her homework difficult, but she managed to make “B’s” and “C’s,” and she was hoping to get back on a better track as she entered Grade 9 for high school.

But things got worse. Family responsibilities mounted. At school Adrianna tried to get help sorting through the difficulties of her life, but she found counselors occupied with other matters and teachers unable to give her the help that she needed keeping up with geometry and biology. Adrianna never showed up for regular high school classes in Grade 10. She tried an alternative high school for awhile, but then she gave up there, too. She continued to read, finding her way to the plays of August Wilson and the poetry of Maya Angelou, but this was her only intellectual outlet. She also found her way to the street, to the wrong kinds of friends, to reefer and then harder drugs. She was flattered when a young man drew close and seemed to offer pleasure when so much real fun had gone out of life. But all that attention got her was her own baby, at a time when she was only 16 years of age.

Adrianna never finished high school, her family failed her, but if it takes a village, then her village had also failed her--- the people of her community and her school. She still had that 125 IQ, but it was hard to view her circumstances in any other way than in the context of a wasted life.