GUEST COLUMN: Lending a hand, a pen and an ear

Tutoring North Philadelphia high schoolers, Allison DiCecio has learned more about herself - and about life - than she's taught them about grammar and composition. ___________________________________ On some level, we all know that there is an abundance of problems in the "real world." We can all recognize that a lot of difficult issues need to be thought about and acted upon here in Philadelphia. We are the people who need to do this acting. We are the ones experiencing society's advantages: attending a fairy tale-like school, studying abroad, meeting intelligent people and getting valuable work experience. Unfortunately, we are in the minority -- and other "minorities" are in need of help. But most of them are not going to get where I am now, even though they deserve to more than I do. Most of their peers don't even get to where those students are, the 11th and 12th grades. The teacher we work with estimated that William Penn has a 75 percent dropout rate. We work with the cream of the crop, the top quarter of students who have made it as far as their junior and senior years. Still, most of them don't have the slightest clue what to do with quotation marks -- or any type of punctuation, for that matter. Forget about verb-noun agreement and spelling. They know the English spoken in their neighborhoods, and most of them rarely get out of their neighborhoods. But I just said they were bright kids. How could they have trouble forming coherent sentences? Sounds a bit contradictory, doesn't it? Maybe with a bit of background things will begin to make sense. Out of some 60 students we work with, I have not heard of one who has a stable nuclear family. Instead, I've heard about unbelievable hardships: abortions, incest, a horrifying number of rapes, girls with boyfriends who beat them, abusive parents and step-parents, a lot of scary stories about foster homes, an enormous amount of teenage pregnancy, a football player turned drug dealer who was shot and is trying to get his act back together? and the list goes on. Needless to say, I leave the school in tears some weeks because I can't do more for these kids. Coming from a relatively sheltered, stable, middle-class family, this is all pretty new to me. We have a problem here, and it's not the kids, although they are the ones suffering. I say "we" because as members of society, their problems are our problems, too. They are not just "inner-city" problems or "black community" problems, and I think some people have trouble understanding that we are all accountable for them. We have to ask ourselves what kind of society we want to live in, and if we are not satisfied by what we see around us -- I, for one, am not -- then we are obligated to do something about it. Three weeks ago, a very bright student in the 11th grade class apologized to me for not being in school the previous Friday. She said she wanted to come to school that day, but circumstances didn't allow her to get there. In fact, she was forced to be absent for over a week. She really wanted to be in class, she continued, and she wanted to know what she had missed and if it could be made up. She was relieved when I told her that Penn had been on break the day she was absent, so she hadn't missed us. From a personal essay she had written earlier in the year, I knew this student had been raped and molested, both times by cousins. Her mother had called her a liar when she broke her silence about these incidents. I couldn't imagine what had happened to her this time to keep her out of school for so long, but she soon told me. The students are very open with us, because we are often the only people in their lives who will listen to them. I have an immense respect for this girl's strength and maturity, as well as for her creative writing abilities. She's made me realize life is 95 percent opportunity. I know this girl does not have many opportunities. In fact, I know I am one of the few white people she's ever spoken to, much less had a relationship with, because of a question she posed to me: "Do your all hair smell like wet dog when it wet?" She had heard that white people's hair smelled that way when it was wet. I let her smell mine, which was still damp from the shower, and she was able to learn for herself that it didn't. I don't know what specifically can fix these kids' problems, but clearly, we need to be aware of what's going in the city we live in; it should bother us, and we should care. If we can get that far, maybe some things will start looking up. In the words of Rebecca Carroll, another Penn and Ink participant, "If societal hierarchies were based on living experiences, or if there were some acknowledgement of the continuum of human experience even within one city, then people might walk around a little more receptively, even perceptively." Here at Penn, we have to start thinking of human experience just as highly as we currently view work experience.