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So, now I teach in an "urban" school - which is to say that the school I'm at is urban, but functional, and really diverse, which is to say, urban, but not 90% Black or Brown, which I know a lot of you (might) assume from the descriptor "urban".

It's interesting, in a whole lot of ways.

But, to be honest, I miss my previous school which was "urban" in the more traditional sense of urban - it was mostly Black and Brown children and 99% were struggling-working-class. The teachers had experience working with this population and it seemed, well, way-more real than the faculty and students of the school I'm currently at.

Which isn't to disparage the students or faculty of my current school - kids are kids, and to be quite frank, well, the faculty on the whole is also way more competent than the faculty of my previous school. I can't think of a single teacher at my current school to which I would just shake my head. But I also have questions about the "competent teachers' " abilities to deal in the environment of my previous school. Does this make sense? In a really weird and fucked up way, I wish I still had the opportunity to teach at school #1 (which is to say, I wish, but don't feel the compunction to actually pursue, the possibility).

I'm currently reading William Julius Wilson's latest tract and so far it makes a lot of sense (except for a quibble I have about the role of the state - and state-rejection - in his theory.) And so far, I feel like his thesis doesn't really apply to the majority of the students I now teach, but did at my old school, where students typically felt at odds with "the system" and therefore rejected a simplistic approach to education.

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I was recently listening to a college radio station on which they were interviewing a participant in the US social forum. As much as I admire the folks involved in the USSF, I wonder how many of my students (at my previous school) would see USSF as representing their interests or issues. Somehow, I think very few, if any. And what does that say about the Left in America today? To what extent is it a whole lot of energy and organizing and effort around important issues that ultimately ignore the basic issues of "the people"? How can we build a movement that is more than anti-corporate, but that deals intimately with the issues that we, the people, in the urban-core (aka - the ghetto) are facing?

A politics that is grounded in what are the ultimately easy issues of the middle-class (environmentalism, corporate-greed) cannot also appeal to those of us that deal with street-violence, statist-targeting, and cultural disapprobation. Which isn't to say that the political issues of the middle-class are unimportant or don't affect the working-classes of America, but rather that those effects are less perceptible or imminent than a lot of other negative pressures both endemic (cultural) and imposed (structural) - with the emphasis necessarily on the imposed issues, since the endemic issues are mostly a response to the structural ones (incidentally, this is what I've argued forever, but the recent impetus behind this argument is all Wilson).