Freeing Kodak Black

“Free Kodak Black, he ain’t do nothin wrong!”

The lockers blatter together like church bells, clattering under the fists of students running amuck in the halls. Snickers erupt from outside the room, snake under the closed door, and fill the room like smoke. The footsteps grow louder, flowing towards the room, and a young girl walks in, asking for tutoring in math—and the noise ebbs away behind her.

My former calculus AB teacher returns back to our conversation, her brow creasing with worry.

“Jesse, can you help her? I’m late to a meeting.” In a flash she’s out of the room, and I turn to greet the girl. She’s a senior, graduating in a month, and prepping for a math placement exam. She’s tense, tells me that she’s been practicing for days and doesn’t want to waste her money in college by taking a remedial class.

She pulls out a practice exam, chock full of circles and erasure marks. We go over the problems she’s encountered so far—order of operations, probability, single variable algebra. Her phone rings incessantly, but she refuses to check it.

“Whoever it is, they can wait. I need to get this down.” She pulls out her calculator to correct a problem from earlier, subtracting six from negative five.

“I can’t get this wrong.”

-----

I stayed until the last bell rang, until the students’ attention spans were razed, and security guards raised gates in the hallways, chaining them shut. I even stayed past most teachers—I stayed until night school began.

Then seeped a handful of students into the building, no more than eight or 10 in total. These students were unable to attend school throughout the day due to issues such as extended suspension or legal troubles.

I walked into a class to greet my senior English teacher, who was in the midst of reading a play with two of the students when one of them receives a phone call. She takes the call, ambles outside, and rambles on about her day, casually mentioning that she stole that phone from a twelve year old girl at the mall the day before.

Administrators in the hallway chastise her for being on her phone, and she curses them out reflexively, hanging up. Calmly, she re-enters the room and picks back up the play, folding her phone between her thighs like a secret, anxious to continue her role.

-----

While talking to my junior English Lit teacher’s current class, a student asked me a question: “Why did you go back to high school after your first year of college?”

Some would say this is a rookie mistake, that the nostalgia of the “good ‘ol days”—where the faces were always familiar and sleep wasn’t just a five letter word—is enticing, but should stay in the past. High school was an experience that had a beginning and an end, a finite blip on the line of one’s life. Why knot these threads needlessly by drudging up the past, by involving one’s self again in the problems of yesteryear?

Having tucked a year of Harvard behind my ear with a unsteady hand, it felt strange not to return to where I first began my academic journey. Yet, upon returning, the cognitive dissonance was staggering. The memories I had of high school after an intense first year at Harvard had been stretched, rendered spineless under the many hands a year holds. High school was a place that clutched my youth and kept it close to its chest, was rose-gold in the rearview mirror—but this idea of high school isn’t the version I lived. The struggles of being a student existed during high school and persist now at Harvard—though their respective manifestations are very different.

At my high school, the student body has an estimated proficiency rate of 11 percent in mathematics, and 27 percent in language arts. The dynamics of academic struggles there find a fun-house reflection at Harvard. One can see students at both schools with this desire for knowledge, this desire to progress and grow, yet in both situations students grapple with their own potentials and struggle to push through their academic walls.

At Harvard, students are blessed with a multiplicity of tools and myriad support systems to assist them in navigating these rough tides. In places like my high school, however, these opportunities are more scarce. More often than not, students see academic iron bars blocking their path—they feel defeated. The possibilities for tutoring that do exist are rarely utilized; tutoring sessions are usually more vacant than night school classes.

The absence and misuse of these tools are what propel me to continue returning to my high school. Whatever ounce of help, change, or consideration I can proffer by coming back is worth it.

I gave her my answer, somewhat less long-winded and probably more to the point. She then asked what students could say to the administration to make them change, and a smile sneaked up to my eyes. Sounded like a question I’d hear at a Crimson Editorial Board meeting.

The bell rang, and like clockwork, the students filed out of the room, snaking out of the room and filling the hallway like smoke. On my way out, I heard one student say to another:

“Yo, you know they freed Kodak? Finally.”

Jessenia N. Class ’20 is a Crimson editorial editor in Quincy House. Her column appears on alternate Tuesdays.