This is giant thank you to the team of people that donated to the Go Fund Me that I started earlier this year. Eileen, Pam & Mike, Kristi, Christine, Mom, Shureen, Nicole, Trevor, Megan, and Katie, we raised $215 to buy 12 copies of The Hate U Give for our DRW reads class, and I can't thank you enough. This is also a thank you to Brennan Weber, a friend of mine that helped out with a project that spun out of reading The Hate U Give. I always wanted to post updates and thank yous throughout the year but was never able to find the time. It’s almost summer here in Chicago (we’re done June 15th!) and I’m starting to be able to breath, so I finally wanted to share how things went.
As you may or may not remember, we started our Go Fund Me because the kids were having a hard time finding books that they enjoyed. Thanks to your money, we found a book they liked. The book focuses on the police shooting of an unarmed black teenager and examines the relationship between police officers and the black community. It’s also a portrayal of what it’s like to be a black teenage girl in 2019.The first day that we popcorn read and the kids got to read curse words aloud (the book has a lot of drug and alcohol references, foul language, and violence), it kind of rocked their world. The fact that they were able to drop an F bomb in class shocked and excited them….and me. This was new territory for Mr. Sparks. But, if getting to say the F word gets them excited about reading...…I’ll guess I’ll take it.
It took us almost two months to finish it, but the kids enjoyed it. It generated a lot of meaningful discussions, but the most interesting theme that ran through all of them was our kids’ strong distrust of police officers. Aside from maybe one or two students, almost all my kids held a distrust, or even outright resentment, towards police. There were several days that we spent almost half of our class period debating the pros and cons of the work police do. They struggled to understand where I was coming from and I struggled to understand where they were coming from, but the discussion itself was meaningful all the same, and before I say anything else, I want to thank you for making it possible by providing us with the texts that generated it all.
I enjoyed the book, but I didn’t like the way it portrayed police. Because of this, and because of class discussions, we decided to video chat with a friend of mine that’s a police officer. Using an online software for recording videos, Officer Brennan Weber of the Tulsa Police Department (my college roommate of two years and close friend) took some of the toughest questions imaginable from the kids. “Have you ever deported someone” from a Latino student led to an interesting discussion on legal jurisdiction. “Why do so many shootings go unsolved” from another student led to insights on the difficulty of solving gang related shootings. Some of the kids were swayed by Officer Weber's answers, but the kids were mostly just shocked that a police officer would even do this sort of thing to begin with. Even where they didn’t agree with some of Officer Weber’s responses, I think it got them to look at police officers more like regular people just trying to do a difficult
job.
I post all this to provide transparency on what we did with your hard earned money, but also to prove to you that your giving made a huge difference in the lives of 12 teenagers from Chicago. After we bought the books, we had a remainder left over, so we bought the movie on Amazon and watched it to celebrate us finishing the book. In addition, we were able to buy a copy of The Stars Beneath Our Feet, another great book that we are in the process of reading. Again, all of this wouldn’t be possible without your gift, so thank you again! Feel free to reach out if you have any questions or comments!
NOTE: This was originally written in 2019 while working as an English teacher with DRW College Prep in Chicago.
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