My Shout Out

           I was already at the entrance of the jail, standing at the gate still wondering if I had dressed appropriately for my first class.  I wasn’t allowed to wear jeans, but were khakis too formal?  Should I tuck my shirt in?  Roll up my sleeves?

           This would my first time meeting my students, a group of twenty juveniles being housed in the Allegheny County Jail. “Juvenile” is a justice system term, but they’re just kids. Kids who know just what you’re feeling at first look.  Kids who make inside jokes that soar right over your head.  Kids with wild imaginations and ever-shifting attention spans. 

            It wasn’t their criminal records that intimidated me, but rather the same curious energy I remembered from my high school self that would eat teachers alive for the sake of one joke, or cause a distraction from the class just to test my boundaries.  I refused to be eaten alive, not by a bunch of kids, not on my first day.  I rolled my sleeves up, and pushed through the gate.

            When I walked in, a few of the kids were already in the classroom.  They looked at me from the side, trying to play it cool and gather their first impressions simultaneously. 

“Ay Mr. Mike,” one kid finally blurted, “are you famous or something?”

I blushed immediately.  Cover blown.  Khakis were a bad idea.  I should’ve worn a polo.

“Far from it, boss.” I answered.

“Oh, ok.  Well, when you do become famous…” he paused, and looked me dead in the eye with sparking, charismatic sincerity. “Can you give me a shout-out?”

I laughed, picturing a moment in some obscure future when I’m giving shout-outs during a radio interview.

“I’m going to need to know your name first,” I answered.

I’ve learned so much from these kids in just five weeks of teaching them, that giving them a shout-out has gone from a hilarious notion to a tender reality. 

I want to give them a shout-out for keeping me humble, and teaching me, every week, how lucky I am to live outside the grasp of the justice system.

I want to give them a shout-out for laughing at my dumb jokes, and being patient when I’m struggling to find the right way to explain something.

I want to give them a shout-out for letting me on the secrets of jail terminology, and for warning me to never drink the juice.

I want to give them a shout-out for reminding me how vital and beautiful a mother’s love can be, even when she can’t be with you all the time, or in their case, rarely ever.

I want to give them a shout-out for showing me to how to keep your hope up even in moments of deep despair. 

I can barely call myself a teacher when I leave the jail, because I so often am learning more from them than I could ever teach.  A shout-out is the least I can do.  

Michael Bennett, Juvenile teacher

Idealizations

Before I came to Chatham I watched a documentary about teaching Shakespeare in prisons. Everyone looked happy. Students smiled while they acted and the experience transformed them into beings that had a purpose. Shakespeare erased any crimes they might have committed and made them human again. As an aspiring teacher, I found this to be attractive. It looked easy and benefited everyone involved. Learning is not meant to be contained to a university. When I started attending Chatham, I heard grad students talking about their experiences teaching in the Words Without Walls program. It seemed to be life changing for them and their students were all eager to soak in new knowledge and produce meaningful writing. Somehow, I had come to place teaching in an alternating space on a pedestal.

Since I’ve been teaching at Allegheny County Jail for five weeks, I’ve realized that the pedestal, everyone’s praise of the program, and my anticipations are not what matters here. It’s like praising charity because it makes us feel good or because it’s something we know we are supposed to do. That’s not the point of giving something meaningful to another person. I had idealized what teaching at the jail would be like and this reduced the reality in front of me.

Teaching at ACJ doesn’t work the way that the documentaries show. You can’t just walk in, hand everyone Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” speech, and expect everyone to connect with Hamlet’s distress and need for destruction. My students have such a wide range of unique interests. One likes to cook and read recipes, one enjoys studying spirituality, one wants to create his own business, others have written songs and play instruments. I am not living on a pedestal. Except for the fact that my students vary every week due to their circumstances, this is just like any classroom you may encounter. Anyone could show up in that room with me, every Friday morning. My students could be my cousin or my roommate. Anyone can make mistake. We are all human. This is what Shakespeare had taught me and what idealization had made me forget.

The broad range of interests in the classroom is not something that frustrates me, but something that enriches the environment for everyone. Give them a poem, and each of my students will see something different in that poem. If I tell them to write a letter about how they want to be remembered, it turns out that there are 12 different ways to write a letter. In all my years living in academia, I have never seen so much creativity in one place before. In order to write outside the box, you have to leave it behind.

Now that I have been teaching for a while, I’ve come to find that what really matters in Words Without Walls is much simpler than all the talk of mutual growth for students and teacher; though that is still a huge part of teaching. If I can teach them to write great metaphors, that’s fantastic. If I can broaden and fuel someone’s life-long interests in reading, even better. If I can learn 12 new ways to write a letter, I’m blown away. But my students don’t live their lives in the same way that I do, going about to classes and writing a five-page short story every week about how society has negatively affected our development of sexuality. I find that the greatest thing that I can give to my students is my time. Time for them to see a different room inside the jail. Time for them to think about a poem instead of who their enemies are. My purpose as a teacher has grown from learning this. Teaching isn’t just about handing out knowledge and hoping someone will take it. It’s not just about having a “greater purpose” either. Perhaps it is more about meeting the reality of our experiences. There’s more to teaching that you don’t always get to see. You won’t see it as long as the act of teaching is an ideal raised above our heads. 

Kellyn Yoder, teacher

Announcing The Maenads Fellowship.

We're so thrilled to announce the Maenads Fellowship.  

The Maenad Fellowship Program offers up to twelve fellowships a year to women who are in recovery from substance abuse. Fellows will participate in a twelve-week creative writing seminar on the Chatham University campus.

The seminar offers mentorship and instruction in the following areas:

• Creative writing. You’ll be taught by practicing, professional creative writers in order to generate new creative writing.
• Publication submission and design. You’ll work with professional designers and artists to design a beautiful publication of your work.
• Publicly presenting your work. You’ll have the chance to present your work at a public reading.

Fellows will receive a $500 gift card at the completion of the program. All supplies will be provided, including copies of your published work. Transportation and child-care for those in the Pittsburgh area will be provided.

The fellowships are competitive, and will be offered to those who demonstrate the most promise as writers as well as the highest level of commitment to attending all twelve weeks.

Details of the Spring 2017 seminar:

• Seminars run from Thursday, January 12-Thursday, April 13.
• We meet each Thursday night from 6:00-8:30 pm on Chatham’s Shadyside campus.
• The final reading and celebration will be on Friday, April 14.
• Fellows will receive their $500 compensation at the final event on April 14, along with copies of their published work.

Contact Brittney Hailer at Chatham to apply!  Bhailer@chatham.edu, or click contact us on this page!

This Is My Purpose

I'd never heard the words this is my purpose before, in my head or out loud, until I read about the Words Without Walls program over two years ago. It's the reason I applied to Chatham and it's one of the biggest reasons that I saw my degree through. I knew this was a place that I could contribute some small thing to, but I didn't go in not knowing what to expect.

Being in jail is a familiar feeling to me. I've spent the past six years of my life visiting my best friends from high school in jails, prisons, rehabs, psych hospitals, and half-way houses. I've picked friends up from police stations and witnessed relapse after relapse because, to loosely quote a friend of mine, "it's hard for people to get right without support, but it's hard to get support when you ain't right." 

When I was a teenager I fell in love with punk rock. And punks are a complicated people. There were parties, fights, and deals happening constantly, booze and drugs abound. Almost everyone I knew in high school was on something. Xanax, Oxy, Codeine, Adderall, Ecstasy, Acid, Mushrooms, Heroine, Meth, Crack, DMT and every OTC med you can think of, I've watched someone take; I watched my friend snort research chemicals he ordered from Japan off the internet. I stayed away from the drugs and dealing largely because of a congenital heart issue that I had surgery for when I was 15, but I was part of the life and I've been an unwitting accomplice on more than one occasion because of it. Most people just say to cut my loses and move on, but the one thing I learned from all that I witnessed in my youth is: most of the people in using drugs aren't bad people, they're just sad and messed up. 

I'm not making excuses for negative behavior; a crime is a crime--I'm not here to change anyone's politics, but most of the criminals I know need help and support, not time wasting in a box. Addicts need help. Ex-cons need help. Lower income communities that are deemed "bad-neighborhoods" that are riddled with gangs and food deserts need help. Everybody needs help. It doesn't make someone a bad person to need more help, more guidance.  During the few weeks that I've had the privilege of working with Words Without Walls, I heard stories that I've heard a dozen times before: violence, abuse, suicides, overdoses, drugs, homelessness and torn families. People are complicated and make mistakes, but those mistakes shouldn't stop a person from growing and having a future. When I show up to Allegheny County Jail at 8 am on a Friday, I'm tired, groggy, and usually hungry, but as soon as class starts and the stories start to come out my mind can focus. I think of my friends locked-up back home and know that even though it's just a three hour class once a week that these classes make a difference. The guys (and girls in the other classes) have the stage. They have a voice and an audience that understands them; and even if the audience doesn't understand them, at least there is someone to listen. It's a chance for catharsis and growth. And when the class is writing, and only the hum of the HVAC unit is audible, I can almost hear: This is my purpose. 

                                                                                                                                                   Tim Connor, teacher

Why I Volunteer In Jail

“You don’t get paid?” Darryl says. Darryl is one of my students, an African-American man in his mid-sixties. He wears the same ubiquitous red jumpsuit as the other seven inmates in my creative writing class. “But surely you get some type of credit?” 

“No,” I say. I shake my head. “No pay. No credit.”

I see the next question forming, see him judging whether or not it’s appropriate to ask. 

Then why are you here?

Why am I here? I’ve been asked that question over and over, by family and peers and even the inmates themselves. As a kid growing up in Pittsburgh, I used to crane my neck to look at the red brick building that leered over 376. For me, jail was an abstraction, a place you visited in Monopoly, or perhaps when you didn’t eat your peas, or brush your teeth. It wasn’t a place that people actually went. 

Even as I got older, and began to get into the kind of trouble that teenagers and college students often do, a stint in jail seemed as beyond me as a trip to Pluto. And yet, with age also came the realization that people do end up in jail, spending weeks or months or years on someone else’s schedule, shuffling across the same scarred linoleum and eating the same tepid food.

But not me. As long as I kept a generally respectful attitude toward the law, I could hike where I wanted and buy organic chicken at Whole Foods. 

This makes me uncomfortable. In his book, A Theory of Justice, the late moral philosopher John Rawls posits a thought experiment for determining the morality of a given issue; the “veil of ignorance” experiment suggests that we form a new society in which you might take on the same abilities, tastes, and position within the social order as anyone else. Before you’ve been “reassigned”—that is, while you still sit behind the veil of ignorance—could you consent to switching places with another person in society?

From this perspective, it’s easy to see that slavery, for example, is immoral, because what slaveowner would consent to taking the position of his slave? The jail system, especially the for-profit jail system, also strikes me as immoral, because there are many reasons for which I would not consent to being locked up. I should spend time in jail because I’m not wealthy enough to post bail? Because I smoked marijuana, which one out of every three Americans has tried, and didn’t have the resources to hire a lawyer?

I’m not naive enough to believe that all people are wired similarly; I understand that sociopaths exist. However, I also understand that many of the people in prison are just like me, and that given access to a relatively stable upbringing and a compassionate education, they could be the ones getting their quarter deposit back from the tiny lockers in the jail lobby and walking out into the bright Pittsburgh January, thinking of brunch. 

I teach in the Allegheny County Jail because society is unfair and jail sucks. Because I believe in social justice, and because it’s not so much for me, for four hours each week, to create a space for people to express themselves. Because if I were born to slightly different circumstances, I know what I’d want someone doing for me. 

Kenny Gould

Teacher

www.kennygould.com