I am a Promise

I finish this film relating to the overwhelming sense of unease and sadness and weight Mrs. Bernie discusses in her last interview on the graduation day of her fifth graders. The future of her kids' lives that she looks into is bleak--she recognizes that their graduation all too often comes to equate a step out of the space of learning and academic pursuit provided in the school, and a step into world of the drugs and violence that lives in constant proximity to the school. Mrs. Bernie recognizes the structural violence affecting the lives of her children and of their families. The "inequity" she refers to limits her ability to transform the school into an environment which can likely overcome and pervade the world which waits for them at dismissal.

Mrs. Bernie, like the principle at City Springs, recognizes that her students must be armed with certain tools to enable them to survive in their world. However, fundamentally the schools approach this task at two different points. City Springs felt that in order for children to learn and pursue academic success, they must first be "instructed" in foundational learning "skills"--they must know how to read before they can begin to learn beyond that and change their communities. With the Stanton school however, the practice of teaching the children is encompassed by an belief that, "The children want to learn, they can learn; but first they want to know that someone understands them and loves them." As Nieto discusses, the narratives of the children themselves are given central value to their learning experience. In the all boys class taught by Mr. Coax, the class discussion centered around the students' experiences growing up in abusive families or communities. They discussed how to deal with the violence around them once they left the classroom.