When I came up to Chicago I left my Wire DVDs behind. The Wire would be too intense, I assumed, in my pre-arrival scared out of my wits state, to rewatch any portion of during my time working at the Center.
Time passed, and I started feeling nostalgic for the crew. I wanted to see what my new perspective would bring to, say, Season Four, which has a focus on schools and students and what works and what doesn't. So when I went home for my birthday, I returned to Chicago with the fourth season DVDs under my arm.
Last night I watched episodes two and three and was struck by how much made sense to me now. The collared shirt uniforms in different colors signalling different grades. The teachers who shut the place down just by walking into the room, as opposed to teachers who yell into the void.
The hairline class differences, compounded by middle school and magnified by poverty.
The first time I watched this scene (and, indeed, the entire third episode which, directly or indirectly leads up to this moment) I didn't connect sudden violence with longstanding dynamics between the characters; I thought of it more as a standalone bullying incident. Now, though, it's part of a longer trajectory, and the treatment one girl gets at the hands of the other is wrapped up in Dukie and how his classmates say his clothes smell and they don't want to sit next to him and how one of his friends(?) wordlessly hands him a bagged lunch on the way to school on the first day even though he gets left out on the curb when the rest of them get invited inside by a third friend's mother.
There's a girl in my class who smells a little bit, and her siblings smell a little bit and she wears a uniform even when the other students change out of theirs. It's interesting because she's at the Center during the afternoon but she attends the same school that the kids who are at the Center during the evening attend. The afternoon kids always seem a little intimidated of the evening kids, and they mask it with comments, usually ones about how they smell or how they dress or how they're "neighborhood kids" even though practically everyone is relatively local. Still, it's obvious that there are distinctions that I've only recently stumbled upon, and that in the minds of middle schoolers have taken up a huge amount of significance.
In the evenings I have two sets of sisters with one younger brother who are my go-to people if I want to get anything done. One set attends during the afternoon as well and their mother is a staff person at the Center. The other set of sisters live a couple houses down and their mother comes in with them as a parent volunteer. They can't stand each other. Or can they? Two weeks ago, the oldest sister from one set almost got in a fist fight (which yours truely had to break up with slightly more success than Mr. Prez) with the younger brother from the other set. Yesterday, the other oldest sister was seen encouraging the other younger brother on his artwork. Who knows. Maybe they see a little too much of themselves in each other. I know how that goes, and I suspect you do too.
The kid you can rely on. The one about to go off the deep end. The smiling entrepreneur. The self-appointed boss. The actual boss. That kid: the kid who, no matter how dire the home lives of all the other students, is the one you would never, ever choose to go home with at the end of the day. The kid who might be okay. They're all characters on The Wire, but I know one of each--at least one of each--in real life too. And, yes, that's intense, but it's also made me appreciate that what I'm seeing is not just in my imagination.
The teacher who's born to it. The teacher at the end of their rope. The teacher who's just in it for the paycheck. The teacher who might be okay. I know those people too.
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