Chalked: A Philadelphia Vocabulary
Lesson for Governor Tom Corbett
1. Definition
Governor Corbett: I imagine that
you’ve never heard that word, the way it resounds from the mouths of Philly kids.
“It’s so chalked”—adjective,
declarative. “Chalk it!”—Verb,
imperative. “He chalked me”—Verb, linking subject and object.
I’ll give you a few examples—the
word in its context. With only two counselors for 600 seniors, many of our
students consider college chalked. Or: Given the large class sizes, certain
innovative projects must simply be chalked. Or: This austerity budget, combined
with moves toward privatization, will eventually result in the School District
of Philadelphia being chalked.
To be more specific, in usage, I
could say that you, Governor Corbett, chalked your scheduled appearance at my
school this past January. Remember? We had to re-do the gym floors. We had to
shine those floors up, maybe so you could look down and see yourself, smiling,
with all of those good-looking minorities smiling behind you. Those floors were
so polished, you could’ve probably seen your own winking blue eye, seen the
flash of the press photographers’ cameras going off. But your helicopter came
around, and its noise hacked and cleaved my lesson on archetypal themes, and then
nothing happened. Because you chalked it.
I went to the protest that was
meant for you, and I stood outside, in the weirdly warm ice-melt air. Frankly,
I’d found your interest in coming to my school pretty inscrutable from the get-go.
So, the kind of sighed, bemused word, the way it slipped, lazy, from me, was the
perfect way to describe your no-show. I stood there, confused mostly by the
fact that I was standing there—outside! when there’s work to be done!—in the
noncommittal January sun. “Wow,” I said to someone, “I can’t believe he chalked
it.” Sadly, that half-yawn slackerly slang was all the outrage I could marshal.
I had other things on my mind, because, as I’m sure you must know, teaching is pretty all-consuming—especially these days, in the School District
of Philadelphia. Honestly, I was distracted with wondering how my kids were
going to do in their debate next period (the topic, if you’re interested, was:
“does American literature prove that the American
Dream is accessible to all people, regardless of race, nationality, gender or
class?”). I know you said that your visit was cancelled due to “adult
theatrics,” but if there were any theatrics going on, I totally missed them. I do wonder, though, Governor. Were
the theatrics all lady-swoon and
tearful murmur? Or maybe a Brecht-esque explosion of firecrackers under complacent
chairs? Perhaps the biggest showing of theatrics
is just us—teachers and students in Philadelphia—going about our days as if
your budget cuts hadn’t utterly decimated and demoralized us.
The thing is, I’m an English
teacher, so I think carefully about words, their smoothness and consistency and
odd-colored underbellies. And, really, chalked doesn’t describe what you
did—any more than theatrics describes
what we did. When one chalks something, one doesn’t
just sidle away. The word—chalked!—spirals out in cyclones of snow-day
laughter, right after the early dismissal’s been announced. Or it cracks from
behind teeth when there aren’t any other choices left. True, it’s the new
equivalent of screw it—said, maybe, with
the force of a fist that punches a wall in its frustration.
So, Governor. You might’ve chalked our entire
School District with bluster and bravado. But, on that haphazard,
anxious-making day in January—you didn’t actually chalk it. Your helicopter just looped up in an elliptical retreat. The
congratulations you supposedly came to utter trailed off in a lame dot-dot-dot.
There was no chalking; there was only the empty sky where you—The Honorable Tom
Corbett—hummed tentative and metallic, further and further away.
2. Etymology
I wonder about that word—chalked.
I’ve come to like it, the way it feels like a heavy book—maybe a
dictionary—thrown to the ground. So I’m curious about where chalked came from, how it found its way
to the tongues of young people here. I have a few rather morose associations. I’m
know that the word probably doesn’t come from the devastating places that I’m
imagining. But still, Governor. It’s been a hard year, here in Philly. So it’s
difficult for me to avoid thinking about worst possible origins, the worst
possible outcomes.
When I think of chalked, I think of white lines, in
bundles, on the beige cinderblock of a prison wall. I think of a life, or five
years, or six months, ticked out in that way—another day chalked, done with, slashed
down and dismissed. Have you ever had that feeling, Governor? That each day is
the same—that each day amounts to nothing but another cross-hatch, another one
over, a ghosting of useless white across your life? Have you ever wondered,
while you’re having your sunlit breakfast, what the 51,500 prisoners of
Pennsylvania think about the days that they are beginning? I myself can’t
pretend to imagine what it would be like, to wake up that way and try to convinced yourself you actually want to be awake.
I can't tell you much about the day-to-day lives of incarcerated people, but I can tell you something about
teachers in Philadelphia. How an elementary-school teacher awakes to another
day of: 33 kids in her class, 8 kids with extreme special needs, 0 support
staff. You’ve heard, and I assume summarily chalked, such statistics plenty of
times. But I can also tell you how, as she prepares her blackboard in the
morning, her lungs expand and take in the feeling—again, awful. How she writes out vocabulary words in white,
controlled curls, knowing that this will be the most peaceful moment of her
day, that the hours ahead will be all unwieldiness and yelling. And how her
brain will get encircled in the desperate, claustrophobic mantra of please stop—make it stop—please stop. Governor
Corbett, let me tell you: she’s marking down the days till summer break. And if
she’s not, she’s marking down the days till she quits the District for good.
Governor Corbett, when I think of chalked, I also think about the negative
space traced on a pavement, when the cops chalk the contours of a body. It’s
true—I’m sure you know—that the chalking thing, when it comes to violent
deaths, is now merely a trope. But its symbolism remains. Its tension between
here and not-here, the way it renders a life into two-dimensional, the crimson contrasted
against the precise white. It reminds me of that late-May night—when the
curtains on my office window were gusting around, and I was trying to get work
done, and a young man was shot in the street below me. I imagine that you’ve
never experienced someone being shot dead right outside your home, so I’ll tell
you what it was like. That young man’s mother found out about her son’s death
right under my window, as she was rushing around the corner to see if he was
all right. The sound she made—like a laugh sucked backward through an echoing
drainpipe; like a god’s lung collapsing; like a creaturely, wordless flaying, with
everything being rent from everything. Like none of that, actually. Like
nothing—believe me, Governor—that I can actually describe. I tried to bring her
a cup of water—a blue plastic cup—but she was already locked inside someone’s
arms, and being led away. Later, a neighbor, as if to reassure me, told me that
it only happened because the kid was involved with drugs.
But, Governor Corbett, I think about
the outlines of each kid in this city who died before his time, her time. On
what wall could we trace the silhouette of Laporshia
Massey, 12 years old, who died of an asthma attack when no nurse was on duty at
her school? Where could we draw a likeness of the little boy, unnamed, who lay
down in the hall at Andrew Jackson Elementary, and died later that same day? Of
course, each child surely deserves a better monument. But—these days, in
Philadelphia—kids get sick in school and then they die. This is, in part,
because they seem to be of very little value to those who are in power. So
then, perhaps chalk—so easily scuffed away, so quickly washed off—would be a
fitting monument for those whose importance is, apparently, ephemeral.
Governor, I’m sure you’ll say that
I’m employing the typical adult theatrics, or exploiting tragedy for political
purposes, or simply using faulty logic. But try listening to the sound I heard,
that May evening. Think about how the mothers of those two children must’ve
cried with that same throat-turned-inside-out kind of keening. And then imagine
listening to that every single time a kid in Philly dies or is sent to jail.
At the very least, that cry—multiplied by hundreds, thousands—might give you a
sense of this city, these schools. I’m saying this only to be helpful, to give
you a sense of what Philly feels like for a lot of folks. Especially since you
don’t come here very often, and you seem to prefer the Bellevue to the streets,
and you’ve never, ever been inside a Philly public school.
But back to the word chalked, its derivations. Nobody knows
where it came from. It’s probably something more innocuous, though, like chalk it up. Chalk it up to the Tea
Party and partisan politics. Chalk it up to four years of a terrible governor,
but— hey!—at least a new one’s on his way! Chalk it up to the economy or the Federal
Government’s stimulus funds. Chalk it up to what happens when Philadelphians
don’t vote.
We will chalk it up and chalk it
up. But there might not be enough chalk—in the District, the State, maybe even
in the whole country—to chart everything that has been and will be lost.
3. See Also
This past school year, that
word—chalked—kept on overturning in my chest; kept on milling itself, phlegm-like,
through my lungs. I had five classes and four different preparations. On
Sundays, when I’d sit down at my desk to plan my lessons, the windows of the
church across the street streamed with early morning light. I was still working
when the windows went pink and opaque in the afternoon. Kids on the street
below played before dinner and then played after dinner, and played past their
bedtimes. And still I was awake, past the bedtimes of those kids, the bedtimes
of their parents. I watched as blinds slatted and people had other sorts of
Sunday nights. A sort of desperation circumvented my breath. It was 2 AM, and I
still wasn’t done. And, so—I chalked. I chalked great grammar lessons that were
too complicated. I chalked whole units—Their
Eyes Were Watching God; Fahrenheit
451. I chalked assignments that I’d been excited about and I chalked
interventions that I knew were necessary. I chalked and chalked, and just kept
chalking.
Governor Corbett, I will tell you:
for pretty much the first time in my nine-year career as a teacher, I made
decisions that I knew wouldn’t be the best for my students. I made these
decisions because—at 6 PM—I needed to eat my first meal of the day. Or because
I had to call someone who was dying. Or because I just couldn’t keep going. And
I just couldn’t keep going a lot of the time.
And this whole year, Governor, I
felt like I was suddenly a terrible teacher. I felt like someone had erased the
board, and there was only the dimmest imprint of the teacher that I used to be.
Sometimes I didn’t even feel like that. Sometimes I just felt like I was the annoying
cloud of chalk dust that got left behind, after all the erasing. I saw everyone
else still teaching, still doing their thing, and I didn’t understand how they
were still so vibrant, so clean-lined and defined. Many days, I felt like any
word that I could write on any board had been obliterated. This very blog,
even, was chalked for the entirety of the school year. I was so worn-down with
the day-to-day, I couldn’t even write about the larger injustice—which is, I suppose,
the method by which injustice thrives. (I wonder, Governor Corbett, whether you’d
agree.) But I also felt that, in writing the blog, I’d be false, a fraud, since
I was no longer the teacher that I’d been.
You know that bare-bones budget
they keep talking about? The one that you, Governor, have instituted over the
past four years? Well, to me, it feels like those bones were not only bare—they
were ground-up, scattered, turned into some kind of fine white dust.
And that’s why I’ve been thinking
so much about the word chalked. I like
the way it breaks, smashes like rock-slabs, gives its granite anger in the
generous way that breaking goes. In the chalked, there seems to be strength. And
sometimes I feel like that strength is the only strength that I have left.