I Am_. I Am Not_.
One morning I spent an hour with a 4th grade class at P.S. 197 in Harlem. Going into schools as a volunteer for Behind the Book is always an experience and I never get tired of the controlled chaos of it all.
As I was signing into the school, a woman poked her head out of a stairwell and said to the security guard, “If you see a little kid running through here, grab him.” The security guard didn’t even look up, just nodded her head, “Okay,” and the woman disappeared and I wondered how on earth the security guard would be able to decide which little kid to grab, as there seemed to be an endless stream of them, coming in and out of the stairwell, tumbling down the hallways, practically swinging from the rafters there was so much energy and enthusiasm and excitement in the air.
In his book, What Every 4th Grade Teacher Needs to Know, Mike Anderson summarizes fourth graders, who are mostly nine or ten years old, as extremely intense, prone to being critical of themselves and others, and often anxious. They are also developing stronger cognitive skills and while they can be “easily overwhelmed,” they are also highly verbal and excited by new experiences and interactions. These kids may still be “very concrete” in their thinking, but they’re also starting to see the bigger picture and understand social issues.
The class at P.S. 197 had recently read Black Girl Magic, a poem by Mahogany L. Browne, and talked about poetry with the 2019 NYC Youth Poet Laureate, Camryn Bruno. Students had copies of Bruno’s poem “My I-den-tity” and had talked about the connections between that piece and the way in which Browne deliberately address hurtful stereotypes in order to take away their power: “You ain’t supposed to have nothing to say unless it’s a joke / Because you ain’t supposed to love yourself Black girl / You ain’t supposed to find nothing worth saying in all that brown.”
Black Girl Magic is an intense piece and I was curious to see how these 4th graders had engaged with it. On the day I volunteered, students were working on poems of their own, and it was clear to me right away that Black Girl Magic and “My I-den-tity” had resonated with these kids. Their poems were full of declarations of themselves and used rhythm and repetition to establish a tone and an energy that seemed perfectly appropriate to the energy of their nine- and ten-year-old selves. Each of the three boys I worked with had no trouble claiming themselves, though as Anderson’s research suggested, their announcements tended to be more literal—“I am a gamer”—than abstract, but still: there is something primally important about filling in the blank after “I am,” something very powerful just in the act of announcing one has an identity to claim—think of how Langston Hughes did so in Theme for English B and I, Too.
Fourth grade is also the start of the countdown from childhood to adolescence, the time in which boys flash occasional glimpses of the young men they might become. Early on in our session, my table of boys was a little rowdy—grabbing for pencils, play-shoving each other, nothing crazy at all but still, noise levels were moving up and I saw a teacher looking our way. “Guys,” I whispered, making my eyes wide and tilting my head toward the teacher, “Y’all, we are minutes away from getting in trouble.” These boys, clearly no strangers to seeing exactly how far the envelope could go, followed my gaze and immediately silence reigned. I polled the boys quietly as to who the troublemakers were in the class. It was the three of them, they quickly agreed, plus “the big kid over there.” I checked the board, where the teacher had written out the groups, and sure enough, each of these cheerful, exuberant, engaged kids had a star next to his name, which meant we could not do our group work in the hallway or elsewhere but had to stay in the classroom where a closer eye would be kept on their work and their attention to it.
I got each boy going on revisions to his poem—one making a list of words that rhymed with “think,” another providing more detail as to what it means that he is “like a bee,” and the third making a list of everything he could think of that was “sweet,” a word he had used to describe himself. As I watched them laboring over their papers, earnest little boys now vibrating with excitement when they had a good idea, then struck with despair when they felt stuck, I thought about how often in the coming years they would be filling in the blanks after “I am,” and “I am not.” How would they come to choose their identities, the words that would define them?
When Behind the Book comes into a classroom, we mean to show our students that all manner of worlds and futures are possible. I hope that as these cherubic little self-professed troublemakers grow up, they’ll find a future where they will choose to write “I am playful,” and “I am kind,” and “I am caring,” and continue to realize they have so much worth saying.
by Casey Cornelius
An identity poem by a 4th grader, A.B.
People say who am I. I think in
my head I’m very important
but I still introduce
myself. Who am I? I am a black male
with peace, I’m a male who wants to be a basketball
player when I grow up
but if I put to
much pressure I might
throw up. I am
peace like a bee because
a bee don’t sting unless
you attack it like I don’t
strike unless someone strike
at me that’s why I’m like
a bee. And it feels
so good to be captain
because all my people
follow me. Who amI?
A Leader.