Tutoring at Mount Hope

This morning I walked down Jerome Avenue in Mount Hope, central Bronx. I couldn’t help but notice: a car-repair shop with half-drawn blinds sprayed with graffiti; a young Black man strolling casually down the street with his jacket hood pulled up over his head; a teenage Hispanic Mom pushing a stroller and speaking nervously on the phone. The scene had a feel of an early 80s action movie - right before something bad was about to happen. The air was chilly, the sidewalk still covered with early-morning frost. I walked fast, feeling cold and slightly uncomfortable. I had been to the neighborhood several times before, but for the first time I really paid attention to its details: the people, smells, sights, noises. Suddenly the place seemed to have formed a barren, austere picture of a neighborhood where failure is everyday reality.

Mount Hope is a neighborhood that struggles with a relatively high crime rate and wide-spread indoor drug-dealing. Moreover, the area has four homeless shelters, which is disproportionally high compared to the number of its residents. Median household income is lower than in the Bronx as a whole, and so are its rents. Families tend to be larger than in other parts of the city. Foreign-born residents represent about 40 percent of the population. In fact, sixty percent were born in the Dominican Republic, Jamaica or Ecuador. Thirty-two percent of the population is Black, while less than two percent are White, non-Hispanic residents. The neighborhood also has low educational attainment, lower than the Bronx as a whole. Almost half of the population never completes high school.

Mount Hope Community Center lies just two blocks away from the 176th Street subway station. It is a two-story building, which houses a dozen classrooms used for various community programs. One such program offers high-school dropouts a chance to prepare for their GED exams. Two times a week New York Cares sends a small group of volunteers to tutor Mount Hope students in Math, English writing, Social Studies or Science. The building itself is nice, newly equipped with IKEA-style furniture. The classrooms, however, are a far cry from what is typical in American schools. The problem is not that they are simple and pragmatically furnished for any age group. (In fact, the classrooms look much better cared for than any Slovak classroom I’ve ever experienced during my school years.) The fact is that they are anonymous and empty: no creativity, no playfulness, no visible spirit of learning, discovery and self-expression; just a handful of posters cover the walls with homework assignments for ‘What do you want to be when you grow up’. Multiplication tables, drawn sloppily with colorful Sharpies, don’t offer any reason to look at them again. Black-and-white line drawings of Martin Luther King Jr. (colored by students) are tacked haphazardly on the walls and are a sad reminder that his message is still very relevant to this day.

This morning, as I waited for my math student, two assignments on the wall struck me as extremely telling: a boy wrote that he wanted to become a football player, so that he could earn a lot of money and a girl wanted to be a pediatrician, so that she could help children who are allergic to food. Not one poster mentioned professions such as lawyer, teacher, artist and musician. Not a single boy wanted to be an astronaut, an inventor or a builder of modern wonders of the world.

My student, L.G., arrived a few minutes later with a dog-eared textbook full of multiplication problems. As we sat down I asked him if he liked math at all. He said, ‘I don’t know.’ The problems looked scary even to me. No smileys at the end of a chapter, no pictures, no hints or tips how to crack a difficult task. For the next sixty minutes I tried my best to think of all the ‘magic’ my math teacher had taught me many years ago (and made me fall in love with Math then). L.G. noted everything down with his blunt pencil. I could tell he was good at multiplication. What he obviously lacked was an ability to think about the problems creatively, in an ‘out-of-the-box’ fashion. The feeling that the whole place lacked creativity stayed with for a long time after I walked out of the Center and made my way to the subway station.