To The Senator

October 26, 2002

Last night, I went out with the girl who is curating a group art show that I’ll be in. We met up with a couple of her friends. My name is Jamie, and her name is Jaime, which made for a confusing night—but whatever.

Anyway, one of Jaime’s friends is a 6th-grade teacher in the South Bronx. His school is rated the 5th worst in New York, and he has the worst kids in the school. His dad is a teacher in the Midwest, and they came up with the idea to have Midwest kids and Bronx kids exchange letters. The Illinois kids wrote things like, “I play soccer. Our team is ranked 2nd in our division,” and so on. The Bronx kids wrote back things like, “Yo! Soccer is whack. It is a fucking whack sport. Peace out—p.s. peace out, soccer is fucking whack.”

Another funny thing he told us about was vocabulary lessons. The kids get a list of words to study—spellings, definitions, etc.— study it for a week, and then are tested on it. The word “Senator” was on a recent list. He said to a girl, “Ok, use the word senator in a sentence.”

She said, “I ate a pizza—it was good—I ate it all the way to the senator.”

I think he said he gave her an “A.”