The (not so) Simple Life

(photo by Schaaflicht. Link below post)

I am in this weird spot of trying to relate to a 13 year old girl who has already out BarStar'd the best of my skankily-dressed, of-legal-age-and-above Uni friends. I've never failed a class in my life, and she's practically flunking out of elementary school. My family has always stood behind me, been supportive. Her family, at least as she describes it, is in pieces.

I am, of course, talking about our little Paris. Paris, of such charming slogans as "K whatever, G-bye!" and "Fuck, ok, don't shit on my head over it" and, oh,  my personal fave, "OHMYFUCKINGGOD this is taking so LONG [elapsed time: 5 seconds] go kill yourself! [to her blackberry]."



I've decided to try to get across to her some of the basic life skills I feel are very important when attempting to be taken seriously by the adult world. Namely, that you can think someone is a "stuck-up, two-faced cunt-wipe" as much as you want, and you can say it to trusted friends too if need be, but if you call them that to their face, there will likely be repercussions, sooner or later, that you don't like. Especially if that cunt-wipe is your teacher. Or another kid at school. Or your mom. I'm trying to teach her, "Look, if you wanna be a bitch and think bitchy things about people, go ahead! It's exhausting, but you're totally allowed. Just don't be an idiot and shoot yourself in the foot by running your mouth off at someone who might be famous via YouTube or something tomorrow when you need a favour." Which is everyone, because people get famous for no reason at all these days.

The meat and potatoes of our tutoring sessions so far have consisted of basic ratios and fractions from asinine Math 8 textbooks: "3 apples and 1 orange give the ratio 3:1 apples to oranges! Bobby has 1 marble, Kenny has four. Bobby has 1/4 the number of marbles as Kenny."... No wonder these kids bbm faux-suicide notes to one another in class. I can hardly blame her for hating it. She's been watching Jamie-Lynn Spears' pregnancy scandal on tv and dodging flung cutlery at home, tweeting and facecreeping and youtubing all before puberty, and they're trying to hold her interest with marbles and fresh fruit? Amazing. What planet are they on? Sadly, I'm about 90% sure that if all the fraction and percentage word problems were based on such real world problems as "Dealer A wants to sell you 1/8 of an ounce of pot for $25.00. Dealer B will sell you 1/6 ounce of the same weed for $35.50. Who's ripping you off?" alot of these "problem" kids would get it in an instant. I'm not condoning drug use (I've never done drugs. Ever.), especially in children, but my point is that if the work isn't at all relevant to their lives, they'll see no reason to care.

Paris is one of those kids who gets labelled a "problem" by all of her teachers and then thrown into the "problem" bucket with all the "problem" kids. They assign them special "problem" teachers (like me?) to help them sort their shit. The thing is that Paris is actually in some deep, deep shit here. Those ratios and fractions? Asinine as they are, she doesn't get them. Or, she does, but it takes her a long time to wrap her head around the concept because she's so busy complaining about boredom (how can you be bored if you have something to do!?) or texting on her phone, or twirling her pen. She has an attention span on par with that of a gerbil. She is me after I've let myself get sucked into Tv for weeks on end: Addicted to the novelty of another juicy image flashed across the screen, then taken away. Another potential message. Another fun commercial break. And she's completely apathetic about the fact that she can't focus, even when I point it out.

What the hell? This girl is from InnerCity. We don't have safety nets or trust funds. We don't have rich Daddies and Mommies to bail us out of hard times. In a way, life gets real simple at this point. No guess work at all. You've got to make it, one way or another, because once you start falling there's less and less to grasp at. And not everyone is lucky enough to have a friend at the bottom, open-armed and bracing for your fall.

Which, in Paris' case, leaves one of two options for where her head is actually at: She's either 100% out of touch with the reality of what her life is gonna be like if she can't scratch together something better than a 6th grade education, or she's long-term suicidal. As in "fuck it, I might as well go hard now because I've screwed it all up so bad that there's nothing I can do about it now, and no hope for me." I really, really hope that in her case it's simply ignorance. Ignorance is easier than hopelessness.

(Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/schaaflicht/346073/)