Personal Narrative: The Surfside School
I grew up in Coney Island, Brooklyn in the 90’s. I lived in one of its many New York City housing developments. As a child I can remember the elevators and stairwells of my building smelling rank from urine. I can still see and feel the bullet holes under our mailbox from a shootout that happened under my bedroom window when I was seven. The chain fences that squared off all the grass areas of our complex. I can still see the poorly painted monkey bars, and the wood-chipped seesaws on the black tarmacs behind our building. Across the street and a little more than half way into the block was my second elementary school. I can’t quite remember why I had to leave the first one, but The Surfside School is where I have most of my elementary school
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I was one of two Black students in seventh-grade honors math, and the only one in my section. Mr. Driggs was also jokingly named “The Devil” because no matter the season, he was always hot and would force the students to sit in the class with the windows open. The Devil had a tendency of publicly embarrassing me in class by highlighting the things I didn’t know or understand and not allowing me to exhibit the things that I did. I can recall one particularly embarrassing incident when we received our tests back. He menacingly slithered around the room placing our tests scores on our desks and eyeing us from the top of his glasses. When it was time for him to deliver my fate he slammed the test down and shouted as if he wanted the world to know, “FAIL!” It was one of the worst experiences, I tried to refute his statement and said “a sixty-eight is not failing” to which he replied “in honors math it is, you need a seventy”. The person next to me tried to console me but I could feel the anger boiling inside of me like a pot of oatmeal on too high trying to bubble over.
Immediately following this experience, he proceeded with success to dismiss me from honors math and send me to regular math classes in the middle of my seventh grade year. Everyone was wondering what I was doing there and I resented having to be pushed to a lower level. This moment of my life made me lose interest in math and to this very day I avoid it whenever possible out of fears I built up from that horrific
I was one of two Black students in seventh-grade honors math, and the only one in my section. Mr. Driggs was also jokingly named “The Devil” because no matter the season, he was always hot and would force the students to sit in the class with the windows open. The Devil had a tendency of publicly embarrassing me in class by highlighting the things I didn’t know or understand and not allowing me to exhibit the things that I did. I can recall one particularly embarrassing incident when we received our tests back. He menacingly slithered around the room placing our tests scores on our desks and eyeing us from the top of his glasses. When it was time for him to deliver my fate he slammed the test down and shouted as if he wanted the world to know, “FAIL!” It was one of the worst experiences, I tried to refute his statement and said “a sixty-eight is not failing” to which he replied “in honors math it is, you need a seventy”. The person next to me tried to console me but I could feel the anger boiling inside of me like a pot of oatmeal on too high trying to bubble over.
Immediately following this experience, he proceeded with success to dismiss me from honors math and send me to regular math classes in the middle of my seventh grade year. Everyone was wondering what I was doing there and I resented having to be pushed to a lower level. This moment of my life made me lose interest in math and to this very day I avoid it whenever possible out of fears I built up from that horrific