The Gum

During our talk about Rosa Parks and the civil rights movement last week, one sixer shared that the sixers are organizing to try to get gum chewing permitted at school. I had noticed quite a lot of gum chewing lately. I’ve asked a few kids to spit out gum, but I think the gum chewing might be keeping them a bit quieter so I’ve been inconsistent with enforcement. After this first sixer piped up, the rest erupted in a barrage of comments about how unfair it was that they couldn’t chew gum. I tried to support them in their social action plans, such as they were, by remarking that I was surprised that teen daughter was not only allowed to chew gum in high school, she was allowed to bring her cd player and could listen to music as she moved from class to class.
One kid yelled out, “You have no idea how many of us are listening to ipods at recess. We just wear our hoods and the supervisors don’t know that we have them with us.” I turned away and began readying the VCR for the Mighty Times video viewing.
Later I told Teen Daughter that I was pleasantly surprised that the kids were sharing their stories with me. “Maybe they trust me,” I wondered.
“They might trust you,” she answered, “Or more likely, they don’t really care what you think.” I had to admit that the latter rings more true at this point. And really, w/e.
p.s. Foto Credit for this pic of happy Samantha as Spider: Menosky