The graduation class of 2017 performed an updated version of The Airborne Toxic Event's "Wishing Well."

All instruments, vocals, and arrangements were done by the 8th grade graduates of class 411.

Wishing You Well


'Ice is dead."

In 2008, just months into my new career as a jail teacher, students came into class sharing devastating news.

Christopher Robinson, "Ice",  was a lanky kid who still smiled. Arrested for violating probation, he had the levity of someone who knew jail was temporary. He notices those who sits by the window motionless for hours on end, and engages them. He was unafraid to talk and share jokes with those whose fists no longer unclenched. 

They said he was beaten to death in an area off camera, its gate left open for the assailants by an officer who ordered the beating. His ribs broke, and punctured his lungs. Years later two officers plead guilty to charges in connection with the case, and given sentences less than two-years. (The boys who carried out the attack are serving 10 and 13 years.)

The Department of Corrections said nothing and the school did nothing. News reports didn't come out until weeks later. But we weren't going to forget.

We spent the rest of that day scrapping materials for a makeshift service. We made a headstone out of a cardboard box, a marker, and a xeroxed photo. We placed it in the hallway outside pf class, and kids from every class walked by to lay down origami flowers.

We were confused. We wondered why some lives are worth so much more than others, and we sought to understand why a world built and upheld by people who identify as kind and good, just like us, could end up being the opposite.

The dialogue after the tragedy helped us come up with our one and only class rule, or rather a belief we'd choose to believe, no matter what:

"Good things happen to good people, because good people do good things. And there are good people in this world."

That became the fiber of our connections to one another, and paved the way for the things we would do and learn. This track written the time of President Obama's election, was the first class project in service of this new connective fiber between us.

Little moments throughout the time we spent together would remind us of it and that it's true. The first of them happened later that week.

We caught an officer through the window quietly sobbing in front of Ice's headstone. I was shocked. She's someone who is stern and loud and often yell-talked to me the same way she did to inmates. I always thought she didn't think much of teachers, but she was also the only officer who would never bring the kids in late.

She walked back to her post, not knowing that we saw, or how much it mattered that we did.

We Are Presidents

The Declaration of Change

Lyrics: 

Another day another way, to depart from poverty without any cancels or any delays, the temptations too strong and we were forced to stray, our lives is but a gamed that we were forced to play, somebody get me out before we die today, no time to go to church but still have time to pray, any means necessary got to make the pay, and if it’s violence then I have nothing to say, nothing to say

My killer instinct is getting me, never living with sympathy, screw it, I’m rapping, there’s nothing for me to speak explicitly. I’m lurking and smirking, watching my enemies closely emerging, thinking a brother like me is just living picture perfect.

What’s the verdict on my case, I don’t know how to control what’s being set into stone, til it’s again standing alone, dark room and in the zone, seeing vision and bad pictures of past figures of being home.

Wishing I’d hit the lottery there’s something inside of me, shooting for what I want to see, this life is an anomaly, I’m making moves in this world like the game of Monopoly, see it’s simple to roll the dice, as a minority.

Now why should I care, the life I long for, it was never there, so I walk in the darkness I will never fear, so I walk in the darkness I will never fear (X2)

I remember in the 90’s, when I was just a baby, the crack epidemic it was killing niggas crazy. My mom she was strung out, my dad loved the bottle, so my brother dropped out of school to promise me a tomorrow.

When I just a boy, trying to fill the void, Hip Hop came along and it was more than noise. Throughout the years this would be the game that I’ve endured, now it’s flowing through my veins, it hears the pain that I’ve endured.

Music held my hand, when nobody was there for me, so every song was kind of like air to me. If you wonder why, the darkness emerged a lot, poetically speaking to God in every single line, my post office flow, I deliver every time, music gave me a soul and in return I gave it mine.

This is all part of the hustle son don’t blame me, because God’s first words were music and that’s what saved me.

Nothing To Say

Prior to being a principal, I taught adolescence boys incarcerated in one of the most violent places in the country: the Rikers Island jail of New York City.

Trapped alongside adults in a world where violence is currency, unable to post bail but unconvicted of any charges, they wait for the legal system to determine their plea bargains and/or sentences, upward to 25-years to life.

Guilty or not, almost all accept the plea bargain. Without the funds to pay for legal representation, the risk of losing trial and being subjected to the extortionate sentencing is simply too high. 

With little input on how or where each of their stories began, they resign to the fact that now too their endings will be written by someone else's hand. 

Nevertheless, these tracks are the chapters in which they themselves held the pen.



mr.kobot

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