A dialogue from my trip to McGivney Academy about an average day in science class.
Principal Looney: Show Mr. Berz your sweet glasses.
Mr. Biolchino: Oh.
PL: Check these things out.
MB: This is for if you’re in a restaurant and you…
PL: —reading at night…
Mr. Biolchino puts on his glasses and switches on lights on either side of them.
JB: Oh yeah!
PL: Isn’t that a great idea?
MB: I had these on in my bedroom and my wife walks down the hall and she freaks out, cos that was the only lights that were on.
PL: Those are pretty cool. Yeah. Mr. Biolchino does science, forensic science…
MB: Something that they have a puzzle, they have to put the pieces together. Trying to stimulate their thinking as opposed to just giving them something and them give it back by rote, you know? Which is the traditional thing. But these students we have have to work harder at that cos their comprehension is lower. So that’s what you have to do.
JB: How long have you been teaching here?
MB: Couple years. I’ve been teaching for about twenty. Most of it in Detroit. At-risk students.
JB: At DPS?
MB: No I never worked at a DPS. Hamtramck and a number of charter schools. I worked for… I don’t know if you’re familiar with Wolverine Human Services.
PL: They’re somewhere around here, too.
MB: They have three churches that they bought from the arch diocese and converted the convents to living quarters for the residential programs. So I was there for like four years. So I’ve had a real kind of a… I didn’t become a teacher until forty. Most schools want to hire twenty-year-old kids out of school, but that’s ok. I’m getting to the end of my road so…
PL: And he’s happy about that.
JB: Do you like being here?
MB: the principal’s a… (laughs) they appreciate my sense of humor to some degree, but you know, I was in Vietnam. After that I don’t get too excited about, you know…
JB: Sitting at a desk?
MB: Yeah. You know, these kids are all… they come up and try to go through that… they like to put on a show—how tough they are. And I just throw it back at ‘em.
PL: I like to put it like, you ever see Jurassic Park? Where the raptors, they like got that electric fence and the raptors keep hitting that electric fence, then they’re searching for the weak spot in the fence—that’s how these kids do it. They’ll test everyone until they find that one person who will just crumble. And just… (makes cracking sound)
JB: And you probably don’t have very many people that’ll crumble here.
PL: Not really.
MB: Not the teachers. The teachers give it back. They’ll come up to my desk and look across like (gives stare)… I go wow, that’s pretty good. Did you practice that in the mirror or what? And they’d just be… you’re sarcastic! And it’s like, you come up to my desk and give me all this and I’m giving a little bit back to you and you get upset cos I’m sarcastic? it’s funny cos these guys, they want to be men, but they’re pretty sensitive and they react to it sometimes like children. And I say, you can’t have both—you gotta tell me what you want me to treat you like and I’ll go accordingly. But they, from where they come from, they’re having a difficult time. They’re hurt, abandoned, I mean, all those things. And we’re trying to put things together for them. It’s a real uphill struggle.
JB: Is it hard to engage them in the subject matter?
MB: It depends. Sometimes they are more attuned to it. You have to have a hook in it. You have to have something that they are familiar with to some degree and would like to know more about. Those things. And they basically, there are people here who don’t… it just kind of goes back…
PL: It’s almost like you don’t know what you’re going to get.
MB: And it could be day to day. Some kid finds some bad news, blah blah blah, he’ll pull a couple kids in with him, and it’s pretty weird. When I put it out like that I go, what am I doing?
PL: Mr. Biolchino had four or five books go out your window the other day?
JB: Out the window?
PL: They threw his stapler out the window, his tape dispenser ended up on the road, it was… and then the girl said, “I didn’t do it!”
MB: Right.
PL: And then her aunt came in?
MB: Her older sister.
PL: Her older sister came in all “motherfucker!” and “my sister didn’t do that,” blah blah blah, and then we go to this other kid, we go, “hey man, did she do it?” “Yeah! I saw her!”
MB: I walk in from a meeting and she’s dancing around, “Mr. Biolchino! Uh, you wanna go looking through the window?” And I look at my desk and I go, “I know what’s out there.” And she was pretty upset… she says, “you’re getting mad aren’t ya?” I say, “no…”
PL: Check out this stapler I got. Specially ordered. It’s nothing special. You know, Office Depot…
MB: It’s my replacement. He’s so proud of that.
PL: I’m so proud of the timing I replaced it in. It was what, two days?
JB: What is this, three floors up?
PL: Yeah, three floors up.
McGivney School pt. 1:
http://rdwnotes.wordpress.com/2011/01/05/mcgivney-school-pt-1/
McGivney School pt. 2:
http://rdwnotes.wordpress.com/2011/01/12/mcgivney-school-pt-2/
McGivney School pt. 3:
http://rdwnotes.wordpress.com/2011/01/19/mcgivney-school-pt-3/
Photos of McGivney:
http://jonfromthemoon.com/2010/12/21/mcgivney-school/
jonfromthemoon 