Post Script by Rodney Brown

My experience at Cato Crest is summed up through my dispatch, “To explain a Question”; however, I will say firstly that I initially went to Cato Crest to talk about HIV and quickly found out that my students not only had a grasp of that but so much more. The intelligence, the understanding, the mere maturity that my students possessed was staggering.  Remembering how difficult it was for me to start being able to wrap my head around the intimidating concepts of race, poverty, success and hopefulness as it directly related to me and those who looked like me, was a trying and daunting test. My Cato Crest students came to the table with an immensely solid sense of this understanding. Maybe because those issues are so recent in their history, only a few years removed from some of their own birthday’s but albeit its because, at Cato Crest, they are taught to understand it.

Conversations with a teacher at the school created a context in which the student’s understanding was measured.  She tells me that there is so much going on in these young peoples lives that we, the teachers and administration, have no choice but to be real about issues with them. They see so many things first hand and in front of them. I look at it like the phrase, 13 going on 30. These young people don’t have the luxury of being innocent and wide-eyed about the convolution of life. Simply being born who they are, not only exempts, but also violently shakes them from this naiveté.  So the portrait that you see in front of you is complex and multi faceted. As a teacher I stood there looking at their eleven and twelve year old bodies but seeing and understanding, through their eyes, a wisdom that I thought could only be brought about by years of living life.  What you see in front of you is a portrait of young men and women who know how to articulate what it means to daily face the text-book idea of adversity better than most… simply because they live it.