Ordinary Resurrections by Jonathan Kozol

She can be assertive also when she talks to grown-ups and seems unaware that she is often going just a bit too far. A pleasant kind of managerial assertiveness is very much a part of the completed package. 'She has a nice compactly packaged personality,' the pastor noted once as we were watching her among a group of other children. She talks about it more with puzzlement, or petulance, as if she thinks that unknown forces in the world conspire to expand her waistline but that her healthy appetite has no connection with this. She doesn’t seem to suffer any grave concern about the fact that she’s so plump. 'Why is Raven way down at the end?' I ask. You can sit over there,' she says, arranging children at a reading table in one of the study rooms upstairs. Pineapple doesn’t seem to understand the reason either, but she never seems reluctant to accept the power that the other children, girls especially, invest in her, and she deploys it with comedic ease, as if she finds it funny that they let her exercise so much authority in coming to decisions. Grown-ups who spend time here with Pineapple comment on the confidence with which she uses her assertiveness to issue little orders like this to the other children. 'Don’t answer him,' she tells the other children. 'This is s’posed to be a pencil?' asks the boy. When she’s done, she passes out the pencils to the children at her table, saving the one she’s sharpened to a stump for last, then giving it to a boy she doesn’t like because he teases her for being plump. She keeps staring at it with an irritated look, as if she knew that this was going to happen. Eight years old, she huffs and puffs as she keeps putting the same pencil back into the sharpener, then looking at the point with obvious dissatisfaction, then putting it back in again, until it’s down to almost nothing.

Pineapple is struggling with the electric pencil sharpener next to the closet on the left side of the room.

They are finishing their homework during the after-school program. Ann’s, an Episcopal church in New York’s South Bronx. The more time the author spends with inner-city children, the less credible and less legitimate large distinctions between them and other children seem.Īpril 10. Current articles and subscription information can be found at This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted and Winnie Brock. Copyright by The Christian Century Foundation used by permission. This article appeared in The Christian Century, May 10, 2000, pp. Reprinted by arrangement with the author and publisher.

Jonathan Kozol is a long-time critic of American Education.Īdapted from Ordinary Resurrections, published this month by Crown Publishers.

Ordinary Resurrections by Jonathan Kozol