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gave a damn about the fact that I came from a broken home, or the fact that my mother was a labor organizer or a shop steward in the garment factory. Those were absolutely irrelevant things, in terms of what they saw as their responsibility and their goals in the classroom, and there were kids in my classes at 139 who were poorer than I, in the sense of -- but everybody was poor. It didn't matter a damn, you know. But who were bright and smart, and who met the standards.

Now, of couse, there were others who were dull. But you knew they were dull because, no matter how hard the teachers tried, the response was minimal. There was a normal distribution curve of achievement. You know, we were taught Spanish. We were taught literature. We were taught English. We were taught mathematics. We were taught music, you know. We had an orchestra in 139. Mr. Dixon was head of that orchestra, and he had those of us playing the violin in his orchestra, sasaphone, trumpet -- it was a challenging, stimulating experience, To use the term today, it by no means turned us off. It turned us on. Or at least turned me on. I felt respected, The only thing that bothered me was that I could never become the concertmaster in violin, because a guy by the name of Winston Collymore was an excellent violinist, you know. And I had to settle for three years of sitting next to Winston as number 2, while he was concertmaster. But damn it --

Now, I don't know why that's no longer possible. You know, I think that what's happened is that the institutionalized norm now is to give up on these kids. Not to teach them, not to hold them to standards-- to say that they can't learn; to say that they can't learn because they come from broken homes, etc. And I'm afraid that we've gotten two or three ganerations of this damn self fulfilling prophecy,