epilogue:

Chicago, 1952

"Red, you better come get this boy, he's getting too big for his britches.  RED!"

In a poolhall on the westside, Ernest "Red" Shaw, Sr., is pouring a beer at the bar. After a long drag on his always-lit Marlboro Reds, he focused first on the man shooting pool, then grimaces at the 11 year old boy in question, his namesake, Ernest, Jr., who just dropped the 8 Ball to win, and can still be heard muttering witty insults under his breath.

Red was excommunicated by his wife; the boy in question is his son; and they live together, in Red’s car.  Between full and half siblings, the boy has 12 brothers and sisters scattered across the Westside.

The boy barely graduated from high school, yet sparked by his own experiences that ignited a belief in the power of education, he propelled himself and his children through higher education, and illuminated the path for his future grandchildren.

The homeless boy in the pool hall went on to graduate from medical school with a wife, and four children, who all, also graduated from college with advanced degrees. I am the youngest of those four children.

From Cleveland STEM to GOALS, and beyond…

My fathers' experience is the lens through which I see the world, and education is the virus I caught from him. For him, the path to equity was blocked, impeded, or maybe just too narrow. 

As an educator, I consider it my Duty and my privilege, to impart mechanisms to educators that propel all students towards Success, and to create access points for those same students.

Golden Owls Academic Learning Services, LLC, is my effort to share what I have learned to others hoping to provide the best chances for our students to succeed, whomever they may be…

Journal Entry - 11/12/2019

I returned to work today, to school, to be precise, where 15-16 year old students stand by for comfort.  It has been a difficult year, a father lost, a campaign lost, even a curriculum made less, a life's worth of meaningful, purposeful thrust in my work, lost to the systems' power, to the error of standardization.

As a moody teenager, I once wrote, "if our only hope is in the minds of our youth, than we have little hope.  For in the minds of our youth are implanted the ideas of the aged and embittered."  I am now the aged, and I still remain fixated on words I wrote as a disgruntled teenager. And, I still regard the statement to be true. 

But, there is an alternate reality, a parallel truth in the words. For what if in the minds of our youth, are implanted the ideas of aged that are not embittered?  Despite the distractions, the "nipping's and cankers" along the way, We still exist.

 I say today, as a weathered, but not yet embittered adult, that if the aged wield the  power  to suppress hope, than we also possess the power to seed hope.  Thus, my burden is to maintain hope in myself; I carry my burden lighter when I make hope my Duty.