Peter Rambo (author photo)
Let’s talk facts. There are about 500,000 high school basketball players in this country. Only about 18,000 of them go on to play college ball — about 3%. And a good portion of college basketball players aren’t on scholarship. I admit that I was one of many knuckle-headed kids who not only believed wholeheartedly that he would play in college, but also get a scholarship. At least I did until fate blocked my National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) plan before it even started.
The first step of my NCAA plan was to make the varsity basketball team as a freshman. But, I never made the varsity team because my biology teacher, Miss White, marked me ineligible, for failing the comprehension questions about a book called The Double Helix by James Watson.
I had known for a long time that I couldn’t read. But when my teachers told my parents that I struggled with reading, my parents never believed them. They saw those white teachers’ words as white lies fabricated by white women, hell-bent on crushing the spirits, the minds and the hearts of Black boys like me. So, year after year, my white kindergarten teacher, my white first-grade teacher, and my white second-grade teacher told my parents that I couldn’t read and that I needed to be held back. Instead, my parents urged them to pass me along, while simultaneously gifting me with a Kente cloth-covered Bible and telling me to pray using a book I couldn’t read. Yes, it was a King James Bible, which I doubt even they could read.
My mother then signed me up to read Scriptures in front of the entire Friendship Baptist Church congregation every Youth Sunday, hoping that Christ would teach me how to read. In the name of the Holy Trinity, I choked back the warm stomach acid that I felt rushing up through my esophagus with each word that ricocheted off my tongue.
My peers loved to laugh at my reading misfortune. I’d call out “pass” whenever it was my turn to read in class. But Youth Sunday was different. Even though I couldn’t call out “pass” to get out of reading, I could have people read the Scripture out loud to me until I memorized it. Thankfully, the Scripture was always picked out in advance for Youth Sunday because my family had one hard and fast rule: Don’t embarrass them in church. I cheated and got so good at memorizing, my parents thought my failed reading tests were a fluke.
I did actually need a miracle because I was now a freshman in high school, and there was no way I could teach myself to read before the basketball season was up. Miss White blocked me from playing varsity ball, but to get my grade up, she replaced basketball practice with after-school tutoring that I doubt she got paid for.
After school, we read The Double Helix out loud, and then she grilled me about it until I grasped the beauty behind the discovery stolen from Rosalind Franklin. I will never forget Miss White saying, “Most folks don’t know that it was Franklin who discovered the density of DNA and that she established that the molecule existed in a helical conformation.”
Franklin’s work to make clearer X-ray patterns of DNA molecules laid the foundation for the discovery of the double-helix polymer by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953. Yet, like many women, Franklin’s contributions have been forgotten or erased from our school history and biology texts.
I didn’t realize it then, but Miss White showed me how to think critically and effectively, use research to build knowledge, and set a purpose for reading. Her efforts made that 209-page book a lot less scary for me, because I could access prior knowledge, use context clues, and infer meaning by reading between the lines.
Reading with someone like Miss White was new to me. And I was starting to like it.
My mother had never read with me.
And my father always told me I could read all I wanted in prison.
But Miss White’s kindness transformed my life. I would eventually become a better reader because someone was patient with me and wanted more for me than to just behave and be quiet in class.
Miss White wanted me to fully understand the beauty between the lines of The Double Helix. Her dedication to me and my learning changed how I felt about reading. I eventually fell in love with reading all kinds of books. And, much to my father’s chagrin, I began to love reading more than I did my jump shot.
All in all, my father was right; I did have a better chance of reading books in a jail cell than playing college basketball. But prison wasn’t on the docket for me. Later on, during my senior year, I landed an academic scholarship thanks to Miss White’s courage in marking me ineligible to join the team (as so many other teachers failed to do); to share a chemist’s lost story with me, a boy whose skin was stained beautifully brown like a basketball.
I often wonder where my life would be if Miss White never spent that extra time with me.
The statistics were stacked against me. At the time, Detroit Public Schools were ranked the worst public school district in the country. Only 7% of kids scored proficient or above in 8th-grade reading. There is an undeniable connection between literacy skills and incarceration rates. So, as a Black child with low reading scores, attending a majority Black school that our local newspaper deemed a “dropout factory,” I was three times more likely to go to jail than to graduate.
I’m not in jail. And I did go on to college, graduating with a teaching certificate. But I’m not in the classroom like Miss White, giving students like me the tools to close the gap. I’m sad that I, like many other teachers, aren’t using their teaching licenses because of our need for higher pay. I’m sad because I know from first-hand experience the power of a single teacher.
Charles Payne is a Madison transplant, certified teacher, and self-taught social artist from Michigan. He has a master’s degree in education.
