True Life: Saturday School

    Saturday class was scheduled to begin at 8:00 a.m. on Saturday morning, April 19. Slowly but surely 21 of the 31 students expected to be at Saturday School entered the cafeteria with tired and impartial looks on their faces. They waited there patiently and quietly for the lesson to begin. This was not like the English or math lesson that a student may have skipped to earn this detention; it was a lesson in life.
 
    By 8:30 K.W. Williams entered the cafeteria and, without raising his voice, politely asked specific students to sit up or remove their hoods. When he finally did raise his voice it was not to discipline the students but to emphasize how much he had enjoyed the new Jet Li and Jackie Chan movie, Forbidden Kingdom, the night before.

    “I like to spend time talking to the kids to see where they’re coming from,” said Williams. “We talk about everything.”

    Eventually the conversation turned to growing up and relationships with parents. Williams asked several students to share the first lesson they could remember their parents ever teaching them. Williams eventually shared that the first lesson he learned was not to hit his younger brother. He summarized that individuals can learn valuable and sometimes mediocre lessons from parents and siblings, even themselves.

    Williams also shared a lesson he learned about haystacks. As a child Williams decided to jump into a haystack to find a needle, what he found was that straws of hay had needles and spurs that dug into his clothes and skin. After enduring the pain of removing the spurs he learned never to jump into haystacks ever again.  

    Despite the sometimes arbitrariness and foolishness of the stories and lessons Williams and the students shared, enthusiasm and laughter was spread throughout the cafeteria. For thirty minutes he shared life lessons with the class, hardly taking a breath.

    By 9:00 a.m., an hour into the four-hour Saturday detention, Williams left the kids to form two groups with randomly elected group leaders. Williams finds that the kids learn from delegated responsibility.

    “To whom a lot is given, a lot is expected,” said Williams about giving students responsibility in detention and elsewhere.

    After separating the students into teams, Williams distributed supplies, including garbage bags and hand gloves to students and instructed them as to where they would go to pick up trash. “I want to show the kids to be sensitive and caring for the school by picking up the trash,” said Williams.

    Once fully, supplied the teams headed to their destinations. Team ‘Awesome Mclovin’ decided to go to the First Presbyterian Church since one group member had parked his car there. The group headed directly to the car, while quickly scanning the grass for any trash. One individual offered his lighter while the group gathered around the car to bum a smoke. One student compared opening a pack of cigarettes to opening a pack of gum, everyone will expect you to share.

    “[Detention] doesn’t really help, we just meet new people, when we could be sleeping,” said senior James Thach.

    After lighting up they headed out around the church picking up all the trash in the area. The students decided to visit a yard sale along the street. Realizing their garbage bags were barely filled and knowing they could not return with such a small amount of garbage the students decided to improvise.

    Using a neighbor’s trashcan the group removed trash from the can to fill their bags. Once they figured they had enough trash, the students headed back to the school.

    When asked about the incident Williams said, “I have my sources and I am aware of what went down. Those same kids that did that will be back in detention. Next time they won’t leave my sight [...] I give the kids a chance to prove themselves. I gave them the rope and they hung themselves.”

    The groups then threw their trash in the dumpster and headed to the courtyard. In the courtyard the groups reunited to help Williams cut the grass. Two students were selected to operate the lawn mowers while the others cleared the grass of trash and moved the benches off the grass so it could be completely mowed.

    Throughout the day Williams, never raised his voice and none of the students were disrespectful to him or the other students. “I can’t complain [about being in detention] because I’m the one that got myself into this,” said Junior Aminata Barrie.

    Despite the relatively laid back atmosphere of this detention, it is not always laid back. Sophomore Max Turner recalls his worst experience in detention. “I went to [a detention in January and it was really cold and we had to rake leaves and I only had a thin sweat shirt,” he said.

    Saturday school is designed to discipline students while teaching them valuable lessons of respect and responsibility. Mohamad Humza learned, “Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.”