The Color Talk

My students at the detention center were mostly sixteen to eighteen-year-old boys, with the occasional girl or twelve-year-old thrown into the mix. Being smack in the middle of their crazy teenage years, the kids thought that they knew everything there was to know and they were pretty much perfect at everything they did. Except schoolwork, which most of them thought was a waste of time. And they weren't all that good at crime, considering they were all currently in detention.

To their credit, these guys did know a lot more than I did about many things. They knew how to get illegal guns. They knew how to get illegal drugs. They knew how to impress their fellow juvenile delinquents. All things I had no clue how to do.

But I knew more about science than they did, with the exception of one guy, who had tattoos, was a recovering drug addict, and watched Animal Planet in his free time. Sometimes the gaps in their knowledge were pretty impressive. You could be a sixteen-year-old gang member, but you might still think that rocks were sentient beings (true story). Because I'm a pain in the behind, I enjoyed showing them up in scientific know-how, because I certainly shouldn't show them up in many other things that they were, um, quite proficient in performing.

One day, while I was monitoring my class to see if they were indeed filling out my graphic organizers (they all hated those things with a passion, but more than one kid grudgingly admitted that it did help them understand how all this stupid stuff worked), one of the guys raised his hand.

"Miss," said the miscreant, who had earlier been identified by his caseworker as "The Terror of the XYZ School District, "It says here that the color white is really made of all colors. What do they mean?"

"Well," I said, a little hesitantly. "They're right. White can really be thought of as a combination of all the colors. Or, you can think of it as white can be separated into different colors."

The School District Terror shot me a withering look.

"Miss," he said, "White is just one color, not all colors. You teach science. You should know that."

"Actually," I responded, "The textbook really is right. I mean it. Like think of black. Black is the absence of color."

By now some of the surrounding delinquents, desperate for a chance to escape the painful boredom of reading about the chemical compounds, were tuning in.

"Mrs. Huang," interjected the Animal Planet Aficionado. "What do you mean black isn't a color? That's like saying the sun ain't the sun."

It was slowly dawning on me that my incredibly elementary grasp of color and wavelength was oddly light-years beyond what my students understood.

I called for a general consensus.

"Guys, how many of you think that white is a color?"

The entire room raised tattooed arms in unison.

"And how many of you know that color doesn't really exist? That color is just what you see when wavelengths of light reflect off an object?"

Nobody raised their hand, but several of the kids looked shocked.

Animal Planet Aficionado spoke for the room.

"Color's got to exist, miss. Look, your shirt's blue. If your shirt isn't blue, then what color is it?"

"It is blue," I explained. "But the blue is only what you see with your eyes."

The room began to discuss this revelation with their cellmates. The thing they don't tell aspiring young gang members is that if you get caught and go to jail, you might just die of boredom. My students loved anything that let them escape from detention, if only in their minds. Some of them thought I was an awesome sauce teacher because I made forty photocopies every Friday of Connect the Dots puzzles with 800+ points and handed them out at the end of class. But I digress.

"Alright," yelled the youth worker. "You guys are too loud. Back to work!"

The room fell silent. All the kids bent their heads and pretended their hardest to read the next paragraph.

I explained the lack of color knowledge to two of my three fellow teachers during lunch that day.

"What!" shouted the math teacher, a young guy who worked so hard to bring the kids up to speed in his class. "They don't know that stuff yet?"

"Apparently not," I responded.

The next day during lunch, the math teacher had news.

"Grace," he said earnestly, "I was so taken about by what you said about the colors that you know what I did?"

"What?"

"I canceled all of my math classes today. We spent each period having the color talk. The kids all know how color works now."

So now, when my students get out of detention and possibly go back to their lives of crime, perhaps they will realize that gang colors don't actually mean all that much, since technically, the colors aren't really there in the first place.