No, this post is not about DDR, but instead about how I helped the SLF chaperone a dance at the school she teaches at on Friday. The school is a “faith-based charter school”, which has students primarily from Garfield, Wilkinsburg, and the Hill District. In English, that means that there’s about 30-odd inner-city kids whose parents didn’t want to send them to their neighborhood’s public school, since they are probably in a deplorable state.

I learned some interesting things on Friday:

  • I am really, REALLY white.
  • The fashion rage these days is velour track suits. Al Sharpton would be proud. According to my co-workers, this is not news at all, as white girls at the mall are thusly clad, but I tend to be ignorant of those sorts of things.
  • I am very behind on current slang. One example was “swole”, which means annoyed or something. e.g. “I’m all swole at him.” Another was in a complaint one of the girls made, “There are too many chaperones around, and we can’t do the coochie pop!” Being a good nerd I immediately ran to a computer in the school to try and look up the dance called “the coochie pop”. UrbanDictionary let me down tho… all I could find were references to the female anatomy. Turns out that one of the TAs was able to clue me in (she’s young and black, natch). Apparently it involves a girl doing a handstand, and the guy stands behind her holding her legs. At least I knew what freakin (dropped the “g” in freaking… thank you, k) was, and believe me there was plenty of that.
  • It is a small school, and maybe my random sample was skewed by lack of data, but I would have to say that 80% of the girls were overweight; ranging from what you might call “thick” to downright fat. As most of the kids parents are lower-income, maybe this means that they eat more junk food, fast food, and the like. In any case, buy stock in insulin-providing compaines now, and retire rich.