For the Love Of Ballou

Superintendent Clifford B. Janey said there is "full recognition" that Ballou is a low-performing school "evidenced by many indicators over a substantial period of time," including 10th-graders' "single-digit" test scores in reading and math. "The number of students achieving levels of proficiency is outrageously embarrassing," he said. The school "can and will do better."

But even in a low-performing school are reminders of possibilities: the trophy cases just past the metal detector, a bulletin board listing honor roll students, vibrant Advanced Placement classes and one classroom in particular where Jachin, Wayne and 11 others could be found deep in thought one day, wrestling with a lesson not about math or science or anything so pragmatic, but about identity.

The class was AP literature, and the assignment for the 13 students was to write a poem describing their names as a personality, a verse incorporating the five senses. "You can get as wild with it as you want," said Nancy Schwalb, artistic director of the D.C. Creative Writing Workshop, describing the exercise as a "linguistic hologram."

It was an assignment that would be challenging in any high school. For some students, words flowed from mind to page like an uninhibited burst of laughter. For others, it was like extracting an impacted tooth.

Wayne looked for ways to write about being indestructible. He toyed with the phrase "diamonds used to cut titanium." He asked around for other examples. Jachin, meanwhile, started writing quickly. He twisted in his chair and put his head down. He stood, balled up his paper and threw it into the trash. He returned to his desk and started over.

Schwalb, walking around the room, approached Jachin and lingered at his shoulder. "This is terrible; it doesn't make sense," he said, but when she looked at what he had written, she thought otherwise.

She directed him to sit on the stool in front of the room and read his draft to the class.

"My name would be heard coming from afar as if it were police sirens on their way to the biggest and baddest shootout in world history," he began in a cadence he uses mostly out of school, when he is rapping as part of a go-go band.

"My name feels like a brick wrapped in toilet paper being thrown at someone's head," he continued. "When you look at my name too long it burns you as if it was cold as ice. My name smells like a tennis shoe that has never been worn or even laced up. The taste of my name would be like a bullet filled with peace and happiness. My name would simply be Jack."

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Staying With Ballou

Jachin and Wayne had become fast friends on a muggy summer day during football tryouts at Hart Middle School, a few blocks from Ballou, when Wayne accepted Jachin's invitation to go with him to talk to some girls.