L' ARAIGNEE DE MATIN FAIT CHAGRIN [THE MORNING SPIDER IS SORROWFUL]

Abstract

During the Winter quarter of the 1993-4 Kalamazoo College academic year, I completed a student teaching internship with Foster Senior High School in Tukwila, Washington, a small, rural suburb' of Seattle in western Washington state. Tukwila, as a recognized city, is young-approximately four-years-old-while as a rapidly developing "mini-Seattle," it is only a few years older-perhaps seven years. Until early 1991, Tukwila was known as "Unincorporated King County," a collection of small farming areas not really suited for living that spread for approximately ten miles, and made up a small part of the large Washington county which includes Seattle and other ''big cities"; because Tukwila, at that time, was predominately farmland and forest, Tukwila was considered a small, farming community with a population of under 10,000.1 But Tukwila is changing, and has changed dramatically over the past five years. It has developed into a "mini-metropolis" with all the small-town charm of a Laura Ingles Wilder novel, and all the big-town problems of the Bronx in New York City. During the three months while I was doing my internship in Tukwila, many major police-involved incidents occured: A student from a rival high school was shot and killed; a student from that same school committed suicide; shoppers at the \ major-albeit only-mall in Tukwila were killed in a drug-related drive- 1 Because Tukwila at that time was "unincorporated," it did not "belong," in a sense, to any county laws. It was, judisdally speaking, a void. And therefore was not subject to "official" population counts. by shooting; two other incidents of drive-bys occured; the house across the street from me was a "suspected" crack house .... And I could go on. I felt as though I was teaching in Detroit, yet knew I was living in Oshtemo.