Our Story: 4 Your Eyez Only
Our Story: 4 Your Eyez Only was written by the students of Venice High School in 2025
Introduction
When does a story start to become History?
For me, History started when I saw Ms. Arslancan (Ms. A to some) move around her classroom on a breezy spring afternoon pleading with her students to hear her song: History is what you make of it, and it belongs to anyone who wants to tell it. Stunned, I knew I had to come back next semester to write a book with her students. More than a book, what emerged was a journey of power and voice.
Venice High School is like no other place on Earth. You can quote me on that. Why? Plain and simple: our students are not afraid of their voices being heard through changing tides. You can see this in the way they raise their hands eager to express a thought, in clothes that scream art, in skateboards against pavement during recess, in words that shake injustice. All soft lullabies that signal Venice High School students are artists, and their artistry feeds teachers like Ms. A.
History is a story told around a campfire, a rap lyric sung, a comic book drawn, and an ordinary day recorded in a journal. Ms. A makes sure her students know that. “That History book over there—History with a capital H—someone wrote that.” The nail art you crafted on your cousin’s hand, the building you practiced parkour in, a visit to your home in Oaxaca, or your journey with country music, they’re all tales of History too. They’re tales of connection to each other and our environment.
The students this semester were asked to find something they were experts on. This could be a place, a person, or an object, but something they could write or talk about for hours to the point their cheeks would start to hurt. Or in the words of author and music critic, Hanif Abduraquib, a topic they could tour guide. In his 2021 Mac Arthur Fellow video, Hanif tells us: “The best musicians, the best writers, are essentially tour guides through the interior of a world that you cannot on your own touch.” Inspired by this, we invited students to become tour guides of their own worlds, drawing on personal experiences and universal knowledge, just as Hanif did in Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest, a love-letter-turned-book intertwining memoir and music history.
When we had the privilege of hosting Hanif on a video called for our students in the fall, he shared that he didn’t always enjoy high school—not the content, but the format. His reflective, casual writing didn’t fit the mold. That stuck with us. If we wanted students to tell stories that become History, the way they told them had to matter too.
Through an entire year of writing workshops, a wonderful author talk, many hours of thoughtful planning and stimulating conversations, I had the privilege and pleasure of seeing these students grow their minds, their confidence, their depth of knowledge and feeling. They understood that true knowledge comes from within, that it comes from connection, and that ultimately, it becomes History.
I return to when I first heard Ms. A speak: “History is what you make of it, and it belongs to anyone who wants to tell it.” These students did.
Julia Malinow
In-Schools and Tutoring Program Coordinator