Chapter Five: Urban Teaching
The task calls for creative innovation all along the line. No society has as yet made the most of the potential of their children. Yet, the increasing role of technology in our society, combined with the ideal of optimal development for all youth, demands that we do better than others have done or than we have done in the past. …The commitment to help the culturally deprived needs to be accompanied by an appropriate strategy that frees teaching from unrealistic assumptions, expectations, and sacred cows regarding what subject matter must be covered when and how. (Taba and Elkins, 1966, p.16.)
I concur with Sheets’s proposal to teach student teachers about how to use the students in their classrooms as the primary resource for learning how to teach, with one reservation. I worry that student teachers often spend too much time focused on themselves and their performance rather than on their students (Reissman, p11).
Each master teacher manages to create a respectful and vibrant classroom by discussing, teaching, and modeling specific values – such as self-discipline, self- regulation, inquisitiveness, purposefulness, camaraderie, and persistence in serious academic work. Despite attending punitive schools where authoritarian, inflexible classroom rules and unresponsive curriculum are the rule, students quickly respond to this different classroom environment. New, positive behaviors soon eclipse negative ones (Foster, Lewis, and Onafowora, 2005).
Deciding what to do, after college, facing the war
I learned about teaching in a program that was especially designed to produce teachers for urban schools. Most of us thirteen were graduates of liberal arts programs. We were fairly balanced gender wise. We were fully white save Annie. We hailed from a variety of large and small colleges and universities. And had all made it through the interview process.
I wanted to stay at Rochester and do graduate work there. I’d graduated with a major in Psychology and a minor in American History. I had been fairly active on campus playing one sport (football), participating my freshman year in the last year of Quilting Club, a riotous all male musical review called “One If By Land, Two If You’re Lucky”, a spoof of Paul Revere and his famous ride. I sang bass and played Paul Sigafoos, the goofy, hapless hero; my good friend John Denison sang tenor and played Agatha Warlump, a barmaid for whom I was smitten and by whom I was ultimately betrayed. I think this was the only time I ever received a standing ovation, three nights running. Heady stuff for a first year student. Interesting in retrospect that I was so successful playing a dolt!
I’d been really scared by the Missile Crisis and unlike some of my good buddies, felt no particular desire to put my life on the line for my country. If we’d have been attacked on our home territory, I’d have been there in a flash, but somehow Viet Nam seemed hardly home territory to me. The problems we needed to be confronting and that needed my direct attention seemed much more immediate and much more local. So when graduation time rolled around, I was actively seeking ways to stay at home and make a contribution to the larger good here in the USA.
My officer candidate school assessments had identified electronics communication and teaching as occupations for which I had special skills. I had applied to OCS in the Air Force reasoning that bad eyes would keep me out of direct combat. But pursuing electronics communication would have meant eighteen months of training in Biloxi, Mississippi and the images of bombed churches, Bull Connor’s police dogs, and the disappearances of Schwerner, Goodman, and Cheney were enough to sway me away from prolonged residency in the American south in the summer of ’64. I decided to investigate teaching on my home turf.
Rochester, Cornell University, Syracuse University, and Buffalo State worked collaboratively on a fifth year teaching program called Project One that would enable me to teach social studies (I’d loved American history – oh, those Landmark Books) and coach football, another occupation I thought I’d be good at. And if I entered the program at Rochester, I’d be near my college sweetheart and whatever future that might bring. Seemed like a good plan to me. There was even some talk that teachers might be granted a draft exemption, just in case we got to that point. So I was crushed when Dean Corrigan, the Director of Project One at Rochester, told me I was ineligible for admission to their post baccalaureate teacher education program. My cumulative average was too low.
My decision making (of lack thereof) about college
I’d had a disastrous first semester, my sophomore year. I don’t know what was really going through my head when I’d thought about college. I think after the Harvard debacle, I just didn’t care very much. Rochester was a bit familiar (my brother had gone there), it had a great academic reputation, the campus environs were striking to me (even then), and Coach Bitgood was very anxious to have me come and play football for them. All that seemed all good to me. I didn’t have the slightest idea what I wanted to do academically. I’d done well in high school and clearly my passions (and talents) were music and athletics. I’d liked my history courses and my earth science course. The teachers in those courses had really made that content come alive for me. My history teacher had a passion for history and that, combined with her uncompromisingly high standards meant as a student, I got some of the ways history connected to my life although like college, it was very much a white man’s interpretation of history and was about as non-multicultural as you could get. In seventh grade, I’d done a big study of medicine as part of an occupations unit. When I showed it to my family, my Dad was remarkably discouraging about my pursuit of that field. He’d remarked it was no fun any more and you couldn’t be the kind of doctor you wanted to be because of the meddling influence of insurance companies in the profession. That put medicine on the back burner for me although I continued to flirt with the idea of it over the next twenty years. I think I’d have been a pretty good doctor.
Outside of school, I amused myself with fossil digging and collecting. I lived in a glacially active portion of New York State and I was forever looking for and finding ancient crinoids, fantails, and sandstone bivalves. I don’t know why I didn’t select music or geology as a major field of interest. I suppose I didn’t know how anyone could earn a living pursuing those fields and certainly, no one had ever told me. It seems so short-sighted now that I didn’t have a future figured out way back then. But, I didn’t and no one helped me with it, so when I went to Rochester, I selected industrial management as a major because I’d figured out that’s the way you came out of college ready for the world of work and that’s what college ultimately was all about. I can’t believe I’m writing this now but in fact, that’s the way my first career choice happened for me.
First semester Sophomore year
Industrial Management was awful. I had a tough time with economics, calculus was likewise a mystery to me, and my industrial design course was so disconnected from the reality towards which I thought I felt I should head (personnel work) that my motivation plummeted. I studied hard and was totally unable to get any big picture of the content in any of these courses. I stumbled on relying on memorization and earned something like a 1.3 that semester. U of R took away my honorary scholarship and two years later, though I’d recovered academically, I paid the price for reaching my academic nadir.
The Urban Teacher Preparation Program
On the way out of Dean Corrigan’s office, one of the most serendipitous events of my life occurred. I was shocked at his words and in a state of despair. My head hung low as I closed the door and because of that physical stance, the contents of Corrigan’s waste paper basket in the anteroom to his office came into view. An orange and blue brochure for Syracuse University’s Urban Teacher Preparation Program topped the pile of discards. I paused, thought for a millisecond, bent over and plucked it out of the ignominious receptacle. Here was another way I could pursue my major interest in staying alive through the next several years and still pursue my nascent curiosities about teaching and doing something about the awful situations of race relations portrayed constantly now in the news media. I was still thinking the problems with race were a southern issue but whatever they were, taking them on and doing something about them now moved to my radar screen as something I could and should do. Maybe teaching could be the way I showed my Black brothers and sisters that though I was white, I was not one of the whites in that awful picture from so long ago. I was not one of the white devils I’d begun to hear a Black minister named Malcolm X give speeches about.
The interview process was a big clue about what was to come for me. I arrived at 410 Comstock Avenue probably a week or two after graduation. I was greeted by a smiling face and informed that there were two parts to the interview: one would be a brief conversation with the Directors of the Urban Teaching Preparation Program, and the other would be to teach a lesson. We’d do the teaching first. I was handed a college oriented political science text and told to prepare a fifteen-minute lesson on the system of checks and balances. They gave me a pad of paper, a pencil, that book, and a desk, and said in fifteen minutes, I’d be taken into a small seminar room and there would be four staff members playing urban 8th graders. I was teaching them social studies and I was to teach them about the system of checks and balances built into our federal system of government. And then the staff member left me alone to plan. I hadn’t ever formally taught anyone anything before in my life.
At least I knew the content. My college minor and my high school history teacher had made sure I knew that cornerstone of our American democratic process. What I wasn’t prepared for were the four adults who seemed like an entire class of twenty. Or thirty. They did everything to get me off topic. They chewed gum, they got out of their seats, they asked me if I was married, they wondered why they had to learn this stuff, two of them even started to fight, one flirted openly with me, a fact noted just as openly by another. Well, I was able to stop the fight and I was able to make a connection between the idea of checks and balances and something one of them said about the priest in his church but the rest of it was chaotic and strange. My suit coat was soaked through with sweat by the time I left the building on that sun soaked very late Spring day and as my Mom’s ’53 Packard sputtered away from the Comstock Avenue office, I was certain I’d just earned a one-way ticket to Viet Nam. Three days later my acceptance letter came in the mail. I was a Masters Degree Candidate in Syracuse University’s Urban Teacher Preparation Program (UTPP), a program designed to prepare a new generation of teachers for America’s schools.
The UTPP, finding myself
The UTPP was one part of a multiple front effort to address the existence and effects of grinding poverty for people mired in the inner-city core of Syracuse, NY. Most who lived there were African Americans living in the projects of the Third Ward, two story brick row houses, shoebox after shoebox wedged between downtown Syracuse and the University Hill, sealed off from the Hill by Interstate 87, an elevated highway that cut through the eastern edge of the Black ghetto. On the edges of the ghetto were other poverty based ethnic groups, most notably the descendents of the Onondaga Iroquois who lived on the western edges and the poor Irish who lived on the northern edge. The Madison Area Project was an interdisciplinary community organizing effort to enable residents of the third ward to gain political control of their own lives so as to begin to effect their own futures in ways that could break the cycle of poverty. The UTPP was one part of these efforts. At the time, I was aware that my learning to be a teacher was part of a much larger set of strategies that were put in place to address social justice issues, among them issues of housing quality and availability, political participation and power, street care, health care, early pregnancy, juvenile crime, high school dropout rates, integrating the police, fire, and public works departments, educational resource allocations within the Syracuse School District, and educating teachers for the students in urban schools. My learning to be a teacher was also learning to be a change agent. This is quite clear from the way we were asked to approach our relationship with our mentors. The following quote is from UTPP seminar notes (6/30/64).
“The seminar session resulted in a long discussion [related to] teacher-intern authority lines and the roles we must play. Basically, it seems that we have three roles: 1. A subordinate role to the teacher in whose eyes we are a green, inexperienced threat (if such is possible); 2. A responsibility to our own self to size up our teachers and extract from their discussions, comments expressions, and other such things which will be useful to ourselves in evaluating our roles as future urban teachers; 3. A role to be played before our counselors as frank, honest, critical individuals who have the ability to dissect the good and bad spots of #1 our teachers, and #2 ourselves. These roles require the intern to possess the ability to disagree internally, agree externally, and not be ambitious enough to force any decision upon a teacher – do not alienate. Important point: throw out an idea – don’t press it, and see if it later reappears under someone else’s brainstorm.”
The advice was useful. Clearly, Gerry and Mario wanted us to be in the schools but not “of the schools.” Good thing. I’m not sure which of my two mentor math teachers surprised me the most; Mr. C. when he called one of the kids “a little black bastard who was responsible for the condition his race was in” or Mr. L. who said he couldn’t wait to get out of school and “rough up some broads.” Having the seminar to process the change process being played out in the school was incredibly helpful. Making our way, learning how to be effective with the kids while at the same time not alienating some of the teachers at the school was to be tricky business. My education as a change agent was also enlivened through university coursework and by living in the Madison Project area and participating in some of the community organizing actions taking place there. But mostly, I learned it working with the kids and teachers at Madison Junior High School and then reflecting on that experience-in-action in the program seminars.
Math Teaching at Madison Junior High School
The kids who attended the Madison Area schools were second generation children of Blacks who’d moved north from the American South during the years after World War One and Two. MJHS had become a de facto segregated JHS as white flight took hold in Syracuse. By the time I’d arrived there, the student population was largely poor and largely Black. The teaching staff was in its third or fourth year of working with MAP consultants and my year was the first year new teachers were brought into the school. The school had interdisciplinary teams headed by Bob Cullivan, a native Irishman from Syracuse who’d made his reputation with the kids by splitting the top of an inch thick hardwood maple school desk when he banged on it for attention in his first day in the school as a substitute teacher. (He revealed to us the desk was previously cracked but I don’t think he ever told the kids that.) Like a lot of the teachers at Madison, Bob was direct, he was friendly, he was street smart, knew these kids could learn because not too many years before, he’d been one of them, and he knew the key was to make intentional connections between what we had to teach and what the kids knew about. He was curriculum director in the school when I got there. He met with interdisciplinary teams of teachers twice a week to plan interdisciplinary curriculum and to make sure the teachers knew what each other was doing. He was free with advice and clues about how to make our work interesting and he was a terrific resource coming off our intense summer of practice teaching in the district’s summer school. He also made sure we were able to make relationships with other veteran teachers in the school. We were spread across all the school teams so we also got to know our new colleagues that way.
The principal at the school was Joe Bongo, a buff ex-Navy prize fighter who like Cullivan was a long time resident of Syracuse. Bongo hailed from Syracuse’s Italian enclave. He was passionate about what education could do for “these kids” and though a little rough around the edges – there were lots of rough but very human edges at that school – he was convinced “every bird could sing its own song” and he was damn sure he was going to make it happen in his school. He didn’t tolerate brutality of any form in the corridors, classrooms, and closets of MJHS. Once when a group of boys attacked a boy in the lavatory and held his head in a flushing urinal, Joe called an all school assembly in the middle of the day, and made the attackers tell what happened and why it happened. He then addressed everyone in a voice shaking with emotion and said in no uncertain terms that behavior like this was unbecoming a school who’s motto was “wings of the future” and that it simply would not happen again while he was principal. It never did. He also made sure that both groups of kids had follow up visits to his office over the next several weeks and that the school social worker was on the case immediately to follow up in the larger community. That’s the way lots of things happened at MJHS. Whatever happened within, got taken out and whatever happened outside, almost always seemed to come in.
MJHS had floor to ceiling bulletin boards with huge black and white pictures of kids learning in classrooms, kids in the hallways, kids smiling. These weren’t just any kids, they were Madison kids and you’d see lots of students bring their parents and brothers and sisters into school just to see the pictures of them learning. One year, an 18-wheeler trailer filled with kids work, pictures of kids doing the work, and interpretive posters that described what was going on at school, parked at different places in the Third Ward. If families didn’t come to school, then the school tried to go to the families.
Other teachers went above and beyond. Harvey met with the gymnastics club at 630 in the morning, before school, the only time they could get the gym during the day. Frank met with a drawing club after school several days a week. Tom helped teach in the unwed mothers program housed at an elementary school just three blocks down the street. That program was so good, kids from the suburbs were making application for entry.) And Mrs. Gilbert’s husband Willie, a local policeman, helped whenever she could put together the props for yet another play she would stage with her social studies classes. It didn’t hurt that he’d show up in his full regalia. Willie was one of the first black cops in the Syracuse Police Department. Dolores and Willie were great people. She was constantly leaning over our team meeting table telling us how she’d go after a particularly knotty instructional problem with which we’d hit the wall.
Every Thursday night we’d all the UTTP interns would gather for our support seminar back at Comstock Avenue. Half of us were teaching then, the other half took a full load of University coursework but we’d all show up for seminar. (I ended up teaching both semesters along with my coursework. A reading teacher had taken sick and I was asked to be a long-term sub.) These Thursday night sessions were intense. We’d put some of those knotty problems on the table. People’s frustrations would just fly. Frustrations with kids, frustrations with mentor teachers, anger at our own inability to change things, embarrassment at failed lessons, failed discipline, disrespect, long hours and little reward, the hard work, tears, and grit of it all. Gerry and Mario, Program directors, and Bob and Dee, program graduate students would help to a degree. But they also wanted us to take hold of the systemic issues we faced. It seemed like every Thursday night was year-long course in gender, race, politics, and culture. Frank Reissman’s The Disadvantaged Child was our basic text and although criticized for its ethnocentric assumptions just a few years after publication, it was a ground-breaking and eye-opening introduction to how cultures, communities, and school program inevitably clashed in the moment to moment interactions we faced as interns. We read Reissman cover to cover, many times over. We also read Charles Wiley, Kenneth Clark, Fritz Pearls, Harry Passow, Charles and Arlene Silberman, Hilda Taba, and Jerome Bruner. We struggled to connect the abstractions of educational and sociological theory with the kids who showed up in our classrooms every day asking, “What you gonna teach us today, Mr. Rat-bone?” We’d end every Thursday night at one of the local bars, exhausted and wrung out, wondering what we were going to do to meet our kids on Friday. We always met them. One way or another.
Most of the literature of the time referred to our kids as the “culturally deprived.” The texts acknowledged that while kids coming from economically depressed urban areas brought a unique and problematic life style and language with them into the schools; their modes of coping with life and communication were at odds with the rituals, requirements, rules, and regimens of public school life. While some texts admonished teachers to solve this “problem” by firming discipline, being explicit about the orderliness of their classrooms, and breaking the curriculum down into manageable bites, these was not the tactics Gerry and Mario took with us. From their point of view, curriculum was useless unless it made “contact” with the kids, and contact involved experiential, affective, and cognitive dimensions. It was later in the year that I finally did my first independent reading of Dewey. I noted at the time that Dewey might be a philosopher to read more extensively because he echoed so much of what I was learning in the program. My awareness came later that I was being steeped in rich, progressive doctrine, urban style. After reading Dewey (Schools of the Future), Montessori (The Absorbent Mind), and Rugg and Schumaker (The Child Centered School), I knew we were standing on shoulders of giants.
For us, good discipline was a matter of being real, of being clear, and of working with firm and fair boundaries. Successful teaching was blending strength and sensitivity. That’s what the “Balance of Powers” interview role-play had been all about. Our responses to the cues the “kids” threw our way were actually tracking how we performed across these dimensions of strength and sensitivity. We were taught to teach to the person, to make contact with kids as individuals and as people with definite cultures, to allow them to connect with us, to show interest in their everyday lives, to respect their culture, and to hold them to high standards. Our path to an instructional goal might be way different than that of a traditional teacher, but the ends were to be the same. School was seen as a major avenue out of poverty and the limitations of circumstance, at least as far as becoming successful in the white world of privilege. While there was much to their world that was to be valued, they also had to learn the codes of successfully negotiating the worlds of those who held power (DuBois’ dual modes of consciousness). At least that was the way it was supposed to be. Reissman and others were soon to be criticized for their assumptions about culture. “Deprived” was a culturally loaded term though to us at the time, it connoted that our job as teachers was to teach the kids the keys to the kingdom so they could go on and successfully operate in a variety of power structures, including the white one. It became increasingly clear to us that institutionalized racism across the power structures would accede power stubbornly if at all. America would continue down the long hard difficult road of acknowledging its multicultural base and racist practices across the next quarter century to this very day. We are a long way from success. Economic circumstance is still the best predictor of negotiating schools successfully. But it isn’t as if we don’t know how to successfully teach urban kids now. What we lack as a culture is the necessary political capital to force it to happen. With all that that remains before us, Reissman’s analysis of urban life and admonishments for educators were helpful to our little band of urban pioneers. At least that’s what it felt like, perhaps with a good deal of naivete, to us.
“What’s Good Money?” An example of “contact” curriculum
Probably the best unit I taught during that period of time was called “What’s Good Money.” I’d overheard Moses and Ruthie and others arguing one day about good money, the kind of money you’d need in your pocket to make it through the day, through life, in a way that was “comfortable.” I asked them how much they thought good money was and the answers I got ranged from five to five million dollars. “Enough” would have been the best answer, probably. Clearly, they really didn’t know. And there was my “contact!” Straight from the kids’ mouths came these varied perspectives on money and living the good life. So I put together an interdisciplinary unit of study that ran through two separate classes.
I was teaching math at the time. It wasn’t necessarily my area of expertise but we were paired as interns so we could fill one full position at the school. One on my UTPP mates was a math major during his undergraduate years. I was second on the list in terms of math credits so I was asked to team with Stan and lead off the year as a 7th and 8th grade math teacher. In January, we’d switch. I’d take the bulk of my University coursework then and Stan would be the full time teacher. The study I conceived[i] involved taking the kids from a brainstorm about what was good money through a guided fantasy of themselves sometime in the future. Who were they, where were they, what were they doing. What was around them? What did they need to live? What did they want to live? They made lists. I subscribed to the local paper for two weeks and we searched out advertisements and read the classifieds to gain a sense of how much things cost. They began to shape a budget that would pay for what they wanted including food, clothing, shelter, car, and “stuff”. They began to assemble costs per week, costs per month, costs per year. We did great work with fractions and for some of the more advanced kids, decimal fractions. When we couldn’t find the cost for items, we made lists, and after having temporary phones installed in the room, and did some phone calling during class to see if we could find out actual costs in Syracuse stores.
Then we took a field trip to E. W. Edwards, a local Department store, to see how stores sold things and to complete our lists of wants, needs, and costs. These kids rarely got a chance to go on a field trip. Folks just expected them to misbehave and when store owners inquired about the sending school, there always seemed to be a reason the trip wouldn’t work out. Of course I was concerned. This was my first field trip. Again from my UTPP journal (1/11/65): “I am a little apprehensive about the trip. It could be a complete bust. We went over rules of politeness – the kids know what is right, it’s only a question of whether or not they’ll act that way! Details: Class of 21 organized into three groups of seven per group. Groups will look for 1) prices of men’s clothing, 2) prices of women’s clothing, 3) prices of household appliances. Each group will be accompanied by one teacher and one salesman (sic).”
How did it go? From my journal on January 12th: “The trip was fabulous! The kids behaved, were intent and professed to “learn something.” The store was most helpful – they supplied Negro salesmen to take the groups around (something I’d requested) and this was important for contact. Also, the kids could touch and feel different weaves and inspect various stitchings to actually experience the relationship between construction and cost. They were dog tired from walking when they got back.”
I finished up the unit by asking a home economics teacher to come by and help us with budgeting for the first year out of school. A car salesman came in to share how to buy a car. When we were done, the kids created tables, graphs, and charts to put in a visual display (along with pictures, of course) of what good money was to them and what it would do for them upon graduation from high school. The writing teachers gave us a couple of class days to help the kids write their unit. Then finally, we looked in various newspapers and investigated what kind of jobs would earn us the kind of good money we figured out we needed. I remember the kids talking about their conversation with Manny Breland, one of our science teachers at the school. He was right at the kids’ level, talking to them about how you get to be a scientist, what a scientist was, how you got to teach science if that were something you wanted to do. He even got a few of them to think about science careers and thanked me profusely for the motivation the study provided for the students.
Making contact
We were schooled to organize our teaching around three affective concerns during this eighteen-month experience: power, connection, and identity, three words that have remained firmly implanted in my soul across the breadth of my career. We had to keep these concerns in mind with every lesson we taught, every unit we planned, whether it was in mathematics, social studies, language arts, English, or home economics! I had to make sure the unit on What’s Good Money? addressed a world that held an actual familiarity with my kids. Not some kind of hypothetical “authenticity” but actual, personalized curriculum. To put it another way, I had to be sure that what I was portraying in the pages and books and activities and pictures of my good money curriculum had an honest, apparent and pragmatic connection for these kids. Most of the time, the media and visual world that surrounded their lives portrayed a way of life way beyond the dreams of someone coming out of Syracuse’s Third Ward. The history they read about in school was someone else’s history, until Madison, that is. Our work had to connect.
I had to make sure that once the unit on good money was over, my kids felt more in control of their lives, that they understood how life worked better than before, that they had strategies and explanations and roadmaps to get from their place in life now to a place that they wanted to be. I had to make sure that what I taught them was empowering, that it assured them more control over their lives. Most of these kids lived lives where people – usually white people – did things to them, especially the bureaucrats who worked the offices and front desks of the agencies that my kids’ parents were increasingly dependent upon. The Madison Area Project was trying to counter that dynamic in the lives of my kids and my curriculum had to do its part.
Finally, I had to make sure that once the unit on good money was over, my students could identify with what they had been learning. I had to make sure that I taught in such a way so they could actually see themselves in what they were learning and could put it into words. That’s why Manny Breland was so important. That’s why I made sure the workers they encountered at the department store field trip were African Americans. That’s why I combed newspapers and magazines for pictures of ginger and peach and cocoa and shiny black skinned people so my kids would see that people who looked like them were doing the things portrayed in the lives they might image themselves into.
Relationship
Connection, Power, Identity. They remain with me today as critical hallmarks of making learning live, regardless of the learner. If as a teacher, I can engage my students in activity that makes connection, enhances power and self control, and communicates that what we are doing is as much yours as anyone else’s, I’ve done a pretty good job. I’ve addressed the affective concerns of being feeling disconnected or alienated from the immediate context. Planning and teaching in this way is not easy for a white person. It’s even more difficult given my own privileged cultural background. But it’s not impossible. What my Madison students taught me during these years was the importance of relationship as the crucible within which teaching and learning occur. The exchanges that are central to the construction of relationship are all about trust, and trust is built through the affective inclusiveness that is obtained when connectedness, empowerment, and identity are part of the action.
I play it cool
And dig all jive.
That’s the way I stay alive.
My motto as I live and learn,
Is dig and be dug in return.
“Motto” by Langston Hughes
What worked so well at Madison was that relationships were the Wings of the Future. It’s what Joe Bongo knew when he intoned every bird must sing its own song . He meant everyone must #1 listen to, and #2 respect everyone else’s song. It’s what Gerry and Mario meant when they told us our curriculum should be guided by the kids’ affective concerns and that it was a “concern that contained more durable potential for a relevant curriculum[ii].” Every child there had something to say and to give and to share. Every teacher there had something to say and to give and to share. And in the coming together of teacher and student, content transferred from the page to the person. I was transformed as a new educator in that place and for me, our work together remains an example to be emulated anywhere when considering the purposes, processes, and products of schooling.
Closure (literally) and Moving on
Madison Junior High School was shut down one year after I graduated from the Program. Internal politics within the school district meant the amazing staff of teachers were dispersed throughout the Syracuse system. Basically, “internal politics” signaled dissatisfaction within the district with the school’s success. All the communal power of the MJHS faculty disappeared in an instant. Joe Bongo moved on to Newark, New Jersey. As part of his job, he was ferried from school to school in a bullet-proof limousine. Control of the Madison Area Project had passed from an independent community board to City Hall. Evidently, the Alinsky-based community organizing model was working a little too well. A year later, both Gerry and Mario were gone, one to become city superintendent (with another bullet proof limo) and one to a college faculty. I was teaching at Roosevelt Junior High, a three-story rectangular brick monolith on Syracuse’s South Side. This was a place where the Irish and the Blacks on any given day barely existed without conflict and where the scolding Principal’s corkscrew path through the hallways of the school foretold not much good would happen for anyone, any time soon.
[i] Fantini and Weinstein refer to this unit as one example of a contact curriculum: the contact through practical reality: pages 405-407 in The Disadvantaged: Challenge to Education.
[ii] Fantini, Mario D. and Weinstein, Gerald. (1968.) The Disadvantaged: Challenge to Education. New York: Harper and Row. P. 366.
Hilda Taba and Deborah Elkins. Teaching Strategies for the Culturally Disadvantaged. Rand McNally and company, Chicago, 1966.