Perhaps the most succinct version of the humanist vision in U.S. Black feminist thought is offered by Fannie Lou Hamer, the daughter of sharecroppers and a Mississippi civil rights activist. While sitting on her porch, Ms. Hamer observed, “Ain’t no such thing as I can hate anybody and hope to see God’s face (Collins, 43).
Teachers do not arrive in the profession knowing how different actions will impact different kids, even if they arrive professionally well prepared. Rather, they use what they know upon entering the field to build a growing base of knowledge over a lifetime. If teachers aim to act in the best interest of children – which is at the heart of moral practice – and the children’s world is constantly changing in complex ways, learning in teaching becomes the essential ingredient in doing their work well (Kroll, Cossey, 31).
When professors bring narratives of their experiences into classroom discussions it eliminates the possibility that we can function as all-knowing, silent interrogators. It is often productive if professors take the first risk, linking confessional narratives to academic discussions so as to show how experience can illuminate and enhance our understanding of academic material. But most professors must practice being vulnerable in the classroom, being wholly present in mind, body, and spirit (hooks, 21 – transgress).
My introduction to RJHS and the paddle
My third year of teaching in Syracuse was spent teaching seventh and eighth grade social studies at Roosevelt Junior High School (RJHS). Theodore Roosevelt Junior High School was a hulking three story brick building prominently positioned on Syracuse’s south side. The neighborhood was the same working/middle class neighborhood into which GLS had been inserted. RJHS was no insertion, however. The physical structure expressed the grand architecture of depression era construction. The building must have been beautiful in its time; by the mid sixties, however, it was pretty frayed around the cornices and had more the look of a factory than a grand institution. What was new about Roosevelt was the redistricted boundary lines. In an intense political battle, the school board had succeeded in moving Roosevelt’s boundary lines northward. Most of the center city’s pre-WWII housing projects were brought within district lines. Any addition of Black faces to a school of white ethnics is news. That’s just the way things continue to play out in our racialized society. This shift was seismic. Much of my Roosevelt year was framed by events spawned by this change. Much of my year at Roosevelt was framed by conflict resulting from interactions among a faculty that with a few notable exceptions, was unprepared and unwilling to professionally receive the new and darker faces that rode, departed, and regained the city buses, five days a week.
Diltz, the Principal
My interview with Diltz Berry, Principal, seemed necessarily pro forma. The assistant superintendent for personnel had paved my way and frankly, the district was grateful to have someone who actually wanted to teach in a school undergoing this kind of urban transition. Mr. Berry was most interested in knowing if I knew what “I was getting in to?” I would have my own room, Room 204, top of the stairs, west side of the building. After our brief interview, he showed me around my room, handed me the room key, and wordlessly revealed the spanking paddle in the center drawer of the oak double pedestal desk that was now in my care. His explanation of the paddle was an expressionless glance the captured my eyes until I indicated I’d received his message. I have no idea what my eyes mirrored back to that man. I said nothing. He closed the drawer and said, “Welcome to Roosevelt,” and started to leave. I followed him out into the locker-lined hallway where he paused for a moment, turned, and then noted one more extra-class duty. I was to share stairway monitoring with Mrs. Eleanor Hobson, my colleague across the hall. When I asked just what “stairway monitoring” was, Mr. Berry noted that the west stairs were the “up-stairs.” Our responsibility was to ensure students used the stairway safely, orderly, and above all, to ensure no students went down the up staircase. Bel Kaufman’s world, described with irony and sagacity three years earlier, was now mine, only reversed. Her monitoring was to ensure that no student went up the down staircase. Bel, Eleanor, and I were now joined, so it seemed, in common cause. I shook my head with more than a little sense of wonder. I thought Kaufman had been joking.
I had great anticipation for this job. The kids of GLS had taught me a lot. I’d left there thinking the program had done them a disservice. Roosevelt was my chance to do some good teaching in a more familiar setting. I loved the subject matter. It was what I found most engaging to teach. In 1965, each day’s current events held enough content to teach entire courses in American history, Race, Class, and Culture, and the Sociology of Place. After getting my key, I began to settle into my room. I spent hours, as every new teacher does, getting the interactive bulletin boards ready, reviewing the tattered texts I’d most surely revise, making plans for every class for that first week of school, and in general, acclimating myself to my new place of employment.
Meeting Eleanor
I met Eleanor soon enough. She was a short, wide woman whose breadth was surpassed only by the width of her loud, often outrageous engaging spirit and personality. She told me to have fun. She said don’t believe the folks who would tell me to save my smiles until November; as long as I was clear about my rules, as long as they were fair and consistently applied, and above all, as long as I really liked the kids, everything would be okay. I warmed to her immediately.
In the first moments of the first day of school, I reviewed classroom rules with my 7Js[i]. They were arranged in rows and desks facing me, standing at the front of the room. Very traditional arrangement. Very arranged for control purposes; or as hooks would say, arranged for the purposes of colonizing. Little did I know how well this concept, learned years after I’d left Roosevelt, would apply to that year at Roosevelt. But on that day, my first day as a “real teacher in a real school,” I did what every other teacher does in America on their first days, I lay down the rules of engagement. I’m in the midst of my rap, setting the structure, telling the newest children in that building that I was new, too, and that we’ll gradually adjust my rules to become “our” rules as our community grew and as we got used to each other and the way we did things. The scene must be familiar to you I’m sure. We, the 7Js and I, were basically actors on the stage of school culture, each playing our part, each knowing what the other will say and do in the ritual of opening day ceremonies.
In the midst of this well rehearsed homily on rights, privileges, and responsibilities, bursts Eleanor. I look to my right as this strange apparition in a fantastic red and blue tent dress materializes in my room. “Well, so this is our new social studies teacher. He’s pretty cute, don’t you think? Mr. Rathbone. That’s a nice name. Well class, we have to show him how we welcome new teachers here to Roosevelt don’t we?” This said to the class. They were even more quiet now, these new-to-Roosevelt first day students, not knowing quite what to do with this strange looking woman who had appeared in our midst with all the subtlety of a Sherman Tank. “We give them a big welcome hug and kiss don’t we!” And with that Eleanor strides over to me with great glee in her eyes, throws her arms around me, lifts me off the floor, and plants a kiss right on my cheek. “Welcome to Roosevelt Junior High, Mr. Rathbone,” she says. “I’m right next door if you need me,” and out she goes, back to her room. The door closes and the kids go nuts. Oooowwww, Mr. Ratbone.” Lots of my new charges wouldn’t pronounce the “th” in Rathbone either! “What she did to you!” This event is my real introduction to RJHS. I learned later through the Roosevelt grapevine that English teacher Eleanor is a diabetic and is in her last years of teaching. I also learned she’d been a drill instructor in the Women’s Marine Corps. She was a great colleague and a good person to be paired with for dealing with the chaos of the up-stairs, or anything else for that matter. During that year we watched over each other though the protective shadow she cast over me was considerably bigger and of a different quality than the one I provided for her. She had my back in many conflicts that came my way during that year at Roosevelt. For my part, I think mine was a voice of encouragement for a pro teacher swimming up stream that had few collegial connections beyond her classroom door. I leaned on her ample shoulders and sensitive responsivity more than once. She, too, with me.
The emotional arc of the year
The year was filled with extremes. On the one hand, there were events like this one just expressed about Eleanor sweeping into my room. Funnybone moments inexpressible in words. Moments I had already come to appreciate as peculiarly in-group occurrences in nature, occurrences filled with irony, occurrences that often played off the pathos and intense feelings of a brief moment in time and space, moments that gave perspective and provided momentary release from the tensions so often bred by the human encounters of school life, moments that hold meaning only for true insiders, moments that only occur in a place called school. These times evoked the kind of laughter that hurts. At Roosevelt, that laughter was balanced by other events of very real hurt.
I wrote a poem that year about my intensifying feelings of how it felt to work at Roosevelt. I called it Remembering Aberfan. Aberfan was a small Welsh coaling village whose school had been buried by a mountain of coal sludge that let go during a period of intense rain. The village school was in the direct path of the muddy torrent and there was nothing any of the men, women, and children could do to save their lives. They were victim to forces they themselves had set in motion, but forces now larger than any of them could control. That’s what my dawning awareness illuminated for me at Roosevelt. As time went on, I increasingly saw myself as participant in a set of social forces that were damaging us all, forces of which we were only dimly aware because we ourselves were agents of their construction. The forces were revealed in moments of utter pain and confusion and despair. Moments like when we heard one of our kids, like Henry, for example, had been shot and critically wounded by a zip gun in a random gang attack the night before. Henry was a good kid. One of the innocents. I remember him as boy with a quick laugh and a capacity to buckle down and do what had to be done to learn. Moments like when I saw my male colleagues, totally out of control themselves, filled with their own anger, punch students with closed fists in full view of other students stopped dead in their tracks by the overt violence of the moment. Moments like when the names of those abused students disappeared from the school register within the next week. Moments like when our students, boys and girls alike, would fight it out with the White name-calling mostly Irish-Catholic students at the bus stop a stone’s throw from our front doors, White students waiting for their bus ride to the Catholic school in the suburbs. Moments like when it would be our students that ended up in the police cars after the fights. That’s the way things were at Theodore Roosevelt’s JHS. When I walked in the doors, I thought this was the place I could make the difference I wanted to make. Change student lives. Open to them the love of learning, like Henry seemed to have. Help them create and realize step by step their own vision of a future full of hope.
I didn’t realize it then, but I suppose what I wanted for them was to have a life like mine and still be the persons they were. I fully believed that school was a place for this to happen and people like me could be the conduits of change. The world was still kind of a dichotomous place for me. I believed that if I got it right, they could get it right, too. Despite the good work of UTPP, I saw my work as opening to my students the possibility of another life, the life of opportunity and open doors that I had as a person anointed with the privileges of being White. After all, didn’t education open doors? Wasn’t education that crystal staircase up and out? I’d read Langston Hughes, but evidently didn’t have enough experience to really understand the poem. I thought that if I succeeded in my good teaching, my charges would catch on to what they had to know and do to earn their ticket to the freedom train at the top of the crystal staircase. I didn’t really know the larger meaning of “life ain’t been no crystal staircase,” of how hard it still was for Blacks in this country to break through the racist barriers that prevailed and prevented their opportunity and my opportunity from being one and the same. After all, this was the sixties, a time of when most of us Whites thought things were changing for the better. If Black college grads and returning veterans were still relegated to jobs of custodial work or menial labor, even after earning diplomas or hero’s ribbons, what real hope was there for my dream to become their reality? I thought I was one big doorway through the barriers of White racism. What I know now, and what became more clear to me at Roosevelt, was the immensity of the barriers. Yet, I could also see that people like me were important in the struggle and dreams like mine were needed. But my doorway was only one of many doorways that had to be gained and passed through for a different circumstance to be achieved. At the time, I had no view of the arrogance of my position. But that position was beginning to crumble in the midst of what Roosevelt put before me and the situations into which I was thrust.
Using the paddle, hitting Della
RJHS was the first and only place I ever hit a student with full consciousness of the act. I tell this story with concern that its very mention will sanctify other such actions. Listen well. I would never advocate this. Years later in Vermont, I was booed by a group of principals and superintendents when I mentioned in an address on school discipline that I thought corporal punishment as policy was a policy of abused ethics. I’m still not sure it was called for. But hear my equivocation. I’m just not sure that given where I was, who we all were, what that school was like, that my act was fully out of bounds.
Della was one of my 7Js. I remember her as one of the largest of the group and that included the smile that usually flashed across her face. She was a class leader and her resistance to authority (read “teacher”) could take an entire classroom of peers out the door with her at any given moment. Most of the time, Della and I were good. The space between us was clearly a negotiated space but I had set up our instructional encounters in a way that gave her some leeway, gave her some success, and gave her some group-based leadership. She was awesome when she was taking charge in “our” way. She was just as awesome when she decided to take the path of most resistance.
This would happen a couple of times a week. We’d have to stop class and talk and try to work it out, whatever the situation was. Sometimes she’d be angry with a friend. Sometimes, she’d come into class angry as hell about an event that had occurred earlier in the day. She and her brother Mart came from harsh circumstances so I often felt it was a wonder they were as regular in their school attendance as they were. Sometimes, she was just plain obstinate and would not stop her talking and interrupting. She was a challenge. Most of the time, she was a doable challenge. She had a good read on me and knew how far she could take me before backing off. But sometimes, she just wouldn’t back off. Instead, she’d say something like, “Now Mr. R., you know I ain’t gonna do what you want me to do until you put the paddle on me. Every one else here put the paddle on me. You gotta do it too. Then I’ll behave good. Come on now. Don’t be bad.” “The paddle” was the infamous spanking paddle Diltz had shown me earlier in the year. It was a small fraternity-type plain hardwood paddle, about 18 inches long, two and a half inches wide. It tapered to an inch wide. That narrow part was the handle, a place where you could get a really good grip. A real smacker. I couldn’t believe Della was asking me – negotiating with me, actually – to hit her.
The school had an informal protocol for paddling. You had to have another faculty person serve as witness and you weren’t supposed to paddle in your room. Like the punchers I had seen, it was something done in the hallway. Unlike the punchers, you were to be in full control of your emotions when administering the paddle. I don’t know if any of these were written down. By October, I’d gotten the message.
I was dead-set against paddling, theoretically. I’d never been in a situation I couldn’t handle another way, even at GLS. UTPP had not prepared me to do this. If anything, they’d done a great job preparing me not to do this. Hit a student? Are you kidding? That’s the ultimate admission of failure. I was proud that I didn’t send kids to the office for discipline like many of my colleagues did. I was proud that I had a good thing going with most of the kids in all my classes when it came to getting on with the business of school. I felt good that when Moses had said to me at the start of the year, “Hey man, don’t ask me to do nuthin’ and I won’t give you any trouble,” I’d said, “No deal.” But here I was, engaged with a female student who wanted me to hit her, to “put the paddle on her” as she so directly demanded. In return, she’d toe the line. If not, she’d continue to resist.
So one day, when her sabotage got unbearable, she gave me that “you gonna do it or not” look and I looked back at her and said, “Let’s go.” The other kids’ eyes widened noticeably. Della got up ever so slowly from her desk. I walked slowly to mine and took the implement of ultimate discipline in my hand and together we walked into the hall. I think, as a matter of fact, she waited for me to hold the door for her. And I did. She was much more experienced at this than I was so I followed her lead. Della turned around, placed her hands against the lockers and told me she was ready. I knocked on Eleanor’s door. She came to the door to witness and never skipped a beat with her teaching while she watched. The smack echoed up and down the long, empty hallway. That emptiness made the sound of the hit resound. Della recoiled from the sting of it. I’m sure it hurt. She turned at the same time she tried to rub the sting away from her bruised butt and said, “Ouu, Mr. Ratbone, you hit me good.” In return, I said, “Yes, Della, I did (hardly believing what I had just done).” When we walked back inside the absolutely silent classroom, Della’s eyes were heavy with unshed tears. A few asked if she was okay. The few that looked at me looked at me with angry eyes. These kids, by the way, were the same kids who’d reassured me Della was telling me “no lies” when she said she’d only behave if she “got the paddle”. They seemed to have had a change of heart. Della nodded silently that she was okay and gingerly took her seat. More than a few of her classmates took me to task by refusing to meet my gaze, like they’d been joined to an embarrassing moment they neither wanted to participate in or to witness, despite their earlier encouragement. I opened the drawer, replaced the paddle and feeling very defeated, finished our discussion half-heartedly.
Della did change. She became less resistant. As far as I could tell, she bore no ill will to me specifically. She still stopped by after school. Maybe I just receded into her mental journal that generalized the experiences of school as basically painful. Maybe my paddling became another notch in her life story. What role it played in the way she looked at life I can imagine but I’ll never really know. In some ways, she had control of her destiny. She knew I couldn’t continue to teach with her active interruption. She knew we worked together well sometimes. I think she knew I liked her. After all, she often came by for those short and friendly after school conversations. She knew the other kids were looking on, waiting to see what we would do. Perhaps, she even knew that she could bend me to her will so we could both get on with what each of us was expected to do. Perhaps she manipulated me into behaving in the only way left to her that would help her save face with her peers? Perhaps, that saving of face was more important to Della than the momentary pain of the paddle. But this is all idle speculation on my part.
Reflecting on my act of violence
Now, my internal dialogue is fractious about the propriety of finally responding to Della as she had asked. In that school, in that moment, for whatever reasons that brought us both together, putting the paddle on her seemed to be not only the right thing to do but the only option left. Didn’t someone once say context is everything? Didn’t someone else respond that the statement about context is a statement of moral weakness? I knew this act of informally sanctioned violence was wrong on so many levels: man/woman, black/white, teacher/student, oppressor/oppressed. It was an act that was emblematic of just one of ways the colonization of bel hooks’ people was enforced, not only for Della but for all the other kids who had to watch and listen. I will not rationalize approving the action because of its complicated nature. I will not rationalize approval at all. What I can say is I thought I was a person who would never resort to physical punishment to enforce my will on others. Turns out I wasn’t. In the narrowness of those minutes, that realization seemed to be a relief to Della and surprise to me. But I have carried the shame of these moments across the entirety of my career.
Della continued to exercise her own kind of leadership in my class. Though reading (and therefore most academics) in Roosevelt came hard for her and her brother, she was a persistent and dogged learner. She was a member of a group of five girls in that same room who I never quite figured out how to handle for the length of that entire year. They could drive me crazy. I spent weeks with them and a guidance counselor trying to sort out the dynamics that moved between and among us all. Any solution never really worked for long. I wasn’t going to rely on the paddle again, that’s for sure. Mary was the ringleader, not Della. Post paddling, Della would always back off when it was time. The rest would not.
My work on city government – the 7Js visit the Common Council
My very best memories of RJHS come from a unit on local government I did with these 7Js. Like most teaching, it involved lots of planning, lots of connecting, and more than a little bit of luck. Remember the three anchors I’d learned for curriculum development: Identity, Power, and Connection? This unit had them all. I tell the story because it was another one of those examples where going against the grain, worked. This unit meant something to these kids because as it turned out, through no initial planning of my own, the topic morphed into an issue they dealt with every day of their lives. In teaching, I was learning not to avoid chance events, but rather to take advantage of them.
We were studying how the city government worked and why it worked the way it did. I was interested in having the kids learn what political influence was and how it could work for them and their families. We had spent a fair amount of time thinking about who we were as a group, who had influence, why they had influence, what the consequences of their influence were, how others could use that influence, what trade-offs occurred when you asked someone to do something for you, and so on. I wanted them to get the idea that the fact the Republicans had been in power for a number of years in Syracuse was not an accident; there were things a party in power could do to turn out the vote and maintain their influence. I also wanted to get out of the building and take my class downtown to city hall to witness a Common Council meeting. I wanted them to see a meeting and to watch how political influence played itself out. I wanted them to observe a meeting and to be able to tell me who they think had power and why. These kids were pretty good when it came to analyzing power structures as long as they were real structures, not paper structures.
So we researched who was on the Council, when and where it met, were visitors allowed, how did we get to visit, and so on. I wrote a small grant to fund transportation, classroom coverage, and random supplies. The kids wrote letters of inquiry, we got a date to visit, arranged for a bus and the day was at hand. I of course went through the requisite process of getting them to figure out how they were supposed to behave at a meeting such as this. They knew. But as we all know, knowing how and actually doing it are often two very different dynamics. Who could tell what might happen on any given day to skew normalcy. Now Cool Jerome, he said he’d help. “Don’t worry, Mr. C.,” he’d say. “We be fine.” And then he’d look over at the rest of the class and laugh. Cool Jerome and I had had our moments. He had the worst smelling pair of sneakers that had ever spent a day in my presence. It was a delicate negotiation, getting him to go with me to find a less flavorful pair. And our confrontation over his handkerchief sniffing had been hard; especially since his handkerchief often held the airplane glue that gave him a high. But all in all, Cool Jerome had decided I was okay and more often than not, he was on my side of the conflagrations. So when Jerome declared, “We be fine,” I mostly believed him. Little did I know what he had in mind? I wonder if the kids knew?
The day came. I’d gotten coverage for my afternoon classes. I was very hopeful all would go well. I was unbelievably planned. I had one parent able to go with me. We were sixteen or seventeen strong, and we were ready. After lunch we gathered at my classroom to go to the bus. The walk through hallways went well. I had that procedure down pat. We signed out in the principal’s office. No trouble there. We walked out the front door of the school just as the yellow school bus that was to take us to city hall rounded the street corner — the kids went nuts. It was like putting a drop of detergent in the middle of a small, contained oil slick. The slick just lets go and shatters. Well, my gaggle of kids just let go and shattered. “Is that the bus we goin’ in Ratbone?” “No way.” Enough of my class took off in 360 directions that I thought the whole class had suddenly fractured. “No way, man, I’m not gonna ride a retard bus.” “F____ that, man.” “That bus for crazy kids.” Even Jerome had run. His lanky legs had taken him the farthest, all the way around to the back of the school. I think he was actually scared. It was over before it ever started. There was no way I could get them back in line, settled down, deal with the issue, get on the bus, and still meet our scheduled time of arrival.
I literally had no idea what had set them off. Sure, there was the yellow bus but what was the big deal? Retard bus? What was that all about? We finally got it all sorted out. It turns out that in Syracuse, the yellow buses were the only buses that took special education children to their schools. Now remember, this is way before Public Law 94-142 was passed. So the kids my kids associated with these buses were kids with the severest of physical, mental, and emotional challenges. My kids were afraid of being seen on these buses. They didn’t want people they knew to think they were one of “those kids,” and they didn’t want to catch any of the germs these kids might have left on the busses. They were afraid they’d catch whatever it was that made “those kids” be the way they were. I was stunned. I was floored. I was caught totally off guard by their flight response and then even more off guard by the fact that they were afraid mental illness was catchable.
So, back to the room. We were still going to do this trip. I decided not to fight the bus issue. More phone calls. More arrangements. Different bus this time. And finally, we arrived at the old Victorian city hall building that held the chambers of the Syracuse City Common Council. Finally.
I’d visited the chambers myself before the time of the first visit to get the lay of the land: where would we sit, how people could arrange themselves, possible distracting trouble spots, the kind of thing you want to be aware of so you can organize a seating arrangement that puts potential partners in crime at opposite ends of a row. Queen and Mary and Rose and Della were some of my worries. I had them in the front row with Jerome and Harold and Moses. We had agreed on a boy/girl arrangement as one that would work the best. In the hustle and bustle of getting ourselves into the chambers, being introduced to all the council persons and getting seated, I didn’t notice right away that Moses and Harold had taken to the back row leaving Jerome with the girls up front. I also didn’t notice right away that Jerome had decided to place himself in the middle of the young women. But when I noticed all this, I also noticed that he had leaned way back and placed his arms behind the heads of the girls along the top of the bench. His feet (with new sneakers, I was happy to note) protruding seemingly forever out in front of him. Oh Lord, I thought. This was going to be bad.
Cool Jerome comes through for me
But it wasn’t. Every now and then I’d see one of the girl’s heads pop forward. They’d shoot Jerome a mean look and he’d shoot them one back and then they’d all face forward again. After several pops I realized Jerome had taken that entire front row under his wing, literally. Anyone stepping out of line would get a head-pop from Cool Jerome The One And Only, as he really liked to be called. That day, as far as I was concerned, he was The One And Only. That day, I learned just how much power Jerome wielded in that classroom group. Of course he was two years older than anyone else in the class and I suppose that may have had something to do with it. But whatever it was on that day, it was find with me.
The issue of the non-removal of Elms
Here’s the serendipity that happened that day. The Council just happened to be talking about the tree blow down that had occurred during the tail end of a hurricane that had swept the wrong way off the east coast and come inland. Syracuse lost a significant number of already diseased Elm trees and the cost of tree removal became one of the topics for discussion the day we attended. On the way back to school, the kids got exercised about what they had heard. “Tree removal? What’s that? We ain’t had no tree removal!” “We got trees all over the place. They piled in the street next to the sidewalks. Nobody picked up our trees. We getting’ ticketed day and night. There’s no place to put the cars. Put ‘em on the sidewalk, they slap you with a ticket. Put ‘em in the street next to the trees, cars can’t get by. Put ‘em in the yards, get a ticket. What you talking ‘bout, tree removal. Huh?!” The next day I asked what we should do about it. After an unusual amount of “can’t do nuthin’ about it” talk, someone said, “Wait. Maybe the council could do something about it!” Just what I was waiting for. So over the next three weeks, we got letters from people who’d been ticketed, we had the Councilperson for the Third Ward come to talk to us, we got petitions signed by parents and friends of parents, we wrote letters to all the Councilpersons, several of my gang even wrote the Mayor, the newly elected Democratic mayor, pointing out how many residents of the third ward had voted for him. We got letters back saying how much our notes had been appreciated and how tight money was and on and on. We thanked them for their letters and still pushed the need for cleanup and slowly, the trucks began to come and take away the trees, just like they’d done much earlier in the outer rim communities of the city. I don’t honestly know if our presence helped speed up the effort, but I think it did. I couldn’t have planned a better conclusion to the unit if I’d tried. The kids, of course, told their friends what good politicians they were. They got kidded about it for sure but they also walked with a kind of pride in their step. I arranged for us to do some presentations in other classrooms at the school. They were shy, but I could also tell they where proud at where all this had gone. They felt they had made a real difference, and maybe they had. Their councilman said they had and that was good enough for me. The topic was relevant to them, they felt they had actually done something about the issue, and in the end, I know they felt empowered as a part of the abstraction called local government. Not bad for a group of kids who’d run away from the first school bus ever to take them on a field trip.
Success is a risk
The story of Gloria underscores ultimately why I left Roosevelt at the end of that year. I could see no hope for really making a difference. I was still looking beyond my room for that difference to be made. Maybe part of the arrogance I brought to teaching at this time was my belief that I was making a difference in the day-to-day learning life of my students. They were tough, but they weren’t impossible. Like Moses, many of them hoped I wouldn’t work them. But this wish came from despair at having failed, especially my 7js. School was failure to them. For most of them, that was okay. They had accepted dropping out at 16 their special form of graduation. Success was a huge risk. Failure was the preferred achievement. Not only did success change their perception of who they were as students, it also meant they were stepping out beyond their peers. The work the 7js had done during the unit on politics was ultimately inspiring. It even brought Gloria to a place where she was willing to give it a try.
Getting Gloria connected
Gloria was one year older than her peers. She was maybe fourteen, going on twenty-one. She was attractive, and used her looks to gain a lot of attention from her peers. Developmentally and experientially, she was way beyond where most of her female peers were at. And she was another powerful character of mine, so her presence demanded a kind of sullen respect from others.
From this teacher’s point of view, it was hard to get Gloria involved. When I tried to get her to participate, she’d also bate the boys, verbally as well as with gesture. Their attention would turn to her and because she always sat in the front of the room, she could easily move the momentum of teaching from me to her. This tendency got more intense as Spring wore on and I decided to try to get Gloria to operate from the back of the room so eyes front would be eyes not on her.
Just as surely as Skinner shaped his pigeons, I gradually got Gloria to take up residence at the back of the room. Some of this was moving her place of operation, some was placing myself in a different location and asking her to help me, some of this was getting her into a work group of three or four students at the large table in the back of the room. This strategy seemed to work pretty well. Gloria was actually more attentive from the back of the room. She’d sit on top of the table sometimes stretching out on the table. I’d be moving around at the front of the room and in the dynamics of how things happened with me, teaching and learning were definitely going on. Until the day Diltz Berry looked through the window.
Diltz does me no favors
I never found out what triggered his reaction but like Alexander, he must have been having a very bad, no good, very bad day. He must have looked in my door window during one of his meanderings around the school corridors. He saw Gloria draped across the worktable in the back of Room 204 and blew a gasket. He charged into my room, interrupting us all. “Mr. Rathbone, what is that girl doing like that on that table. You cannot allow that. Young Lady, get down this instant, right now, do you hear me. How dare you choose to receive instruction situated like that? Get down. Now!” His entrance and outburst was so unexpected that even Gloria responded. She did get down. She sat in a vacant desk near the radiator. Mr. Berry turned his diatribe to me. “Mr. Rathbone, how do you expect to win the respect of these students if you allow them such informality? Surely you want them to learn.” He had evidently missed the point that Gloria had been totally attentive and it was he who had caused learning to cease. I must have been red as a beet. But I was pissed. I’d worked weeks to get Gloria where I wanted her and in an instant he put all that work in jeopardy. I gently touched his elbow and asked if we could talk about this outside. I moved him away from the center of the room and out in to the hall. By that time I think he’d surprised himself a little bit. I assured him I knew exactly what I was doing, that Gloria was a good student and had been attentive, and that I understood his concern for learning and that I’d appreciate him taking up any future concerns he had with me before he took them up with my students. He said perhaps we could continue the conversation in his office. I noted that wouldn’t be possible because I was teaching at the moment but that I’d drop by after school. And that was that.
Prisoners in our own classrooms
Gloria had a few things to say about that “bald-headed man” when I entered the room. The kids were fed up with being treated that way and class was pretty much a bust for the rest of the day that we had together. This was a group I’d invested an enormous amount of thought and energy into, instructionally, one to one, personally, every way I knew how. And still I couldn’t prevent the random events that conspired to put them in their place, or someone else’s place actually. It began to dawn on me that that’s what school was doing to them. If all my urban teaching colleagues and I had our own school, maybe we could effect a change. But the discouragement of one step ahead and five steps back began to get to me, once again. I though a school might be different. But we were, all of us, prisoners in our own classrooms. There were no faculty teams. There were no faculty learning communities. There were no progressive groups of like-minded teachers able to control an entire day of a kid’s time. There was only each period of the day and each class of kids cycling through us at the ring of a bell, doing school. And beyond us, there was the outside. The fights, the shootings, and yes the trees. But the trees were few and far between. Could I make a difference here? With Diltz’s incursion in to my room, I realized, I’d begun to doubt that.
__________
“Mother to Son” by Langston Hughes
Well, son, I’ll tell you:
Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
It’s had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor –
Bare.
But all the time
I’se been a-climbin’ on,
And reachin’ landin’s,
And turnin’ corners,
And sometimes goin’ in the dark
Where there ain’t been no light.
So boy, don’t you turn back.
Don’t you set down on the steps
‘Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.
Don’t you fall now-
For I’se still goin’, honey,
I’se still climbin’,
And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, (Vintage Books, 1994)
[i] RJHS was ability tracked. Grade 7 had the 7As, the 7Bs, the 7Cs, the 7Ds, and the 7Js. Lord knows where the “J” appellation came from but this was the labeled notorious class. And they were my homeroom. I also had the 7As. In fact, I had the 7As and 7Js, back to back last two periods in the morning. The 7As were mostly fair faces. The 7Js, mostly dark.