Trying to describe what kids in school are like, since this is one of the things Patrick wanted to talk about after the Proust talk. Some of them are scrawny, some growing, some grown, but from what they show, they’re almost all still immature kids. Never having been expected to do anything, they don’t expect much, and never made to feel responsible for what they do at school, they take no responsibility for what happens there; whatever their real world might look like it’s supposed to have no bearing on the school things, and vice-versa. There are so many students, it’s impossible to know what they might be like apart from the group, but in the group their main concern is to stay in the group. The scariest thing is to be treated as an autonomous individual, to have an independent thought, unless insofar as it appeals to the group approbation. To get people to laugh, to laugh along, is the chief good. To be laughed at—observing it, you would think this was feudal Spain, the kind of puffed-up pride and honor they put on, affronted, and spitefully seeking redress and vengeance. It’s merciless. It’s the way loneliness reaches into every interaction, and the lack of love, which draws together and excludes so violently. And so wrapped up they are in this, this social virulence, the best attention they can pay to a teacher’s voice, if it pretends to stand outside it, is the kind of cross-glance you might see a businessman cast askance a bum on the street. The most they can give is half a moment; even then their attention is only half there, but really concentrated in their group, and calculating how they look at that moment, they do everything to deflect the outside attention, or else turn it to their petty aggrandizement.
Under this pressure, it’s common to see a teacher step into the group-scale of valuation, and try to score points in the same way. And not surprisingly, they can do so easily, they’re older and more experienced. But the attention they earn by this is utterly compromised, good for nothing like learning, except a few more tricks, and the damage it does to the kids’ self-respect is not worth that. The only thing is to call out some better nature in the individuals, and undo the hold of the group. This is the work of service, of love, putting things in perspective, taking responsibility. It is practically impossible in the structures that now constitute the school.
For now love is a joke. Every appeal to the good is one more thing to laugh at, and heartier than most. There is a kind of pudeur about doing the right thing, when all conceptions of honor go back to a petty egoism and saving-face. And when the models are just bigger peacocks, bigger frauds, big kids wielding their authority where they will, it would be strange to expect them to recognize simplicity, humility, kindness as something to aspire to. And yet, it would be strange, too, to expect the teachers and administrators to act with any of these life-affirming virtues, or to dare to love openly with the charitable love that could open a mind or heart, when they are everyday surrounded by the same group dynamics and organizational structures that break the individual down into a fragment of a class or grade, and thrown back on these exercises of authority or a mean wit to salvage what order they can.
It is easy to see from the position of an outsider with no chance even to attempt this route, the clown, the substitute, how desperately the structures would need to be changed in order to put the principle of order in the student, and the shame in recourse to a crummy group. How reality would have to be brought into the work, to give it relevance. How to raise a kid’s expectations from a little laugh, above a grade, to a desire to learn, for his own sake. How to see beyond the group and the school to the world, to his potential in it, and what his life could be for, if he only cared about it as it cares about him. It is too easy to see, and too impossible to actually do—to reach a position where one could really change this perspective, philosophically one would be reduced to an all but total self-contradiction.
Seems the only thing is to talk to individuals when the group isn’t looking. The power of reading and writing. That’s the thing after all that really unlocks the individual. And now that no one reads, the individual is on its way out. All that remains is to see what succeeds it—whether it is a greater community, or a lesser hive. The schools are auguring ill, as ever. What you do see more and more of is technology being turned toward the use I used to make of books, raising walls around the individual subjectivity, protecting it from the carrying tide of the group. That’s why so many kids have their ipods in constantly, or the phones, texting someone else. For most of what you get in schools now, in fact, an online class or video teaching could do the job much better.
This just turns the question around, though—what kind of subjectivity is developed by these kind of media? Does it have the interpretive acumen of a book-devourer, or something different? If at no time have there been enough people keen on reading to call them the norm—taking society as a whole, not just the upper classes, and really the world as a whole, not just one society—maybe there was never as good a chance as now, with new forms of books and literacy to consider, and new media to communicate them by. All it takes is seeing them as more than an entertainment or muffler, to see in them that buried significance—texting incessantly not for the things said, but just to feel that contact, just like when they talk about shoes or sports it’s not that they’re really so fascinated by those things, any more than the young pedants are so fascinated by their philosophers—it’s really the talking and attention at the heart of it.
It’s possible to imagine, though it might be very hard to do—asking one of these kids a series of questions to get to see that—like what they like about shoes, why they’re cool, what it means to be cool, if it’s not the same as what other people like it’s at least connected with that, it’s what’s fun to talk about—more fun anyway than doing work—and so, in that light, shoes or anything else could serve as the content of a curriculum. New media certainly could. If there is something worthwhile in literature, math, and the rest, it will show by this kind of Socratic questioning, just as much as the worthlessness of the material things will, aside from their usefulness, whatever the Republic might say about poetry. Then again, the distant look in the students’ eyes when you try to get their attention is very much like the look on the face of someone reading, listening, to something else, staring into space lost in thought, like Socrates on the battlefield.
The content must enter in at some point to some scale of values, just as it must at some point engage them back into the world. Insofar as it gives good models to judge by, taken on their appeal to both reason and feeling, that combination of heart and mind that is properly human, a content should hold students’ attention. For that you need some bad models as well as some good, and there should be room for both. It could be talking about what kids don’t know about their own interactions, it could be reading steamy romance novels or listening to whatever trash—with a critical appraisal, a different perspective than they’re used to; rather than that comfortable distant look in the eye that means safety in numbers, that faraway thoughtfulness that can only be got at alone, for oneself, however you might strive to share and impart it after.
Because there is plenty of time for just enjoying those things in the usual way. Time for just talking about whatever stupid thing should be built into the school day, since kids might not see their friends outside school. But school should sometimes be hard. If it weren’t so boring, it might be easier to tell when kids say that it is because it’s actually hard for them; as it is, they could very well just be telling the truth when they say ‘I’m bored.’ And if they can’t get interested about thinking about things, it could be they simply aren’t ready to learn it yet, and some preliminary work needs doing—giving them things to do, then, so that the time that would have been wasted pretending to think can be productive elsewhere.
Patrick was also saying how interesting a position the sub is in, and how this gives you a lot of freedom for criticizing and no leverage for backing it up, but also it would let you try out different ways of getting for just a moment the attention kids won’t give anyone but themselves, from the novelty of it. Being so interesting or honest or funny as to make an impression, open their minds to all the things school could be, and all they can do beyond school or anything they’ve ever thought of. And as the things I say sound great and are hard to accomplish, so this, another step removed, sounds dandy, and it is what I’d like to do, but insofar as I, too, am within the system, I have an excuse not to try too hard. Saying the things I need to would cost me the job, and the chances of getting through to a kid are still so fraught—with some the boisterous scene might do it, but there are also quiet kids, and demurring ones, and ones no words would reach or any one instance could open up. It’s so hard to tell what would move those hearts and open those minds, or what good it would do to leave them vulnerable in that state, in those surroundings, without more guidance. Plus I like getting paid to just look on.
As the principal said to the teacher who told the kid what his sagging pants were code for in prison, thereby giving him a little history lesson he and his mother took as an insinuation against his heteronormity—just stick to teaching math. And we were talking about this, she and I, in her free period, and about her wild youth in the Navy and her grandson—showing me pictures—and giving up reading between sixth grade and the friend’s suggestion, years later, about the sleazy romance novels that were her door back in, and her trips abroad with groups of students in the summers, and an old sea-dog’s tattoo poking out between her sock and her jeans, how students might act in class like they needed parenting, more than teaching, but woe to her who broke down and spoke like a parent, for the main thing is to have the kids feel good. The same goes when it comes to grade time, where if they put their name on the paper and attempt a single problem, the lowest they can be marked is a 50%, and failing the senior who’s been passed along his whole life in this way is something unthinkable to him, like snitching about something important to keep secret, so that he’s still mad at her when he sees her at the Target a year later, and she for her part still tells the story.
Her husband like so to get her goat saying teaching is so easy, or else, commiserating with her, he dares the president or any of the cronies in Washington to try to teach in a public school. As if they didn’t know what their schools are like—they send their own kids to private schools. It seems more likely that they don’t care schools are so terrible, that they are intentionally allowed to become what they sometimes seem to be, merely holding pens for all but the wealthiest youth of America. Or if we are inclined to indulge in political spin, perhaps the schools are simply accurate laboratories of the economic and social realities most Americans face their whole lives, lives in which learning for a human life plays very little part. Surely it’s better to lead a real American life than an imaginary human one. It’s plainly useless to try very hard to bring the two into some kind of harmony—where would politics be without irreducible dichotomies?
What I take for granted for my school are the very things most difficult to find—students who want to learn, teachers able to make their teaching interesting, being truly interesting people themselves. In short, finding good people, young and old, and simply giving them a space to learn together, time set aside for it. How are they found? Do they come looking for you? I’m always on the lookout for them. Do you go about calling out in the wilderness, advertising this place you’ve only so far imagined, maybe on the strength of some ties to the real places you have been?
Do you start in a small way—a single class, an abbreviated course, over the summer, or after-school, or within a larger school? A freedom school, a pilot graduation-booster, something tangible, building the relationships that will make the fuller elaboration of the school come naturally, and be sought out. Letting a few foundational texts speak for themselves—an emphasis on reading and interpreting as the critical faculty students need to practice, and the behavior and attention are bound up with that, but the only thing prior to it is the genuine interest, will, curiosity, which you have to imagine everyone innately has, only in most cases it is obscured and redirected in all kinds of shortsighted ways. Starting with concrete events, men and women, a Malcolm X reading in prison, a Jane Austen writing deathless prose with social gatherings swirling around her—and the lives these writers led, who led lives worthy of aspiring to—a Tolstoy, a Conrad, and more familiar voices of American originals, and more pertinent living examples, like Wangari Maathai. Not shying away from what is best and most challenging, but going after it with all your heart. That’s all there is worth calling school, education—the rest belongs to life, and only a politician would dream of controlling and shaping that directly. For me, I want to live my own in a meaningful way—and for me, that is in trying to help others do the same. But not if they don’t want the help—not yet. Let me see how this works with people who are willing, and maybe from there I can discover the springs of that willing.
I have some ideas, even, as to what might be important, but some of them, like temperament or sense of humor, seem almost preordained, and the others are things like parents reading to kids and generally being awesome, which is fairly beyond the scope of the school—except insofar as ultimately the students should go on to be pretty good parents, too.
Anyhow, getting started in an existing school or church or whatever as an ancillary, optional program they might want to call enrichment or advancement or something like that—this means working with administration, its people and structures. Probably better to focus on the people—the structures I know nothing about, except that from where I stand they look awfully silly and overblown. But people are all right—teachers with many years and indefatigable energy; counselors like Eppeldauer and Ms Williams, with their straight talk and the Black Saga program; coaches like Bauer; parents who are active in their kids’ learning; and ultimately, but way of friendly secretaries, on up to the principals in their sweatshirts before school and their shirts and ties by the time the kids come in, and the far more shadowy bureaucratic ranks, principalities and powers above them in central offices at the state and federal level.
Somehow people manage to organize sports and academic competitions, and even quite rapidly it seems like new directives about grading, scheduling or other policies come down the chutes, so it seems like it has to be possible to institute some kind of program like this. Another of Patrick’s suggestions was to start at Annapolis High, why not do today what you keep putting off until tomorrow kind of thing, and as a corrective to all those sweeping claims I am wont to make, to actually try to put them into practice and see how easy it is. It just seems so awkward starting from scratch there. If it were the beginning of the year, or I knew Julie better, or I subbed there, then maybe there would feel like more of a way in. As it is, if I don’t bring real 826 or St. John’s or some other big-name bona fides, I can see my proposals patiently and blankly heard out ad absurdum, with nothing happening but a burned bridge in my own mind.
And I’m so jealous of my own inspiration and incipient vocation, I can hardly imagine teaching in a public school or TFA situation right off—I want to be welcomed into it, like the prodigal son, like I am where the teachers and staff kind of know me. Like the part about instilling the will to learn, I’ll go later where I’m not so much wanted and more needed—but going there now, I don’t think it would do anyone much good.
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