Just some observations

Student aides—in the front office walking you to the next office where someone had  a schedule for you, and bringing you your hat when you’d forgot it; in classes, grading and returning worksheets, sitting next to a student misbehaving and chatting with the teacher; in the library, so carefully lining up the chairs again after the first bell—he’d looked at me in the hall earlier and asked, I don’t know if forlornly or hopefully, if he knew me from somewhere. 

And the rowdy boys so easily cowed once their teacher called them out, but she’d given them a good while to themselves, letting them dig a bit of a hole for themselves first, while everyone else got to work. The one kid in the back who asked if I had change for a five showed up in the library the period after, escorted by the security guard who’d been sitting there reading until he’d said something into his radio and gone to get him. He listened while the boy told what had happened, impassive, until they both settled into a silence where each reflected the other, the peace of a tumult exhausted. He walked him back after a while without saying a word, and came back to read some more. I wanted to ask him what it was like being a security, but the period was nearly up. They’re really so short. Some of those rowdy boys would stop distracting each other when I just stood nearby, or in their line of sight between the ones who’d been placed across the room from each other. But with the kid who’d been with the security guy that didn’t work. 

And all that the others learned from this was to wait until they didn’t think the teachers were paying attention, then mess with each other again. They trained their attention to know when the others’ attention was absent—but that’s no good for any kind of constructive cooperation. It all stays a game. Winning is getting away with it, losing is getting caught, and maybe  punishment, which is silence—which is the same as behaving, but just a roundabout way of getting there.

Learning is learning to be silent, and so when it’s time to converse, share an opinion, explain oneself, you get responses in monosyllables, mumbles, if not just silence. Among themselves, kids learn to interact in their own way, and whatever of that they’re able to preserve underneath the silence and in those lacunae from the teacher’s attention, that’s their creativity and their joy. And they must have questions they don’t ask. There’s too much interesting stuff around the sides of the room not to notice—skulls, anatomical models, laminated posters, aquariums luxuriant with slime and humming filters. And Mendel the monk in the garden, eye colors. 

The questions com e out tentatively in the down time at the end of class—why can’t the whole lesson be this natural? We are afraid of the possibilities, of ways it can go wrong, and so don’t believe it might somehow get made to work. This process of improving things, so slow, interrupted, dragged backwards or tunnel-visioned, even for good, experienced teachers. To get kids to fear and toe the line, speaking in a loud voice and taking no sass, in particular at the beginning of the year, so that you can joke with them and they respect you later. But I don’t think I can keep a straight face.