Teaching the Invisibles

Teaching the Invisibles

By Jack Seeker

Second City Teachers is running excerpts from the wonderful book about teaching in a Chicago high school on Northwest Side. This is Chapter 5.

Chapter 5

Student Teaching or learning the craft when every student is shooting for a D-

Oh yeah, let me tell you about the student teaching part

You’d be surprised how often student teachers are rarely helped by their supervising teacher. It is in the affluent suburbs where parents can be alarmed their kids have a student teacher that the regular, in-class teacher keeps an eye on things. Teachers in city schools can ignore the needs of the students in ways that would never fly in better schools and this stopped being a better school thirty years ago. 

Back in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, this high school had an altogether different student body. It was predominantly Jewish. The parents made their kids hit the books hard, and mind you this was pre-1980s. If a kid acted up his parents were ready to pounce on him. It had to be a joy to teach to there then.  

Eventually the Jewish community migrated to better pastures, and in their place came Hispanics and Blacks and Croatians, Bosnian refugees, and Vietnamese and Somali kids. The school now has twenty different immigrant groups, and each group of kids sit together in their classes and in the cafeteria. Perhaps the only time a kid is forced to mix with other cultures is if he’s the only non-Asian in the National Honor Society. And while this elite society has a decidedly oriental flavor, you won’t find any Koreans in it, even though the immediate neighborhood is filled with Korean shops. Where are the Korean families? Why in suburban Glenview and Naperville where the good school districts are. They may be new to this country, but they get the lay of the land quick. 

Unbelievably, a girl from here was accepted to the University of Chicago. So you might think it’s still possible to get an education here if you try hard enough. But not so fast. One curious Chicago Tribune reporter interviewed Chicago Public School students who were in their first year of college. Turns out they form study groups on the campuses they’re at. They get together so they can fill in each other’s gaps in what they should have learned in high school. One student was quoted as saying he was assigned to write an expository essay. Fortunately, another student in the group happened to have had one assigned to him in class and could explain what it was. Talk about resourceful, especially since some of the students came from this very high school, one that’s had two drive-by shootings.

As far as the classes I took over, I got some nice ones, two US history classes and two Chicago history classes. In one of the classes I started out as the “cool” teacher because I buddied up with one of the skateboarders, easily identified because he brought his board to class every day. We talked about the history of skateboarding. How it got invented by surfers in southern California so they could still practice on days when there weren’t any waves. How it went from crude boards with metal roller skate wheels to the ultra-flexible ones with smooth riding rubber wheels. The boarders in class were fascinated and hung on every word. Of course I tied this into why history was important. “Just look how knowing about your sport’s past increases your appreciation of it. In educational jargon this is known as making a connection and motivating the students. The boarders weren’t buying a word of it.

One Monday, I started my class with what I thought was an innocuous question, “How was everybody’s weekend?” A sophomore black girl quickly became animated and started describing a party where everyone had hit the floor as gangbangers sprayed the room. 

“What! You went to a party where there was shooting? Was that the first time that happened?”

“Oh no, there have been other ones. You keep your eyes out and watch who’s coming in and what kind of crowd it is. Then you hit the floor quick. People were flying out the doors!”

“What were they shooting about?”

“Rival gangbangers, shit like that.”

“Where was this party?”

“Irving and Wolcott.”

“Where’s that?”

“By Hanover Park.”

“Oh, okay. I know where that’s at.”

Left unsaid by me was, “Whew, that’s far enough away from my house not to get worried about.”

Yup, nothing like fearing for one’s life to help you concentrate in class.

In my Chicago history class, I gave out a short quiz. One black boy just flat out refused to take it. I finally said, “Look, come after school and take it orally. We’ll just discuss it. No big deal.”

The kid took off and never came back to class. When I asked what was going on with him, Ralph, in a rare moment of exertion, informed me that “Chicago History” is a dumping ground for a lot of learning disabled kids, or LDs. They were all guaranteed to pass with a “C” if they bothered to show up. A “D” if they came sporadically, a “B” if they talked in class, and an “A” if they turned something in.  (Now you tell me? Two weeks into class? Oh, wait, my bad, you only answer questions, not volunteer any useful information.)  

It was a bit of information that would have come in handy because I started the class, not with a rookie mistake, but with one big, knuckleheaded blunder. After two years of college lectures and reading a book a week, I had jumped right into my favorite subject the way I was used to learning it, and I started teaching the class on a college level, just the right approach for a watered-down parfait of a class for the working poor. 

So I toned it down and picked up the Chicago History classes with the Haymarket Riot. Unbeknownst to many is that the story of Chicago is the saga of robber barons, industrialization and maltreated labor forces. It was going well, until I got bogged down with the Columbian Exposition of 1892. A real pivotal moment. We were studying a carnival. 

But more important than the syllabus, my college professor was coming in for an observation. I needed a show piece activity.  Hand out a worksheet or show a film and you’re in serious trouble. If a student teacher received less than a B, he or she had to do it all over again. 

I took the “primary document” route. History teachers today are huge on using original materials from the era. It’s a vast improvement over read the book, take notes on the lectures, and take the test, we had growing up. I found a formal petition on the PBS website, signed by Thomas Edison no less, asking Congress to allow the fair to be open on Sundays, the Sabbath, allowing common folk who worked ten- and twelve-hour days from Monday to Saturday to attend on their one day off. Big-time exhibitors like Edison, McCormick Reaper, and John Deere had plowed a lot of money into the fair and they wanted people to see their technological wonders. 

My observing college prof, Rose, took a seat in back and began furiously writing notes as I taught. I handed copies of the petition out with the PBS study questions. All I said was that I had discovered a controversial document concerning the Exposition, and that it was up to their groups of four to figure it out. “Pretend you’re doing historical research and you came across this and you want to figure out what it is. Be a detective and gather as many clues as you can, and don’t forget to use what you’ve already learned so far about the fair, and use the book too. Tomorrow we’ll discuss what you’ve come up with and see if it helps us understand the Exposition more.

That’s all the directions I gave. It was definitely a challenge since it’s written in nineteenth century legal language. But as seniors, I thought they were up to it. Plus I was already sick of them sitting back all the time and telling me to just give them the answers.  

I visited the groups, seeing if they needed any help. The room radiated frustration as four or five Greek choruses chanted, “But we can’t read it!” 

“Look,” I finally said, “Just have fun with it. Write down any questions you have and any conclusions you’ve reached, and tomorrow we’ll share what we came up with.” I was asking them to think on their own, quite jarring after four years of fill in the blank.

After the bell the visiting professor gave me her feedback in the teacher’s lounge.  

“What were you thinking? You can’t just hand out an assignment without any explanation.  The students won’t know what to do. Remember “scaffolding”? You start with what the students already have in their schema,” a fancy word for the memory folders in our brains. The idea being that the students will take what they already know about a topic and link it to new related information to make sense of it all, a sound technique. So Rose wanted me to read and explain the petition so they’d understand it and then open up their schemas on petitions by asking if they had instances in their lives where they’ve found themselves trying to change a situation they didn’t like. 

At this point I was on the defensive and my thinking blinked off. Rose was a retired teacher in her sixties who used to teach at an alternative school on Michigan Avenue. A cool job, lots of field trips within walking distance. It’s also a cakewalk because while the students are there for “guns or drugs”, they’ll do anything to get back to their old school and friends. 

During this chewing out, I was thinking how nice it would have been if she had gone over all this in a nurturing manner. Taking into account I was brand new, not a seasoned veteran. She then brought out the exculpatory evidence of my total incompetence. “During all this, the girl sitting right in front of you, five inches away, was doing homework for another class. Didn’t you see her?  I saw her and I was sitting in the back of the room.”

Having wrapped up her case, she went into her summation. “You hand something like this out and they’re not going to ask about what they don’t understand. Boys stop talking when they turn fourteen. Our grandson has only started to converse again now that he’s nineteen. Your Honor, the defendant has a teenager. I’m surprised he doesn’t know that.” You have a teenager. She was right. I didn’t remember what being a teenager was like anymore. Who does, except the screenwriter of the “Breakfast Club”? 

It was like she was the chief surgeon doing rounds with the new interns and yelling, “Really, Seeker, liver enzymes test? What are you trying to do, kill this guy?” It seemed every professor in charge of student teachers had the attitude of “God knows what we’ll be unleashing in the classroom.” 

The next day after my tongue lashing, I continued with the Exposition document. The fear of the unknown had set the kids off more than anything else, and we had one of our best discussions because they wanted to solve the riddle. They were invested in it. 

Later, I had the students pretend they had been to the fair and were writing a letter back to a friend or relative about their visit. “Now that’s a good lesson,” my prof said. The kids knocked it out in class in no time. It was basically a list of things they saw, and it did reinforce what they covered. It was a good activity and it would stick with them. Unfortunately what they’d remember was what carnival booths were on the Midway.

A few weeks later, after the school year ended, I bumped into one of the Chicago history students I had gassing up his car. We chatted. And get this. The whole document disaster was the only thing he remembered from the class. And he remembered it in a good way.

What I learned was that educational theories are like one of Newton’s laws of physics. For every action there is an opposite and equal reaction.” Accordingly, for every new teaching method, the equal and opposite method works just as well. Example: Don’t teach vocabulary out of context of what’s being read, the kids won’t remember it. Opposite method: The kids don’t read, give them a list of vocab words or they won’t get any at all. In other words nobody can agree on the “best practices”, we just know we should be using them.

All through student teaching, the seniors were playing me like a video game they had beaten months ago. It almost got to the point where they were telling me what homework I needed to complete. When I gave out an assignment, they renegotiated it like congressional lobbyists until it consisted of the least amount of work possible. They did it in such a cute and charming way I couldn’t say no. Besides, it was their last semester in high school in a blow off elective, what was the point? And because they all wanted to graduate, they participated in class. It was a good class to have in a not so good school. 

Consequently, I gave out mostly A’s and B’s. If someone was a real screw-up they got a C. Except for one poor soul. Ralph personally stepped in on this one guy and flunked him. I was incredulous. Why this one kid I asked. Ralph told me a while back he asked where this student was going, and the kid had the temerity to lie to him. So he was getting an F. This is against Board of Ed. bylaws. Students cannot have their grades lowered for bad behavior. But this was one battle I was not going to fight. I didn’t want to repeat student teaching. 

The F got put on the report card and a few days later it was report card pickup day. Students age eighteen could pick up their own cards instead of their parents. I sat in the room and handed out the report cards to the small amount of parents who showed up. At the very end of the day, in walks the kid with the undeserved F. He was eighteen and was coming in to pick up his report card on his own. He also came in with his wife and baby. If anyone needed a high school diploma, it was this guy. 

I shared this story with another teacher later. His reaction to what Ralph had done was succinct: “That guy is an asshole.”

All along with this madness, I met with other student teachers once a week back at the college for a seminar type class on what we were doing. It seemed our biggest teaching problem was sustaining a discussion. We just couldn’t do it. We didn’t know how to ask questions the students would answer and keep discussing. The only advice Rose could give us was that we’d pick it up along the way. 

OMG! What a moron! Discussion questions use prior schema, the same advice she had given me when I just dropped the 1893 document on the class. But she didn’t tell us that, she told us we’d figure it out after a while.  

I finally saw teachers who were pros at making a class talk. At my first full-time job, teachers there had almost every hand flying up when they asked the class a question. But every time I tried it the place turned into the county morgue. I got them to explain how they did it. 

First you lead-the-witness by asking what had happened in the story. Then you ask what was the main character hoping to do when he did such and such? No answer? Then you keep backing up. “Okay, if you were in that situation what do you think you’d do next? All right, why did you choose to that? So do you think this is why the main character did that in the story?” I didn’t become adept at it until three years into teaching, and nowadays that’s two and a half years too late. It’s one of those things that sound simple until you try it. 

The process is called “scaffolding”, a laddering up from what the students do know to questions that tease out the stuff they don’t know. Rose could have demonstrated it in class and sped things up for us. But she had done it for so long and it was so automatic that she couldn’t, errr uh, teach it. And like that missing instruction, the rest of her class was just like the other con jobs the school was calling courses. We wound up getting reprints of handy tips on teaching that overloaded us with more shit we were supposed to use. Learning to shoot par would have been easier. 

The student teachers in the class I do remember were the ones who were getting the shit kicked out of them at the nastier schools. Bill, a former struggling ex-standup comedian turning high school history teacher (he now had a family) was teaching in a storage area that had been converted into a classroom in an overcrowded school.  The professor informed us this was quite common in CPS (Chicago Public Schools), as was a whole bunch of other basic necessities you won’t have, things like text books, DVD players and TVs, enough desks, as well as being able to make copies of  the of the materials you wanted to hand out. 

...

The worst descent-into-hell student teaching assignment went to two petite women, Cindy and Heather, and I don’t know how they did it. They were at a bottom of the bottom of the ghetto schools, the kind where the students pulled the fire alarm once a week and lit stink bombs routinely in the hall ways. When I heard the stories they told I stopped complaining about my comparative cakewalk.

They were at an all-Black high school on the West Side with some of the poorest kids to be found in Chicago. Cindy was forty-one, and I thought she should have had enough maturity and experience to handle the assignment. But those two traits don’t really factor in to it. Temperament seems to be the key. Any touch of being high strung and you were toast. Take anything personal and your days are numbered. Heather told me later that Cindy would go into an empty room after teaching a class and start weeping. But you couldn’t say she didn’t learn from her experience. After graduation, Cindy continued on to get an in-demand science endorsement and split post haste for the suburbs. It was Heather who had the right temperament. She stayed on at that school, and because of its high turnover rate, became the head of the history department her second year there. 

One night I bumped into them in the campus coffee shop and joined their table. They said hello and continued their conversation. They were so wigged out and nerve jangled from the day that, to shake off their stress any way they could, they were discussing their sexual histories. Psychologically, it made perfect sense. When in hell go to your happy place. 

At first Heather paused and asked Cindy if they should be going on in front of me. “Oh, he’s harmless,” Heather said, and off they merrily went down memory lane. 

“I used to go into the “Roundabout” a lot,” Heather said. “I knew all the regulars and all the bouncers pretty well. The second floor was open in the middle with a rail around it so you could look down on the dance floor. Well, one night I was there by myself and I invited the bouncer I liked to come up to the second floor with me.  I hung on to the rail and lifted up my skirt in back and the bouncer came up behind me and we did it right there.”  

I was in the deep end of the pool alright. “Didn’t anyone see?” I asked.  

“Naww. We just acted like we were standing around and watching the dance floor. It was too crowded to see anything anyway.”

“Yeah, sure, I can see that.” And I really could see that. I couldn’t get the picture out of my head. 

“Then there was a time we were all riding in a car somewhere and I started blowing my friend next to me.

“How many people were in the car?”

“I don’t know, five or six.” 

“Jeez, why’d you do it? 

“He needed it. I was drunk.”

Then Heather went into how she picked out waiters wherever she worked. And said she currently had her eye on a boy toy and it would only be a matter of time. 

Then she looked directly at me. “Oh you think women are these clean, nice, moral people. But they’re animals if you knew them. They’re really animals.”  

Here was Heather, a beautiful and thoughtful woman becoming a teacher, and was good it, but she was also an animal. Wow, maybe they should listen to some standup comics talk about sex and the stuff they do and what their girlfriends and wives have told them. You know, comedians, the truth tellers of society. Anyway, it’ll take another generation to bury the double standard, but right then in 2005, the harsh judging of women was still roaming around at night looking for fresh victims. 

Please don’t accuse me of being all “pervy.” And don’t think, “I thought this was supposed to be on the ills of our education system–not a sexual expose of the teaching profession!” It is about the schools. My point is you’ve got to be under a boulder of stress to blow off steam that way. Hell, if the question of whether or not women should be allowed in combat arises again, consider the matter closed, they already are. 

In another theater of operations, a middle-aged woman in our class, a marketing manager with Arthur Anderson until it went out of business overnight in the Enron scandal, was scheduled for her college professor observation. The professor pulled up to her school and wound up driving right into a race riot. He went into survival mode, hit the gas, careened through the ball field, and headed right back from where he came from. The next day the professor called his student teacher and told her there was just no way he was going into that school. The student teacher never got observed, but she did receive a final A for valor.  

A few years later, after I had started teaching full-time, I learned one co-worker could top that story. She got an A for student teaching without having to teach. She was at one of the snootier North Shore high schools, and the school refused to let her instruct, period. The faculty was not going to subject any of their students to a teacher in training, and for the next semester she was lucky if they allowed her into a classroom. Now that’s parental pressure. 

In the classes I was student teaching, I kept on holding class discussions, the kinds that go into deep thinking and analysis. The kind that reveal what’s in the teacher’s and students’ hearts. This is the learning, I think, stays with you, not the repetitive worksheets. And discussions are what I remember from high school thirty years later. 

For example, a discussion when my high school history teacher told us about the first railroads out West. “There were spur lines where trains pulled into so the other one could pass.” 

“What’s a spur line?” we asked.

“It’s a dead end off the main line that trains can pull into so another train going the other way can get through.

Another student: “Weren’t there two tracks, one in each direction?”

“You don’t think they built two tracks right away do you? It was hard enough to get one track down.” 

The class goes silent. History had just come alive. 

The teacher continued on, “Oh yeah, and when two trains met head on, one had to back up to the next spur. Sometimes they decided who would back up by shooting it out!” 

One blessed day, a substitute came in for Ralph, and the sub and I hit it off immediately. The sub couldn’t believe I was asking him to teach instead of read the newspaper. We were on the quilted patchwork of the varied ethnic neighborhoods the first Mayor Daly prized so much, so we formed the class into a circle and we began talking about how immigrants in Chicago were treated from the 1880s onward.  

We delved into Jane Addams and Hull House, the tenements, etc. Then I directed their brains upward into the why of it all. Why huddle with your own, why Hull House, why muckraking, why did they live in tenements? And what would you have done and why. And what’s it like for today’s immigrants. Everyone was on a roll. 

And then a gift wrapped up in pretty flowered paper with a bow was opened for all of us. We bounced on the religious differences between the arriving nationalities. We had the luck of having a very articulate senior girl in class who really dove into the deep end of the topic and she wound up expressing a remarkable insight. She thought the strife between the different religious outlooks boiled down to which one is right. “If you don’t believe the same way I do, maybe my religion isn’t the truth after all. And instead of examining their own religions, or being tolerant of others, they did it by killing each other.” 

I asked her about her background. She shared that her mother crossed the Rio Grande pregnant with her. It was cool stuff. The sub turned to me and said, “Wow, she’s something. Great class.” 

It was then I noticed there was no tension in the room. The tension would be back tomorrow when Ralph returned, until then I enjoyed the holiday from his bullshit. 

In my US history class, I had the class open their textbooks to a page with song lyrics written by soldiers fighting against the Philippine freedom fighters. The textbook to its credit pointed out the hypocrisy of it all. The history texts were kept under the desks. The kids weren’t going to take them home. If they did take them to their lockers, they didn’t bring them to class because the books are 1) too heavy 2) it doesn’t look cool to be carrying them in the hallway 3) forgetting your book and asking the teacher if you can go back to get it is a great way to be out of class for ten minutes AND 4) the books weighed a frickin’ ton. Publishing houses now write textbooks to include everything to avoid the chance a school district might not buy the book because something had been left out. If the school had extra textbooks in addition to the ones that sat under the desks, students were told to take them home and keep them there in the unrealistic hope they’d use them for homework. 

So we read the song lyrics written by the American soldiers fighting the guerillas opposing our foreign occupation. Fascinating tidbit: the word “gook” was coined in this war, not Viet Nam. It was a good moment. The lyrics are pretty disgusting, evocative of what combat is really like, and just how unreasonable little brown people can be.  

I asked them what a song like this one told them about the Viet Nam War. Then I handed out some of the lyrics Country Joe and the Fish’s “I-Feel-Like-I’m Fixin’-To-Rag”, and sang them in their sardonic melody. 

And it's one, two, three,
What are we fighting for?
Don't ask me, I don't give a damn,
Next stop is Vietnam.
And it's five, six, seven, eight
Open up the pearly gates,
Well there ain't no time to wonder why
Whoopee! we're all gonna die.

Well, come on mothers throughout the land,
Pack your boys off to Vietnam.
Come on fathers, don't hesitate,
Send 'em off before it's too late.
Be the first one on your block
To have your boy come home in a box.

The word picture of having your boy come home in a box lingered in the room…the kids were jarred out of their cocooned complacency. Just to make sure they didn’t miss the message I ended with the quote, “You may not be interested in war, but war is very interested in you.”  

 We were learning and having fun, at least until the wakeup call on our foreign wars. I’m sure there’s some education theory for what I was doing. But by now I didn’t care. Education has a label for everything. I knew the whole field was full of shit when I was told reading quietly in class is known as SSR, “Sustained Silent Reading”. I wonder if a kid looked out the window or had to go the bathroom if that counted as un-sustained. 

At any rate, all of the class paid attention that day, so I knew I had done good. I also knew it would be time for one of my supervising teachers in the room to irrationally feel threatened. And sure enough, they didn’t waste a time about it. A few class periods later, Charlene is telling her paramour loud enough to overhear, that she had sung a Polish folk song to her class, like all of a sudden serenading your students was cutting edge pedagogy. Gee, no wonder the room is wrapped tighter than a tourniquet when they’re here. They were becoming so bad either one of them was a vacation home for a therapist. 

In spite of this, I did have the satisfaction of teaching The Spanish American War, an event I had just covered in a college history class a few months ago. I was revved. This was the beginning of American Imperialism. Mark Twain was in the Anti-Imperialism league, and his “War Prayer,” an anti-war poem he thought so controversial he left instructions for it be published posthumously. The Anti-Imperialism Third Party wrote a platform for the 1900 election that eerily sounds like it could have been written for the Iraq War. 

Perhaps the more patriotic of you find teaching that America at times has fought against freeing people, and is being run like an empire, is some kind of brainwashing. All I can say is that I’ll pull the documents for you and you can deny them. I feel it’s my duty to stop the “America can do no wrong” white noise for just a little while. With military recruiters roaming the halls nowadays, it really can be a matter of life and death. And funny how the recruiters are so sparse in the better schools.  

...

But with that one class notwithstanding, brainwashing wasn’t my problem, brain freeze was. After four weeks of failing to conduct more than just one class that was at least somewhat interesting, I gave up. I simply gave up and sat home nights flummoxed and confused. I attempted to come up with something cool and my mind would come up blank. Or I would come up with something neat but I’d kill it because it wasn’t good enough. If I was Elizabeth Taylor, I’d be suffering from a nervous breakdown or nervous exhaustion. In retrospect, what I was suffering from was having an audience of 125 let me know every day that I was bombing, that my scintillating historical revelations were boring, and it finally got to me. 

Was I really terrible? No. Was I really great? No. Was I letting the kids get to me? Yes. I tried to console myself by thinking that maybe the problem was akin to a sophisticated New York comedian performing in Huntsville, Alabama. The comedian delivers his punch line, “You know everyone complains about the DMV, but have you ever considered we have them to thank for messing up Franz Kafka’s license?”…..Pause…..wait…for…laughter….break nervous silence by cracking a joke about how stupid people are down South. 

Whatever it was, my self-confidence was shattered. I knew I needed a couple of weeks to convalesce before it would return, so I assigned read, answer the study questions; read do the worksheet; read some more, review, take a quiz. 

And what happened? No one could find anything to complain about. It was like a normal class. Grunt it out and wait for the bell. But if I did some new, “fun” activity, everyone was a critic. In reality though, they weren’t criticizing. What they were really saying was I don’t want to make a fool of myself by having to do something in front of the class. Just getting them to stand up in front of the class and read a report required a Xanax. 

So I learned that no matter how upbeat I was, no matter how much fun I said something was going to be, at least four hormonal-infused teenagers would set out to prove me wrong. So if half the class liked something I thought it was worthy of a Nobel Prize. Teenagers can be dicks. They don’t mean to be, but nevertheless, they’re still being dicks. I started ignoring them, always best when dealing with the snarky, and got my semblance back. But I needed two weeks away from them mentally to be able to do it. 

It’s Showtime Folks

My college professor was coming in for another announced observation; much the same way the health department announces its visits to restaurants that manage to be immaculate for the day. So I borrowed another dynamic activity from a methods class that fooled no one into believing I routinely taught that way. But no matter, the activity really demonstrates the conflict of cultures in Chicago history, and I was dying to try it out. 

It involved separating the class into two groups. Each group had a different societal hierarchy, one was authoritative, the other egalitarian. Each group got a sheet of its own nonsense sounds so they’d have different languages. One half of the class went into another room and the other half stayed put. The groups rehearsed their vocabulary. Group A elected leaders. The egalitarian Group B didn’t have leaders. They decided everything by a group consensus. They also gave out shells as gifts to encourage friendship. I went back and forth between the classrooms while my college instructor and Ralph watched the two classrooms. 

I gave instructions to each culture to send scouts to the other group and report back on what they saw. Then Group B was told that Group A was expanding into their territory, and the choices to make: fight, flee, or negotiate. The groups decided to negotiate a treaty. After we discussed how it related to ethnic groups interacting with each other, in Chicago and throughout history. Language, the kids said, was the biggest barrier. Then I teased out the political structures and other misunderstandings. Some of the kids were even thinking about enslaving the peaceful group!  

The whole thing was a show piece, and the observing college professor lauded it. Only Charlene had a problem with it, and she did what any insecure person would do, she took a shit on it. 

“In a real job, this would never have worked,” she said. “There won’t be other teachers to help you. You should have done it in one room.”

 “I know,” I replied. ”Next time I’ll do it that way. But since I had the other extra manpower, I did it this way for maximum effect (you fucking idiot).”

“No, you should never have done it that way in the first place. It’s not preparing you for teaching on your own.” God Almighty! She’d be threatened if she found out I had taught my dog to give paw.

Direct participation in my classroom activities usually went well as long as I didn’t assign homework with it. But if you wanted them to answer a question or even watch a movie then points had better be involved. So I started handing them out like an airline.   

And it worked. Dangle a few points out there and they snapped ‘em like guppies. Until it came time to earn the ones that actually counted, the ones I assigned and kept track of on homework. And it was there they drew the line. On a 100-point essay I had assigned to a class of twenty-five, three were turned it in. And each of those papers had at least one grammatical mistake in every other sentence. In the time it took to correct them I could have watched a movie.

I assigned the essay because history should also teach writing. Charlene and Ralph said, “We don’t assign essays. We let the English department handle that.” Since then history classes have become Reading and Writing Classes with social studies being the reading matter. In an effort to augment the skills these students are so lacking in, and of course, because the schools need to raise ACT scores so they’re not put on probation. Stay on probation long enough and the school board comes in and fires even the gym teachers. 

And that’s exactly what the board did with Fenger High School. It got a whole new faculty, principal and security staff. Grades didn’t go up but violence did. Eight weeks into the new school year, a boy got stomped to death. There’s a YouTube video if you want to see the boy being kicked in the head over and over again. It was said that because the brand new teachers and the security guards didn’t know the students, let alone each other. The sheer anonymity of the place created a kind of carte blanche for out and out brutality. 

But I digress yet again. Unbeknownst to my two knuckleheaded colleagues, history can and should improve reading and writing skills. First off, there’s quite a bit of reading comprehension needed, and second, there should be quite a few short answer questions, and several essays. 

I know this from experience. My history degree kicked up my vocabulary big time, taught me how to analyze and think, and finally, taught me how to write a kick ass argumentative essay that logically doesn’t leak any water. 

So I started putting two questions on the tests that required a paragraph each. I was fine with this since they didn’t know how to write a proper paragraph let alone an essay. So my tests were 50 multiple choice questions and two short answer questions. As soon as I announced the test was going to be multiple choice there were sighs of relief and cunning little smiles like they had pulled one over. According to them, and probably all of us at one time or another, multiple choice questions can be guessed out correctly. But you’d think they would finally wise up to the fact that they can’t. There are always a couple of answers that sound like they’re the right ones. And for the rest of the semester the class kept averaging 50% right, close to the amount a typical guesser usually gets.    

When I handed back the three graded essays, I announced to the students that had not turned one in that they were getting F’s on their progress reports. A voice from the back row blurted, “You can’t flunk us all.” 

They knew if I did, I’d be a bad teacher. At the end of the semester they knew I’d be the one who would have explain why this class received 22 F’s and 3 A’s. It was understood you didn’t hold students back, you shoveled them along. Charlene and Ralph summed up this “best practice” with, “You can’t save’em all. If you try, you’ll burn out, and if you burn out, you can’t help anyone.” 

For once they said something right. I noticed when I gave a student the least little bit of advice on how to do something better I was quickly ignored. They didn’t put in more effort on assignments they already had a passing grade on. I began to stop helping as much as I would have liked to. I got the message, and I got demoralized.  

So at the end of the semester I was surprised I had helped a girl in class, and had helped in a meaningful way. Little by little we developed a relationship. Early on I saw her one day in the hall, said hello and added some friendly teasing.

“There goes my favorite student, hi Adriana.”

“That’s bullshit,” she answered. 

Yikes. I had to let her know I wasn’t lying even though I was. It was too early into the class to have any favorite student yet. 

“Okay, you’re right. You’re not my favorite student. You’re one of my favorite students.”

“No, I’m not.”

“No, you are. There’s a group of you and you’re one of them.”

“Oh, okay.”

Alright, I thought, a little hard bitten, but bright, definitely bright. That was the first time any of the kids had me on my toes. 

As the semester continued and I challenged her class to think about why an historical event had happened, she was the one who jumped in and nailed the causes. She was the one who caught the abstract concepts I tossed out before they hit the floor. 

I told her she’d make a good lawyer, and she asked me why. But this time along with her making sure nobody was screwing around with her, she also wanted to know what she was doing that would make her a good lawyer. God, it was a joy to talk to her. And God is it rewarding to see one your pupils begin to discover who they are, what the can do, and what they’re good at. So I told her why she has the skills to succeed at the law, and I answered her in the same tone she asked the question to make sure she believed me. “You like to debate, you like to reason, you like to think, and it’s fun for you.” 

She paused. 

“Oh, and you form good arguments.”

She nodded and said, “I never thought about that.”

I moved on to having the class form pairs, choose a Depression photo and write and act out a skit of what they thought the people in the picture went back to doing after the photographer left. I took videos of their work so they’d take their performances seriously, and so I could mention I was doing it to my college professor. Cynical, I know, but if the college didn’t keep piling on needless work during our student teaching and threatening we’d might not pass if we didn’t get it all in, I wouldn’t have been thinking this way. Student teachers are treated like medical interns that are supposed to work thirty-six hour shifts. 

Before starting the project, I gave them a mini-lecture on what the Depression was like for the common people photographed, how the photos were part of the WPA to keep artists employed, and to be used to show Congress just how bad things were. 

The photo Adriana and her partner chose was a portrait of two forlorn women. Their characters discussed the terror of not knowing where their next money was coming from.  Then one of them asked over and over what they were going to do, and all the other woman could do was to keep replying she didn’t know. Their piece rolled on in this “Waiting for Godot” way until it abruptly ended.

The mystified class looked to me for an explanation. I told them to ask the girls. “They’re the ones who did it.” 

Adriana quickly told them. “It’s what Mr. Seeker told us. People didn’t know what to do.”

“Why didn’t they know what to do?” I asked all of them. 

“They didn’t have jobs,” a boy answered. 

“Right, you don’t know where your next meal’s coming from. The Depression was devastating. People really didn’t know what to do. Wouldn’t you do that in that situation, keeping telling the other person you were out of answers?”

There it is, I thought, Adriana applying knowledge, a higher order thinking skill as we professional educators like to say. 

At grading time I walked up and down the rows and whispered to each student their grade. But before I did I informed all them that I didn’t give grades. I reported the grades they had earned. I’m not Santa Claus I told them.  

Adriana was the last student I came to, and I told her her final grade was an A. Then I went back to my desk. She came up and firmly stated in the nature I was now used to, “You made a mistake, I think I should get a B.”

This was a first. Who the hell argues for a lower grade? I pulled out my grade book and went down the list of each individual grade for her. 

“You’re right, your grades add up to a B. But you’re forgetting I also add in a participation grade. And because it’s a high B, your participation grade makes it an A.”

Satisfied, she went back to her desk. Why she wasn’t in honors was beyond me. 

The semester was ending and I went to a job fair in the morning and came back to teach my afternoon classes. I left my suit and tie on walked into the classroom.  The kids made a big deal out the suit. It’s amazing how the slightest change in a teacher’s appearance, a haircut, a tan after spring break, a shaving cut, is always big news for them. I downplayed the suit and tie with the kids, saying I had job interviews earlier in the day. One of the kids asked Ralph why he never wore a tie.  

The next day in walks you know who in a tie, something he hadn’t done all year, and I could swear the kids in the first few rows all had one arched eyebrow. 

“Hey, how come you’ve got a tie on today?” a girl asked. 

Ralph squirmed and tried to be nonchalant. “Oh, I put on this dark shirt with a white undershirt, and it made me look like a priest. I figured if I put on a tie it wouldn’t look that way.” 

“Well, it’s official,” streamed my consciousness. “He and his companion are fuckin’ nuts.”

My very last day I passed out candy bars to everyone and said it was a pleasure to teach them. They all knew otherwise. 

Ralph and I were by the desk with Ralph making small talk that did not include my doing a good job of course. Adriana came up to me to say goodbye and with Ralph standing right there said, “I wish you could be our teacher for the rest of the year. I really like the way you teach.” 

Holy shit. Talk about awkward. My instinctive reaction, anybody’s instinctive reaction was to graciously let Ralph save face and say, “Oh, it’s just hard changing teachers. Mr. Low IQ is a good teacher. It’s hard for students to make the transition back again.”

Normally, I would have, even for enemies. But I had taken way too much of his shit.  So I told her, “Me too, Adriana. I’m going to miss you, and you better apply to law school, alright?” 

“I’ll think about,” Mr. Seeker. 

“Well, that’s what you do best, kiddo, think.” 

Ralph painfully and slowly went back his computer. 

It makes all the sense in the world why she didn’t like Ralph. She had a learning disability Ralph couldn’t help her with. She had undiagnosed intelligence. 

I think she was the one I “saved”. I just wished I could have saved her from here. Imagine how she would have blossomed in the right potting soil of a school.  

As I was leaving the room for the last time, numbnuts was taking over. Of course, the asshole was repeating what I had already covered. But this was his favorite part, WWII.  On the way out he’s lecturing on the air war. 

“Now remember, the Allies did not bomb civilians, only the Germans and Japanese did. The Allies, I repeat, never purposely bombed civilians.”

Well, that leaves out our bombing of Berlin, Tokyo and Dresden, and Nagasaki and Hiroshima. 

I’ll let you decide if my going on about Charlene and Ralph is a foolish grudge. All I have to say is if they had put their students’ needs first, the ensuing happiness that naturally comes from helping others would have increased everyone’s learning, even theirs. 

But I didn’t leave pondering that. What I thought was that this was no time to be getting something this important wrong. Not with the military recruiters on the first floor waiting to sign these kids up for Iraq, another place where we don’t bomb civilians. 

###