Chapter 9

Teaching the Invisibles

By Jack Seeker 

Chapter 9

Baggage 

Or I hate teachers who won’t see a therapist

When I speak of the psychology of teaching, I don’t mean adolescent psych. Sure a lot of that applies, but a lot doesn’t. Life near the poverty line far outweighs what would normally be thought of as coming of age. First loves, hormones, acne, fluctuating moods, relating to peers, etc. all happened, but when you’re ducking gangbangers, racially motivated melees, child abuse, financially insecurity, and chaotic home lives, it’s not a place where the Disney channel would want to film. 

The bedeviling part is that these issues won’t be seen with a prolonged observation or even an extended stake out. From the outside, all you’ll see are some scruffy kids who all own the finest in sneakers and the best in smart phones. But get to know them and over a long period and your vision and hearing finally gets attuned to their lives. 

I spent my first year concentrating on how to teach. My second year, improving on what I had learned and then seeing half of my sophomore classes drop out by April because they had hit their sixteenth birthdays.  By my third year, now that I didn’t have to fully concentrate on learning the job, I had more time to relax and get to know my students on a personal level. And if you found yourself in the same circumstances they’re in, you’d seriously consider moving your family to the Rockies, building a cabin and being ready to shoot anyone trying to steal your provisions. 

One time I was merely asking a few of my students where they lived. Did they like their homes? Did they have a quiet place for homework? What were their neighborhoods like? The topic slowly drifted to how, not one, but three or four of them, can see whores outside their bedroom windows plying their trade in cars or gangways and the next morning walking past used condoms on their way to school. 

I hit it off with Lissete because of her sense of humor, always a sign of higher intelligence on the planet. When she told me one of her teachers had chewed her out for some trivial reason, I was incredulous. After that I kidded her about being such a bad kid and a trouble maker. 

She was taking a full load plus three night school classes to make up credits. So I completely understood why she slap-dashed her Macbeth essay. As usual I only received three essays from the class, and this was after I had written the essay opening and most of the body on the board and asked the class to write the last three paragraphs. 

I handed her back her B essay and told her it wasn’t up to what she normally did. She quickly divulged she just didn’t have the time to do it over. I didn’t press it. I asked if she’d consider reading my comments and doing a revision, not that I expected to see one. The next week she handed in a new paper. It was exactly what I was looking for, it was nearly college level. 

In my sophomore classes, where we were trying to improve their essay skills, I came up with the “Mr. Seeker’s I Hate to Write Writing Lesson” after I saw most of the kids trying to write each sentence to perfection and getting nowhere. I tell them I completely agree with them, writing is no fun. Most people don’t enjoy writing, they enjoy having written. Drawing, playing an instrument, acting are fun, hearing a blank page tell you it’s out to get you is not enjoyable. The trick is to tell the page you’re just going to write down the first ideas that come to you and not worry if they work or not. Before the students knew it they had a page and half essay right there in class. The next day I walked around and helped them edit it and then I took ‘em to grade. This helped several of them. Most of them, however, started to smell work, and put it down, even after I had sat with them and helped them write over half of it.

I thought I had brought forth an effective method, until I saw another teacher teaching the same class and getting almost all of her students finish their essays. The small step by step process she used was created by a group of teachers at her old school. I tried to use her lesson but, because I hadn’t been in on the writing of it, didn’t know use it. The old way of teachers doing everything on their own is not nearly as successful as working as a group. 

In the last few days of school, after the students had taken their finals, and they were cleaning out their lockers, Lissete stopped by and hung out. I felt flattered and bitter sweet, knowing we wouldn’t be joking around anymore. 

We talked about her moving to Milwaukee. She then told me something that was a good thing I didn’t know before; I wouldn’t have challenged her to work harder if I did. Her parents were drug addicts, and she lived with a different set of uncles and aunts which meant a new home and new school every year. Senior year she was staying with the relatives she hadn’t lived with yet. 

My eyes became as wide as silver dollars. “Really? It’s amazing you’re doing so well in school.” 

“I know,” she said, “My counselor says the same thing.” 

The bell rang, she needed to leave. I regret not hugging her before she left. I hesitated because of all the warnings about touching students. After that I threw out the rule.

We have met the enemy…and it’s me–I mean I

It took me a while to realize what I learned growing up not only didn’t apply here, but was also downright harmful. My childhood imprinting, are now gut feelings I can no longer rely on, and the unlearning of it is painful. It became all too apparent when I thought the reason a kid was misbehaving was because his or her parents were too indulgent. The perpetrator needed a firm hand in order to see there were consequences. Sometimes I was overly strict, and I prosecuted infractions just short of going to the grand jury. 

Once too many times though, Geena, the dedicated counselor, would step in and see me about the student I had reprimanded. She’d let me in on the child’s background, and what she thought was going on, and I’d wind up feeling like a compassionless bully. My students were dumping out their anger and home issues unconsciously.  

In a tony North Shore high school I would have bet a kid’s weekly allowance that a misbehaving student was spoiled. A teacher in one of those schools recounted how the students there knew exactly how much he makes, and insinuated that maybe he’s not really qualified to grade or correct them, seeing how they’ll be able to buy and sell him in a few years. Giving a student a B may involve a parent phone call or personal visit, or a threat the parent is going to “take this to the top”. You could say instead of dealing with gang warfare this teacher had to deal with class warfare.

To give you an idea of how tricky it is in finding the right path to take with a student, I’ll tell you about Gio. He was a sophomore boy trying his heart out. He joined ROTC and did homework consistently and sat so far up front that most of the time  he was practically sitting under me as I stood in front and taught. He was serious about succeeding and routinely asked for extra help. Before I knew it, I had taken him under my wing. 

One day though, when things in class were relaxed and we were reading a nonfiction essay, Gio was seated on the counter next to the windows not five feet from me. All of a sudden an enraged security guard came running in demanding to know who was throwing books out the window. One had just missed his head. He saw Giovanni by the window and yanked him out of the room.  Later, Geena, perhaps the only counselor in the school doing her job, came in and told me what happened.

“Gio’s had four people close to him die in the last six months, two friends and two uncles, all from gang violence.”

“Christ,” I replied, “If it was me, I’d have burned the school down.”

In addition to unlearning my middle class family’s views of discipline, I also realized I was now in a parental role, and even the mildest of my past childhood issues might be unconsciously transferred to youngsters who were the least equipped to handle them. They’re resilient, but adding to the fire was something I did not want to do, not if I could control it. But making mistakes, of course, is inevitable. Every teacher has “blind spots”, imperfections in our psyches, that make us misunderstand student problems from time to time. 

It could be a female teacher who didn’t grow up with any brothers and therefore doesn’t understand the male half of the population. It happens in grade schools all the time. A boy will be fidgeting at his desk. The exasperated teacher yells at him to stop as if she caught him rifling through her purse. The boy’s left wondering what the problem is. Unfortunately, he hasn’t taken the evolution of human biology yet, so he can’t respond with, “Gee, I’m sorry, Miss Raskins, my remnants of hunting and gathering genes are telling me I’m supposed to be with the menfolk right now learning how to hunt antelopes, a biological clock, if you will, that accounts for my high energy level…So could I fidget just a little?”

Sometimes it just boils down to a failure to change, especially when a teacher has been at it for twenty years. The students in his first fifteen years on the job have moved on, and a whole different group with a whole new set of circumstances and economic realities has moved in, and the teacher uses the same ol’ attitudes and claims it’s the kids’ fault. 

The teachers I don’t have patience with are the ones who take their job way too seriously, teachers who treat high school like it’s an extremely vital part of life. The ones who keep telling their students if they don’t shape up now they’ll never get a job. They rigidly control their classes and flunk anyone who isn’t clicking his heels. They know what a teacher is supposed to do and by god they’re going to do it. The chances for mentoring and nurturing, identifying hidden talents and passions, setting challenges to increase self-confidence, and teaching new and unconsidered ways of viewing the world never come up. And catching students’ possible depressions, low esteems, family issues and learning disabilities is traded for covering chapter after chapter and ridiculous homework loads. Yes, sir, there’s nothing like employing Stalin’s iron fist rule to increase productivity for the four-year plan known as high school.

And yes, most of those kinds of teachers are women. It has to be. They’re 80% of most high school  faculties, the percentage  in our school. I felt discriminated against. A masculine viewpoint in teachers’ meetings was usually dismissed. Defend your manly outlook and knowing little glances darted around the room signaling that changing the subject was the best course. 

The major chasm I see between the sexes is that women seem to hyper-focus on details. Even the English teacher whose lessons I used throughout the year told me that teaching the theme and meaning of a novel is her least favorite part. She really enjoys the content and who the characters really are. What the fuck! One of the most gifted instructors in the place and she likes leaving out the purpose of the book. 

But that’s quite common. Today’s driven teachers, teaching one picayune point after another, knowledge without understanding or relevancy.  Ironically, the most meaningful learning I remember was when a teacher wasn’t teaching. I recall my Spanish class being in rapt attention while she showed us her vacation slides from Mexico. “I was in total peace with the world on this beach. I’d go back in a heartbeat.” I even remember her telling us about her boyfriend who was on the trip with her. He was well off, and she would catch him slipping money to the kids selling chicle when he thought no one was looking. 

I got in touch with how much I wanted to travel, to one day be on that beach. I wanted to go to Mexico and immerse myself in its culture, to emulate her friend’s values, and leave the narrow-minded suburb I was growing up in. It was quite a bit of self-knowledge from a few vacation slides and a diversion that the education world now considers misspent–better to speed though Advance Placement Classes and save on college now! 

Joseph Campbell, the cultural archetypes guy, feels true learning only takes place with a teacher willing to share his or her soul, when he or she is willing to speak to students from the heart. The few times I saw my students pick up their heads and pepper me with questions was when I talked of my personal history, what it was like when I was their age, my prior career before teaching,  and the life challenges I had faced.  My kids were eager to hear about any information that intersected with their lives and futures. 

On another occasion I had a sub for a day in another Spanish class who imparted what adult life is really like, and who doesn’t want to hear about that when you’re a high school student.  He oversaw Peace Corps zones in South America, and he wasn’t afraid to joke how when too many girls started turning up pregnant, it was his duty to send the culprit stateside. The boys chuckled and were grateful someone was giving us the unedited version for once. He was with us for only forty-five minutes, and we waited the rest of the year for his return. 

I’m not saying the curriculum should suddenly shift to teachers gabbing about themselves. The regular Spanish teacher taught us the nitty gritty of the language. I’m just saying heart-to-heart exchanges with students are now called “off task”. In fact, it’s gotten so bad, substitutes will often know more about the students than their regular teachers. Subs have the luxury of being able to talk with the kids. 

I don’t want to deny my classes these magical moments, even though they’re rapidly being extinguished in our business–penetrated, test–obsessed schools. Schools that will soon go the way Goldman Sachs and Citibank want them to head, with five percent higher standardized test scores than last time this year, reduced operating costs and keeping the shareholders happy. 

A calcified damage 

Tammy needed therapy, enough for a therapist’s new vacation home. And because her childhood abuse kept being triggered by her students’ behavior, her classes turned into not just train wrecks but train derailments of box cars leaking toxic chemicals. 

I shared a room with her my first year, and while I noticed the kids didn’t like her, I didn’t see anything terribly wrong. But overtime I saw she was completely isolated in a school of over a hundred teachers and 2000 students. No one had anything to do with her and she could be seen in the halls, at teachers’ meetings, leaving work, always by herself. 

But she had told me about her childhood in the Deep South, in the 1950s, and I couldn’t help feeling sympathy for her. But the abuse visited upon her wasn’t from racism. That doesn’t cause mental illness or at the least anger management problems. The real damage came from her dysfunctional family. 

I shared a classroom with Tammy. When her class ended, I came in to start my class, so I couldn’t help seeing and chatting with her every day. All of her classes were in that one room. She kept it clean on an hourly basis and would rip into any kid who so much as left a wrapper. The other four classrooms I was in only received attention after something was leaking or falling off the hinges.

After becoming comfortable with me, she started going into how she had missed large chunks of school every fall because she was still out in the fields picking cotton. Her family was desperate for money but only because her father was playing house with two families, two families he didn’t go through the trouble of keeping secret. In fact, he lived right down the block from Tammy.  

Her childhood anger was transferred directly to her students. She mistreated any young person she suspected of the least wrongdoing. Any explanation on the student’s part was treated as defiance. No faculty member had any empathy for her, but I knew her story. Even Helen, who should have understood, labeled Tammy as batshit crazy. 

Being well over forty, African American, a woman, and tenured, she was going take at least three years to get rid of, so the new Principal, Chuck, put on the old full court press. He observed her day in and day out, hoping her emotional disgrace would speed things along. 

Of course, I didn’t hear the whole story from her or the principal, perhaps Tammy refused help from HR, perhaps it was never offered. Whatever happened, I strongly recommend that the schools be very quick in referring teachers for help. Even preventing a teacher from sniping at students or unconstructively criticizing them is well worth every penny. 

Why Fight Over Crumbs?

And why underpay teachers? Why not kick up salaries to attract the best? Why skimp on social workers, nurses, doctors, family psychiatrists so these kids can learn? And why have education so underfunded families are left hoping for their lottery number to come up for enrollment into a charter school? Really? We have to go to Vegas to see if our children get a decent education? Why not have enough charter schools to go around? Why do we continue to short change our schools, a foundation of a healthy economy? A pithy bumper sticker tells us why: More Money for the Military, Less for the Skools. People with the sticker that says, “If you’re free to read this thank a soldier, if your child can read this thank a teacher” need some more math classes.   

The better charter schools have beefed up support systems of enough social workers to go around, parent training in how to support learning at home, nurses, doctors, even getting students their vaccinations. What we have now are anxious teachers dreading the next reprimand, kids trying to get to school without being way laid, and so much personal shit going on in the students’ lives they can’t concentrate in class. 

Children need routine so can apply their energies into schoolwork. When I went back to school at age forty-eight I hit a few weeks where my wife went to Florida to care for her sick mother, and I had both halves of taking care of my son. My grades started to slide, and it later woke me up to what my students who were watching their younger siblings after school were going through. 

But as bleak as it was and is, our school, and every inner city school, still limps along enough to provide some very good things for their students. There are book clubs, the school newspaper*, academic quiz tournaments, sports, year book, poetry slams and other activities you’d find anywhere else. Teacher conference days that include half-day student sessions compromised of individual teachers sharing their favorite interests ranging from ethnic restaurant tours, museum trips, guitar lessons, henna tattooing, to e-photo albums to widen the students’ lives. 

There are countless moments of beauty. Teachers mentoring students after school. The football coach who has a mentally disabled boy as his equipment manager every year. The student who went on to college because his teachers challenged him with extra work. The teachers that slip kids twenty bucks throughout the year for bus fare or groceries. And all the countless classroom parties for holidays and semester ends, paid for out of pocket. Great help and little help that went on every day, done by teachers who pitched in and did what they could.  

*Funny story: Turns out Hugh Hefner really loved his high school days and credits working on the school newspaper for his career direction. A journalism teacher now in charge of his old newspaper wrote Hefner requesting money for much needed supplies. He sent a check for twenty thousand. He’s so fond of his alma mater that even in his seventies, he’ll stop by for a visit when he’s in town. All you have to do is ask, and some of the staff will tell you about him walking around the halls with some of his girlfriends in tow. 

You can order the book on Amazon Kindle at https://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Invisibles-Jack-Seeker-ebook/dp/B00C8GBB98