The pickings in my more wonted fields (the arts) had gotten slimmer and slimmer. One day when they seemed to have reached a final hard zero I came to a decision: I would offer myself as a substitute high-school teacher. Why not? I had traveled so epically far from the launching areas of life that I thought it might be a rewarding experience to return to them, not as a tourist or sightseer but as participant. Then, too, I thought it might be fruitful to engage the young for a change. It might be nice to roll back time and taste life in a stage in which it was more palpably in the making, more malleable. And, by no means incidental, it would be a way of earning a day’s pay a little less onerous than any other available at the time. So I dusted off my modest credentials and offered myself. I was accepted. It happened so quickly and painlessly that I was left a little suspicious. Whenever institutionalized life bestows favor or membership on those seeking to join it that easily, I always feel—look out! I expect and dread questionnaires, forms, affidavits, references, interviews, and so I was a touch uneasy as I gazed on the Substitute’s Certificate duly bearing the county seal, the Commissioner’s signature, and proclaiming me qualified to substitute in all subjects, all grades. I wondered if this might not be a gift horse whose mouth I might regret not having examined a bit more closely.
And so it came about that several mornings a week I found myself entering one of the four high schools that called me, heading for the office where I picked up the class schedule, lesson plans, and whatever else the teacher for whom I was substituting had prepared. I would soon be standing at the head of a classroom, coping with the foremost difficulty of substitutes, that of not knowing one face from another or what to make of the blur of expressions ranging from indifference to mild curiosity to hostile defiance. Eventually the bell would ring, setting fate on its way. I would stumble through roll call trying hard not to mispronounce any name even by a shade because that invariably sent the young aborigines off into gales of laughter. (I never knew why, and it could have been my trouble that I was bogged down with the unfunniness of life.) The loudspeaker would sound, we would all stand and face the flag and recite the pledge of allegiance in measure with its gargled tones. After we sat down there might come a series of activity announcements made incoherent to me by the distortions of the loudspeaker: “All juniors will glawahwah this wahwah and bring their wahwah to wahwahwah without glawahwah wahwahwah, thank you.” I once turned to a young man and asked, “Did you understand what was just said?” He shook his head negatively. A young woman shook her head negatively too. They seemed to feel no loss.
In another high school the principal would make an effort to consecrate the day with some apt quotation, Voltaire or La Rochefoucauld or Elbert Hubbard. This school had a better and newer loudspeaker and the words would come through clearly, sensibly, but without too much conviction, somewhat like a prescription devised by a physician who wasn’t too sure of the medicine, but who hoped others would profit from it. Then everyone would sit back and wait for the bell sending them to the first class. I would be standing there reconnoitering the faces, seeing the majority a little too listless and the restless remainder keyed too wildly for mental effort. Then the bell would sound and they would be off to the wars.
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Too often the lesson plan for the given period left by the regular teacher was unworkable. It might require the use of textbooks when in fact more than half the students never brought a textbook to class. Or it might be a reading assignment or a test or a review or some other time-wasting recourse, anything to keep the students quiet and let the substitute come out alive. It never made the regular teacher unhappy when I disregarded his lesson plan. If it was all right with me, if it left the premises more or less intact, it was all right with him. I developed a number of ways of using the time, depending on what I sensed about the class as I was taking the roll. If they were college preparatory, especially seniors, if I heard a certain timbre in their voices, if I could believe they were receptive, I would try something called a class colloquy. When it worked, it worked superbly and delighted me. When it didn’t, I would try hard to get it back on track or, failing that, terminate it and go on to something else.
I would introduce the idea somewhat along these lines: “Friends, today we’re going to attempt something different, it’s something we all do innocently and naturally and therefore badly, so we’re going to try to do it deliberately and better, but that will depend on you and how receptively you give yourself to the idea; we’re going to hold a class talk, and I hope each of you participates. But instead of dealing with any logical or factual subject or any impersonal matter, we’re going to deal with an emotional experience; instead of inviting differences of opinion or argument, we’re going to invite sympathetic association which each of you will search his experience to supply. The idea in this colloquy is not to win an argument or establish a factual truth, although this sometimes comes about as an unintended and excellent by-product; no, the idea rather is to establish a unifying group mood, a pervasive singleness of feeling based on what we can tell one another on a common theme; you could say we are going to try to compose a piece of music collectively but instead of notes we will use words and instead of instruments we will use our speaking voices.
“Now all this sounds more complicated than it really is. Here is the way it works: after I am finished with these remarks, which will be in a minute or less, we will have an interval of silence lasting fifteen or twenty seconds; during that time I want you to fasten your mind on any experience that has really gotten to you recently or long ago, painful, happy, shocking, or whatever. I am well aware that it is difficult to put your finger on something like that cold, from scratch, or to speak of it in public, but it is much to your advantage to try. Pretend you’re by yourself and telling it to God, or persuade yourself that the experience you’ve had is one not too different from what others have had or could have; remember, you’re not really inside life or living until you’ve found a voice to bring your most personal experience into common hearing. If I call upon you to tell us your experience, you may take roughly from two to four minutes to do so, the rest must listen with much sympathy and attention; then will come the difficult and critical part, the part in which each or any of you will be free to give expression to anything aroused in you by the first speaker provided you observe two conditions; first, you must not argue about or protest or condemn anything the speaker has said, and second, whatever you say must be germane to and bear upon what the speaker has said. Argument tends to destroy a mood of unity and sympathy which is one of the important objectives of a colloquy, and we must stay on one theme in order to deepen it and in order to make you widen your own mind to listen to any human thing sympathetically. Now that doesn’t mean you have to freeze yourself sympathetically inside someone else’s experience when your own experience speaks for something different; no, all I mean is you have to listen sympathetically to what another has said and then add your experience to it so that it builds and strengthens something he has said. That is all I have to say, and now we will take about twenty seconds to recall something.”
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The colloquy occasionally fell below my hopes of it and left me feeling I was far off-track. But it succeeded often enough and well enough to make me retain it as an educational device for that period when certain signs augured well. I found it worked better in the morning when minds were fresh and responsive. I learned never to attempt it of an afternoon, never in the face of signs of staleness or fatigue. Its best instance came one morning when it seemed a perfect answer to what that class wanted and needed. I had barely finished my introductory remarks, was barely into those twenty seconds of silence, when a young man had his hand up. He seemed strangely wound up and ready to go off, and in no time at all he was thick in a story of a death in the family, a grandmother who had died of cancer a few weeks ago, of her peculiarities, her kindnesses to him. The class carried out its role and soon we had a Spoon River epic going, the fussy way she kept her room, how from earliest remembrances she would slip him candy or a few pennies or some other little gift, how she had few friends and seldom went out except to church once in a while or to a doctor, and on and on. When the bell rang we were deep and absorbed inside that life, we were as much living it as hearing it and telling it and inventing it; it was a spell and we had created it and it was up to everyone to keep it going, they sensed that and they did.
Other instances were less successful. I recall one that started promisingly when a boy began readily telling of a friend who had been in a motorcycle accident and lost a leg and was still home in some sort of traumatic aftermath. There was an early murmur of recognition soon after he began, and I gathered that it was someone quite a few in the class knew, possibly a former student. The speaker had begun confidently, even with a touch of defiance, as if someone or something were trying to suppress the burning importance or truth of the accident. Then something happened, his confidence snapped abruptly, the strong feeling that had propelled him into words mysteriously failed him and he fell into self-conscious silence. Gently I tried to lift him out of it by asking, was his friend inclined to recklessness? Was he inexperienced? Was the bike faulty? He thought a moment and began to answer freely, someone else contributed a point, and I thought the occasion had picked up a second wind promisingly.
In another minute or two, however, an argument got under way and the prospects changed drastically. Some of them thought the victim had himself caused the accident, others thought he had not and was innocent. There was no quelling or smoothing over the hot argument, it went on and on, a result evidently of the boy’s equivocal popularity. I let it rage for a few minutes in the hope it would burn out and we could get the colloquy back on track. I wasn’t at my best that period, I lost patience and I brusquely called it off. I said to them, “You’re all pressing too hard for a particular and partisan verdict and that is incompatible with the spirit of a colloquy as I see it, it’s the difference between a trial, which we’re not trying to hold, and a colloquy, which we are. The idea in a colloquy is to deepen and enlarge the grasp you have of your idea or interest or bias or whatever you have on your mind; in fact, the very thing you want, a true and just verdict, is ill-served by the kind of contentious argument you’ve been carrying on—yes, he was—no, he wasn’t—yes, it’s green—no, it’s red.” They laughed approvingly I would say, and that was about the most favorable thing that happened that period. There wasn’t much time left, so I said, “Do anything you want to for the next ten minutes, but please do it quietly.”
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Doing it quietly didn’t come easy. Discipline was often a shambles. It was a far cry from the high schools of my day, and anyone who believes this to be the usual dotard’s lament hasn’t been in a position to observe the scene. I turned my back once in the huge auditorium where, together with two regular teachers, I was conducting a study hall, and a hard wad of something or other struck me jarringly in the back. I didn’t get far discovering who had thrown it. I didn’t expect to. I knew it came from the last two or three rows where the toughs roosted in what they felt were fortified bunkers, where the law of omerta was strict rule. Study hall was badly misnamed in that study was almost the last thing likely to be found there. It was a detention area holding a hundred to two hundred students who weren’t scheduled for any class that period or whose regular teacher hadn’t appeared and for whom a substitute had not been found. No one could be debited with responsibility for the botched study halls, they were an improvised solution for a situation that no one person or agency had brought about.
That same day of my cannonading I backed down to the platform (I wasn’t going to present a second target of opportunity to that accurate hurler of avenging wads against tyrannical faculty), folded my arms, and waited for the storm to subside. I might still be there waiting except for the lucky arrival of two gym teachers who had heard the commotion as they were passing by. One was tall and beefy, the other was shorter but broader, and their mere entrance was half the miracle. It became a completed miracle within a minute. These sad, sad young, born and bred in an adverse time, knew their masters when they saw them. All the gym teachers had to do was walk up and down the aisles of the auditorium and shout, “You shut up!” and they all shut up. I believe the source of their authority was the realization of the young toughs that the gym teachers were entirely unsworn to any restraint and they symbolized a readiness to deliver a solid clout to the head or administer a kick to the rear and find a way to do it without legal reprisals or consequences. I stood there much impressed with this act of pacification, a Noah pleased to hear the dove report that the rains had stopped and dry land could be seen. The gym teachers took off and the taller one had the forethought to say, “We’ll be back in a while, and anybody who steps out of line, I guarantee we’ll find out who it is.” It was a potent admonition, and it worked. The auditorium was quiet.
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The classrooms were seldom as bad in their tumult as these study halls. By trial and error, or by accident, I worked out a number of ploys to achieve enough quiet to get something under way. When the uproar attending the first few minutes as they found their seats had lasted long enough, I would come in front of the desk, fold my arms, and stand there in silence, intimating not only that I wanted to speak but that I had something portentous or dramatic to say. It worked often. There is something in a silent person petitioning for an opportunity to be heard which cuts across the momentum of a group’s noisiness almost against the latter’s will. It may be simple curiosity. It may be a primordial hunger to hear tidings, perhaps interesting or good tidings, from someone in authority. But it certainly wasn’t symbolized fear of corporal punishment, as with the gym teachers.
Once I came accidentally across a recourse that was to work well in later times. As soon as the class was seated, they became quiet of their own accord by some mysterious alchemy, and I said almost casually and unexpectedly, out of a surge of good feeling, “I enjoy being here and I like most young people.” It was a magic word. They broke into loud applause and it surprised me and embarrassed me. I hadn’t said it to flatter or curry favor. Seeing them with smiles of pleasure and hearing their hands in prolonged clapping I felt myself a liar. I hadn’t intended my statement that I liked them to be a definitive summary of my feelings about them. Much as I was squeamish about being applauded for an opinion that I didn’t hold in any unqualified way, I was rather stopped dead in my tracks to realize that they wanted so much to be liked. It brought me face to face with an obvious mystery that people could be so anxious for a favorable opinion of their worth that they would applaud the flimsiest verisimilitude of it. It had cost me little to say that I liked them, nor had I specified one concrete virtue about them as a group or as individuals, and yet there they were, applauding me as if I had labored to bestow great riches upon them!
I wince to recall that the experience made a bit of a demagogue of me. I had learned a lesson and I used it opportunistically. Thereafter when the going got rough, and when I thought I had the right balance of psychological forces to augur a favorable result, I would tell them I liked them. I would say, “I am sorry there is such a wrong impression about you young people, I find most of you very decent, considerate, ready and willing to do what you have to.” I wasn’t being absolutely a liar, but then neither was I being absolutely truthful. They liked it. Basking in this favorable image of themselves and wanting to continue to earn it, they would quiet down and give me an opportunity to conduct a spate of education. I can’t say that I was left with much self-admiration for this stratagem of flattery and fawning. If I had spoken the truth as I really felt it I would have said, “See here, I am not going to stand here for the rest of the period waiting for you to quiet down and bring up the necessary composure and decorum to permit you to bestow sensitive attention to the understanding, knowledge, and skill that is beyond your compass at this moment; I warn you that if you keep on as you are right now, you will die almost as totally ignorant and unenlightened as the day you were born.” I never said that. It would have served no purpose that I believe in. Truth, I remembered hearing in my early days, is a many-faceted thing, and it is not immoral to invoke that facet which produces a humane and enlightened result. That was the way I solaced myself for telling them I liked them when my feelings were a little mixed.
Alarmingly I confirmed a hazard that confronts the opportunist: he gets to believe the dubious things he says, he begins to confuse the words he utters with the actual thoughts of his mind. I think I stopped short of that, and in time. All it took was for some young lout whom I had sent out of the room for making an intolerable nuisance of himself to stand at the door, hurling abuse at me, to discharge me from the obligation for clinging to a belief that I liked the young unreservedly. I found it much better to admit that occasionally I found them loathsome and despicable. And it would lead me to some dissident and unhappy thoughts about those well-meaning and intelligent critics who say the schools ruin the young. I would reflect, perhaps so, in some circumstances. But what about those young who ruin the schools? I would say that education is a state of tension in which learner has to be most fruitfully empowered against teacher but only in a way compatible with teacher being most fruitfully empowered against learner. It has to be a two-way street.
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Having learned that the young often feel better and behave better when they hear themselves spoken of favorably, I decided that perhaps there was a lesson there that could be pushed a little further. Possibly education went better when carried on as a sympathetic thing between you and me and him and her and them. One afternoon when a class seemed diffident and sloppily unwilling to apply themselves I said, “Friends, I wonder if you would follow me through a little story involving some simple arithmetic, it’s not just abstract arithmetic, it’s arithmetic that deals with the number of dollars that people have to put on the barrelhead to bring you and me together in this warm and well-lighted classroom for just one period. As I compute it, it costs about fifty to a hundred and twenty-five dollars and that’s just for one period, and the people who have to get it up are your parents, your neighbors, yourselves. Now then, are we going to piddle and waste it away?” I could see from their faces that this argument, which I went on to develop at considerable length, made an impression. I used it often after that. I discovered that the young (especially the American young) extend skeptical if not stupored reservations to all claims, principles, values until they are translated into dollar costs. Then they prick up their ears. A thing might be intrinsically good, bad, or indifferent, but if it costs money it has to be respected.
Most of my students came from low-income homes, quite a number worked after school, and the authority of a dollar was associated with the pain and sweat they had experienced themselves or had witnessed directly in others. So the value of forty-four minutes of class time stirred them when it was put as fifty or seventy-five or a hundred dollars. It brought them face to face with a wonder and a mystery they had not previously considered. It put a finger on them as possible betrayers, and some young can be spurred morally by such a challenge. One morning, however, I was challenged myself. It was a social-studies class, and when they saw a substitute instead of the regular teacher, they fell into that disorder which is half holiday and half insurrection. I sized them up as quite possibly susceptible to a moral appeal. I would not have made my pitch otherwise. But then one young man raised his hand and said, with a soupçon of defiance, “Where do you get that figure?” I said, “Why do you ask? Do you doubt it? Do you think it’s too high?” He answered argumentatively, “Yeah, I think it’s too high, it’s way out of line.”
The class immediately became quiet, alert, attentive: there was nothing like stumping or besting the teacher to arouse their interest. I said, “Well, you may be right, let’s see.” I pointed to a young woman, one of those absolutely quiet, sweet, docile ones who barely seemed to be breathing and said to her, “Would you please go to the board and take down the figures as we call them out?” Shy and suffering from this plunge into the cold water of public life, she went with no more than the faintest sigh. I said to the young man, “Now I’ll present the different items of expense, the cost of each, and I want you to approve it or give me an alternate or more reasonable figure. Then we’ll add the total and divide it by the number of class periods in the school year, fair enough?” He said, “Fair enough.”
I began by saying, “This school cost seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars to build three years ago and it will be considered entirely depreciated in twenty years, that means we put down thirty-seven thousand five hundred dollars for the year, fair enough?” He answered, “Fair enough.” Item after item went down on the blackboard in the neat, small handwriting of the girl and a certain excitement crept into the process. Faculty salaries, heat, light, textbooks and school supplies, building maintenance and repairs, bus transportation, office staff, insurance, accounting, legal fees, the list grew, and soon members of the class began to call out items which they thought should be included, “How about landscaping? How about janitors? How about nurses?” I would have the girl set down a figure I thought right and ask the boy who had challenged me, fair enough? Not only did he invariably answer, fair enough! but the class took up the phrase and chanted it along with him, fair enough!
It became a bit of a spree and mildly disconcerting, but as long as there was residual seriousness to the event, as long as there was good nature in it, I wasn’t inclined to object or call the thing off. For all I know some of the excitement might have gotten to me. We finally reached a total of what it cost to run the school for a year, divided it by the estimated number of class periods, and came up with a figure that well vindicated me. As I knew it would. I had anticipated that sooner or later some youngster would challenge me and I had gone through a rough estimate of the cost per period. I discovered early that the young combine with their innate distrust and skepticism a tremendous innocence and credulity. Since the very large degree of innocence covers most of life, the skepticism becomes more intense in the small area in which they feel qualified to express it. It was therefore most desirable to have facts and hard logic instantly on tap when they set up a cry for proof or justification.
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There would occasionally come that class, that period, when none of the ploys I had worked out for achieving the minimal working decorum was effective. The din raged on. One or two students had the transistor radios they carried with them all day from class to class well tuned up in volume, others still had horseplay to live out with their friends, still others felt it almost obligatory to show open disdain for the substitute teacher. Those times usually came after a period in gymnasium when the boys were still in a surge of animal spirits or immediately after lunch when they were full of food and freedom and fun and disinclined to submit to the quiet life. After getting as much decorum as I thought this hapless situation would yield, I would plunge on in the face of the noise. I believed that if what we were doing or saying was interesting enough, the recalcitrant few would join us sooner or later. If not it was to be borne the best way possible. A little chaos never killed anybody. There was no alternative I could think of that was acceptable to me; I was not a gym teacher, I had little sympathy with teachers or anyone else who proceeded to get tough, and I felt that gaining a free, easy relaxed atmosphere in the classroom was worth the price of two or three or even four troublemakers.
Evidently something in me began to think otherwise, probably starting with the time I saw a regular teacher send a boy out of a class and achieve a quick pacification. I was impressed by the result, but the act itself affected me disagreeably. There was something cold and harsh and gratuitous in it. I must have unconsciously weighed the net worth of the act for quite a few weeks. One day I was some ten or twelve minutes into a period that was quite disorderly and showed no signs of improving. There were three or four boys in the front row (where it was sure to be most annoying) who were being quite deliberately and mercilessly disruptive. Before I had any intimation of what I would say, I found myself saying, “You,” pointing to the noisiest one, “go down to the principal’s office and tell him I sent you out for being disorderly.” Immediately the youngster broke out in that protestation of innocence I was to hear often on other such occasions, “Who, me? I wasn’t doin’ nothin’.” There was something comic, ridiculous, and debased in these protestations, something like a person caught in the dead of night with his hand in someone’s cash register screaming, I was only testing my digital prehensility. The young American has studied psychoanalysis in the very womb; from birth on, when he is caught in an anti-social act, he is fully prepared to proclaim, “I am innocent! It is you who are guilty! It is you who led me to do what I didn’t do!” I would try to hear him out sympathetically and would answer, “I realize I may be high-handed and unfair, but I think you had better go down and see the principal anyway, tell him the truth, tell him that the substitute teacher singled you out in an outrageous way.”
After that first time I never hesitated long. I had come to the conclusion that it was valid in some educational situations to insist on the peace and quiet necessary to let speakers and hearers function normally. And I found it wise not to waste time or temporize with any student other than the roughest, toughest, biggest, noisiest one, the one who fancied himself beyond penalty. It was magic to see a class transformed into hush and orderliness as soon as the leading miscreant was sent out.
It happened several times that the one I had ordered out would say, “Can I stay if I behave right?” Invariably I answered, “By all means stay, I would like nothing more, I get a sense of failure when I have to send anyone out.” They would be as good as their word and it would be something to see a boy who a few moments ago was nearly compulsive in his unruliness, now a normal, quiet person. It was also something to see the youngster who was trying to imitate the tough and influential corybants, and perhaps even to surpass them, immediately cease and desist as soon as he saw them exiled. Best of all was it to see a quick furtive look of gratitude on the faces of those quiet and studious ones who had been tyrannized and upset by the wild ones. That settled whatever vestiges of doubt I had about the wisdom of getting rid of the troublemakers. Whatever education might or might not be, the freedom of the speaker to speak and the hearer to hear was a necessary condition, a redoubt to be defended staunchly.
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Occasionally as I talked to the class and glanced around me and noted the waking stupor which at times appeared on every face, I would be assailed by a sharp wavelet of dispiritedness. It seemed rather all for naught. I managed sometimes to get over the dispiritedness with a far-out hope that there was more carry and hold to my words than might appear in an immediate way, but I could never verify it. I tried in different ways. I would ask a class I had substituted in a month ago about something I remembered saying to them, nothing too specifically yes or no, nothing merely informational but rather to probe their minds for a direction I had tried to steer them in. Example: I had a class once in social studies and the subject for that period was how court judges at the state level got their jobs. I believe we covered it quite thoroughly. When I had the same class some five or six weeks later, I decided to ask them about the best way of selecting court judges so that dishonest, incompetent, or biased men were kept out. I didn’t refer to the fact that we had discussed the subject the last time I had taught them, nor did I ask them how judges were selected in Delaware or New York or New Jersey. All I wanted to ascertain was whether in confronting a problem they would associatively bring into play those helpful concepts which they had previously discussed. The results were inconclusive. Those who had been functionally attentive when the topic was first discussed were most forward in their responses. I couldn’t prove or disprove with such brutishly simple experiments that which I longed to believe: that there might be a time lag between the moment an idea was dropped into a passive or torpid mind and the moment when it would emerge as a conscious directive within that mind, but the process was inexorable from the very nature of mind in all its phases. And it might even emerge with all the more explosive force for having been received beneath the waking level and having taken a certain period to gestate.
There were actually a number of ways to overcome the prevailing torpor, although I had to be prepared to see none of them work. One was to let the students understand, to see for themselves, that it was safe here. No matter what went on out there, here there were no penalties, no discrimination, no put-downs, no hard words, no shouting, nothing at all to leave anyone clinging tightly inside his freeze. If anyone gave a wrong answer or said something foolish and the rest broke into guffaws or gales of laughter, I never joined them. They would see me standing there impassive and stonyfaced. When the outbreak spent itself I would say, “I would ask you as a real favor please not to laugh at anyone and I’ll tell you why.” Most of the time my spiel on the error of laughter was effective and there would be no more of it. I had discovered that in most cases the laughter they directed at one another had an overtone of derision which would leave them more unwilling to drop their defenses, or shed certain inhibitions. The connection between torpor and defensive tenacity might be almost nil or very strong and the only way I could find out was to convince them to drop their silent guard against injury. I had to intimate to them that here in this classroom there was absolutely no enemy but a certain easy winter and a certain natural rough weather (if Shakespeare will forgive me) involved in the mind’s making a little jump from its passive hold on what it had already mastered to a new hold on things, a wider hold. I had to give them every security that they wouldn’t get hurt in the process of making this daring little jump. This process of disarming them never succeeded entirely nor ever failed entirely, but its degree of efficacy was good enough so that, taken together with the innate reasonableness of the idea, I used it freely.
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Musing now on my experience in those high schools, I can discover a degree of generalized meaning and structure in it. But while it was actually happening it came as an irregular flow of instants that popped abruptly and passed so quickly that I barely had time to register them.
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An instant: I am about to enter the faculty room when my eye falls on the principal and the vice principal some thirty feet away at a key intersection of corridors. It is the four-minute interval in which students pass from class to class. There is something odd and tense in the way they stand there eyeing the stream of students, and for the barest flash of time I am a man from Mars, an ant stumped by the mystery of human action, baffled. Then I remember: they are there to stop the whites and the blacks from provoking and assaulting each other, they are there to keep the traffic moving, and I walk into the faculty room with a sense of violence all around me as the arbitrating element in the human fate.
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An instant: I have just sent a sixteen-year-old-boy to the blackboard in an industrial arts class to draw a diagram of the electrical wiring of a car. He stands there peculiarly unable to get going, the chalk in his right hand ineffectual, his head cocked back in a weird angle. I look and I look and I look and then I realize: he cannot see. He cannot see because the coiffure he is wearing thrusts a fringe of hair over both eyes and blinds him. I thank him politely and ask someone else to the board.
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An instant: some three or four weeks after the preceding instant I am walking through the hallway one morning before class and my glance falls on someone in the fine-arts room who is hauntingly familiar. Before I know why, I am entering the art room and before I know to whom, I am saying hello. It is the boy with the blinding coiffure, with the obtrusive bangs, except that coiffure and bangs are gone and he now has a severe crew cut. He is working on a plaster torso which I pick up and examine as we chat. I congratulate him on functioning in the fine arts as well as in the industrial arts, I tell him I too have tried to be at home in a material word in the process of mastering an art, I ask him if he has ever worked in wood, and we part on a friendly note. I go back into the hallway and a warm glee takes hold of me. I don’t know why but there is something absolutely hilarious in the boy’s transformation, and I resent the fact that the Creator reserves His most comic inventions for Himself and but one other observer. It is a glee without laughter but it is glee with a strong element of vindication. The fact that the boy came to a decision to cut his hair of his own volition, the fact that he felt an urge toward sculpture as much as toward automobile maintenance and repair (if not more), seems a vindication of a latent streak in me which believes that life is a self-correcting, self-complementing process. Occasionally, if not always, if not even often. Occasionally it is a matter for glee (with the joke mainly on us) to discover the world is a better place than we thought it was.
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An instant: I am in an English class with Fours (the bottom of the educable level) and I am perplexed with a discovery I have just made about this seventeen-year-old well-grown Negro boy who can’t read as well as an average seven-year-old. I have just discovered that he has an amazingly attentive and retentive mind. We have just finished a group reading aloud in which he naturally had no part and it now turns out he remembers and understands what he has heard better than anyone in the class, possibly including myself. I don’t know why I should be so agog about a fact probably older than the hills, that literacy and intelligence don’t necessarily walk abreast, step in step. But I am. Why? What’s happened to me? I surely knew this at one time, but I suppose over the years I have slipped into a habit of assuming intelligence so linked with the printed word that to see first hand that they’re not so necessarily, shakes me up a bit. I try to get friendly with him, to talk to him after the class is over about upgrading his reading but he keeps his guard up stiffly, he doesn’t quite trust me and would like me to leave him alone.
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An instant: I have had Susan in other classes, I know her manner, but she has just surpassed herself in telling the class and me what this John Steinbeck story they have just read is about. It seems to me exactly true and for a moment I am speechless. I am stumped by that most ancient question: What is human excellence? Susan embodies so much of it. She has a younger brother in the school, I have had him in class, they resemble each other closely, both very bright, utterly courteous, gentle, modest. Is it genes and chromosomes, is it environmental, is it some mysterious capacity to respond to flawless precepts, or is it pure chance? I have talked both to Susan and her brother, I have learned who their parents are, at least superficially, but I have unearthed no clues. Sitting there that instant after she finished her interpretation of the Steinbeck story, I recall regretfully her response when I urged her to go to college, when I tried to persuade her she would make an outstanding teacher. She shook her head, no. She told me she was already engaged to be married, she gave me to understand that whatever talents or abilities she had were on a noncombatant, noncompetitive base and purely for private and personal use, that she would be swamped in anything other than a little life, that she could foresee a slow and gentle atrophy over the years with equanimity, confident that she could transform any life she might have with a certain enchantment, provided only it were tiny enough, the tinier the better. I sit there ruminating on the non-heroic aspect of human excellence, on that aspect of it which, knowing itself, knows that it is incompatible with struggle, and I get a feeling that human history is as bad as it is because those out to have a role in it are willing to renounce Susan’s kind of human excellence, or perhaps they never had it in the first place.
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An instant: it is a free period and I have decided to leave the faculty room and go a few feet up the hallway to the library which is carrying a student art show. The faculty room couldn’t be drearier. It is painted cinder block, very small, not a book, not a periodical, not a picture in it, nothing but large ashtrays near the cheap, plastic-covered chairs and last week’s professional football scores in someone’s hastily-crayoned scrawl cellophane-taped to the wall. The ash-trays tell the story. They are always full, at least half the discarded cigarettes barely smoked, not more than two or three puffs. The faculty room is a dugout, a shelter, a retreat where the men teachers come for a very brief respite from the battlefield in the classrooms. There isn’t time for more than two or three puffs, or two or three words of gossip or banter, then they must return to the wars. I enter the library with relief that is instant and total, a library being the one way to enclose space that is nearly foolproof in its power to provide shelter and sanctuary. I move from picture to picture hung above the shelves or in alcoves, I take in the sculpture atop the shelves. I again confirm the huge callowness of cargo carried by youth from one generation to the next. This could be the art of my high-school days with a little modification. I recognize the torso done by the young man with the blinding coiffure who went crew cut. It is better than when I saw it before but it has a way to go to suggest it is or was the habitation of a living spirit. Finally I have made the rounds of the art in the library and in relief I sit down with a periodical for the remainder of the period.
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An instant : it is again the faculty room in this high school, perhaps a week later. It is the last period and I have no class, and I could go home except for the rule that I have to stay on the premises. I have barely settled into a chair when in comes Mr. Martin, the head of the mathematics department. I have substituted for him quite a few times, we know each other, and now we exchange hellos as he sinks into a chair, rolling his eyes slightly heavenward for this sweet relief and respite. He is one of those men who beams a modest grin with everything he says and does, possibly like a talisman to exorcise evil spirits or to ward off unwanted seriousness. His health is not what it should be, he has been out more days than any teacher I know, he smokes too fretfully. A younger colleague in his department once told me confidentially that Mr. Martin’s true problem was an excessive reliance on liquor to get himself through unhappiness and loneliness. It seems Mr. Martin was Colonel Martin in the Korean war, a survivor of two broken marriages, a man in his fifties newly reconnoitering the infertile terrain of his life in hunt for something to nourish him and depending more and more on bourbon to get him over the low spots. The place he looked to with least hope and expectation was the dailiness of life, it cost him much effort to give it the necessary little that he had to give it, and for the rest he leaned mainly on small talk to get through it. Nineteen times out of twenty I would respect and abide by the demands of the situation, but this is the twentieth time. It is the end of the school day, I am tired, and in certain states of fatigue I find I have used up all the energy I have for small talk.
“Mr. Martin,” I find myself saying, “what do you think of the new math?” He opens his eyes wide as he looks up and brings out that instant grin that disinfects all situations of a cumbersome or gauche seriousness. His expression just barely suggests that I might have overstepped a boundary of what is and what is not to be talked about by civilized people in certain times and places. “Do you think it serves effectively to bring young people to an understanding and use of mathematics?” Guardedly Mr. Martin says, “I would say it does, yes.” I go on, “Occasionally I have my doubts about the new math, I mean apart from the fact that half of the class or more doesn’t seem to grasp it. My trouble is that I resent the excessive theoretical clutter that is allowed to engulf the cleanliness of the computational process, if you know what I mean.” Mr. Martin says faintly, “Yeah.” I continue, “If the real object of math is to quantify knowledge in order to make it exact and thereby control the environment a little better, why weigh it down with all that theoretical abracadabra? I had a friend once who was infatuated with math; he used to boast that he was on the brink of devising a formula for the greatest number that could be conceived without using the sign of infinity. One day we were in his back yard examining a washline that had broken under the weight of wet wash, and I said to him, ‘Bill, for your next great mathematical achievement, why not compute the test-pull strength of washline rope under different conditions of loading and publish a monograph on it and benefit millions of housewives?’ After all, most of us are not Einstein but we do need to be able to do our grocery bills.
“I recall that one teacher in another school reminded me that the new math was quite essential to the work of devising and programming computers, but if one out of every thousand students goes into computer work, why should the rest of them be driven through the sophisticated mazes of monomial coefficients that undergo cyclic increase inversely proportionate to the cardinal polynomials whose power they establish when the latter are set in series, etc., etc., etc.? I think I would do better firing the imagination of students to a love of accurate quantification in the process of obtaining exact knowledge by giving them the architectural dimensions of the school building, a few other details, and asking them to compute the weight of the bricks, the cement blocks, the framing steel, the roof—it’s real, it’s solid, it’s life, and we would get into lively discussions about it.”
I don’t know how long I have been running on in this way but a chance look at Mr. Martin sitting there, his eyes glazed in boredom, probably not even listening, or, even worse, listening and irked blue, draws me up short. I feel foolish, I feel as if I had gone to considerable pains to tell the story of my life to a person who was either badly hard of hearing or totally deaf. There is a silence and Mr. Martin brings out his grin and mutters, “I’ve got a conference after the bell and I don’t know how I’m going to stay awake.”
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I have shot my conversational bolt for the afternoon and we sit there a moment in lame quiet when the door opens and unexpected rescue arrives in the dynamic person of Mr. Gilliardi, also of the mathematics department. There is a certain ebullience in his manner and in short order the air shakes excitedly with the doings of the Knicks on television last night, how they had come apart in the third quarter but bounced back in the fourth to win going away, “It was just great! simply great! really great!” It is remarkable how Mr. Martin has perked up and revived from the semi-coma into which my words seemed to have dropped him. He sits there enthralled in the spell being spun by Mr. Gilliardi’s eloquence, his grin fixed a trifle wider than usual in assent and pleasure. There is a certain warmth and heartiness in Mr. Gilliardi that he never seems able to spend to his full satisfaction on anything or anyone.
His voice goes on unfurling his love of professional sport and I sit there recalling the oddest kind of episode involving Mr. Gilliardi some months before. For a week or so he and another teacher from the biology department would get into a card game after a quick lunch in the faculty room. In short order an excitement would grip him and he would be sucked into a competitive frenzy that he seemed unable to control. He would snatch up his cards, tap them feverishly, riffle them, spread them, collapse them, loudly uttering entreaties, imprecations, curses, obscenities. I was there that noon when at the peak of one of these outbursts, he abruptly let the cards fall from his hand in a violent fit of self-disgust and revulsion and loudly said, “Oh Jesus Christ, what am I doing with myself?” He seemed like a man abruptly dropped out of a fever and returning to himself in shock. He looked desperately around for something or someone off whom to bounce his roiling contrition and his eye happened to fall on Mr. Martin just then walking out of the faculty room. The door had barely closed when Mr. Gilliardi was saying emotionally, “There goes a real man, he’s done something with his life, he served this country to the best of his ability, not everybody is a sad nothing like me.” He searched for something more to say, for some other way of proving to himself that while he might be in abysmal self-disgrace he still could discern right and wrong, good and bad. There was nothing more, he picked up his briefcase and walked out with his face red and distorted. I never saw him play cards again.
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All things end and the school day did, too. The bell would ring and bring a dramatic deliverance, never revealing exactly from what to what to me personally. I could see it in the youngsters, in the way they came explosively to life, in the way they hurried out of the classroom down the halls to their lockers in a whir of loud talk, horseplay, joking. Seeing them this way and remembering the sluggishness and staleness on their faces the last period I often felt a mild twinge of error for keeping their animal spirits in suspension for so long. This friskiness was their birthright and obeisance to their season of life and how much good had we done them inside quieted classrooms? I think the question was rhetorical, I believe I had clear answers somewhere in the back of my mind but seeing them in this energized resumption of living, I was possessed fleetingly by rhetoric to the detriment of reason. In a few minutes they would be streaming out of the entrances briskly, talking and laughing and shoving, heady in their rediscovery of spontaneous action as they hurried to the buses already waiting for them. In an early moment a whistle would blow and the policewoman at the entrance would wave to the first bus to start moving. Traffic would be halted in both directions and the yellow armada of galleons on wheels would begin the voyage home to the respective districts.
Occasionally a youngster peering through the window of a passing bus would recognize me inside my car in the halted traffic and wave and shout, “hi!” by way of letting me know the classroom score of teacher and student was now wiped clean and we could be free and easy and person to person. I always acknowledged. This was what happened every afternoon all over the nation, school buses returning youngsters to their homes. It could be thought of as providing an answer to the kind of question an inquirer from Uranus might ask, what do you people do with yourselves, with your time, energy, and resources? The answer would be: we use some of it inducting the young into the more enlightened ways to survive and live, we try to educate them, what else?
It was an answer all right, but it wobbled a bit unsteadily on its feet those early moments of my homeward drive when I felt tired and clobbered. The green fields through the car window, lying there in the afternoon sun or even under an overcast, talked of a better and easier way to be than any I was ever able to work out in the classroom. I always seemed to feel I had to answer there with my life and therefore no doubt was impelled to make them feel they had to answer with theirs. This made it an abrasive and wearing process over a span of five periods each day, especially with the presence of those few whose bent was more to animal spirits than study. I suppose I saw no desirable alternative to answering with our lives, viewing that as inherent in the very structure of things. And I probably felt the sooner they realized that, the better. Most of them responded favorably to the challenge, they accepted the perspective I held up to them that the difficulties, the hurdles, were there not by my whim or the arbitrary rule of the school and its administrators but by fiat of life. I rather think they saw me practicing what I preached, they saw me go to the blackboard for yet another demonstration and heard me launch an explanation or go into an exposition when I was tired and had no natural zest for it. And I hope they got the idea that only by effort would they attain a viable no-effort state. Romantic or procrustean heroics could very well be pronounced dead for all time but there would still be much room and need for each human being to be hero in striving for control of the inexorable processes within himself.
Whatever the answers, or my efficacy in carrying them out, there was no doubt the cost came high. Perhaps higher than any results could justify. I couldn’t be sure, I could only cling to a belief that we had to be able to afford it. Certainly there was nothing about being in the company of the young that carried its own automatic fulfillment or revelation. Sadly I often ruminated on a contrary idea: it wasn’t possible for me to be youthful with the young. Just as Shaw saw it, the young knew little about youthfulness or how to practice it. No, I could only feel that anyone who went to the young without his own vision, his own system of prophetics, went badly and wrongly. I felt that anyone who went to the young to borrow a vision, or bask in a prophecy, was on a dubious mission. At best they could be true visionaries and prophets for an interval of life no longer than a minute, an hour, perhaps a day. Anything longer became a reef of dailiness and actuality on which their oracles were shattered. No, in their company I could only feel that the initiative and the direction had to be mainly with me. Or, leaning as far back as I could, it could only be a fair tug-of-war whether in any clash of perspectives they could persuade me to reconceive my idea or I would persuade them to reconceive theirs. In the great majority of times, as long as the give-and-take was conducted by reason and logic, I think in all modesty it was the latter. Which is as it should be. For what is education—if it is anything at all—but a stirring-up of the more lately-born to move closer to what checks out as the good, the true, the beautiful? Or getting at the same thing by a different approach, what is it but a continuing summons to them to reform their living according to an implicit norm in a given sphere of interest? If not that, then what?
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