They come and go

A.

Her name was Karen. She was seven or eight and I was six or seven. It was 1949 or 50. Our mothers still picked out our clothes, told the barber how to cut our hair, put our breakfast on the table without asking what we wanted and put us out early in the morning to play unsupervised. It was before stranger danger, before rebellious kids who would even dream of leaving the block and yes, there were neighbors who kept an eye out the window, but most of them were too busy with the house work and whatnot to pay us any mind.  We hadn’t heard of puberty and no one had heard of playing doctor. We were just a bunch of kids, the little kids, boys and girls, brothers and sisters who played together outside, weather permitting.

We all played Hide-and-Seek and Mother-May-I. The girls jumped rope, but in general we just ran around. Karen wasn’t necessarily a leader, but she was adventurous. She lived in a three-story Chicago-style brick courtyard building, and we lived in the one right next door. She liked to run up and down the back stairs, playing a kind of catch me if you can. She was the one who discovered that if you were careful you could kind of half stretch and half jump from one set of porches to the other and get away scot free. After she did it two or three times, she made us do it. A little encouragement and a little teasing and we did it.

When you’re little, too little to be self conscious, one’s not aware that one’s growing up. People say, “My, look how big you are. You’re so tall.” But day-to-day you don’t notice. It’s the same body, after all, and you don’t pay much attention to your own body. But after we learned to jump from building to building, we realized that we had just passed a milestone. We were almost ready to hang out with the big kids.

And then it happened. Her family moved. She was gone, just like that. I must have known that she was leaving, but I didn’t realize that she was gone until well after she had left. I didn’t really realize until years later that when she left, she left a hole in my life.

Over twenty years later, I gave Karen’s name to my youngest daughter Melissa for her middle name. I did it in Karen’s memory and in memory of that long ago time when little kids were just kids and played happily together in comradeship and good cheer.

B.

            When I was just a kid, I didn’t know about social dynamics, war babies and boomers, class and race, demographics and median family income, or religion and gender. My world was my parents’ friends in the building, later the kids in school and the big kids who played baseball with a tennis ball. It was a small world, and I had no idea about all the convulsions a society goes through to create such places. Our building had never been designed for kids, and for twenty years it had always been older, childless couples, widows or newlyweds saving for a bigger place. Things had been put on hold during the Great Depression, but our street had escaped the changes created by the Depression. Nothing on our block was cut up and divided into smaller and smaller units. The southern white immigrants had gone someplace else. But the war froze everything in place.

No one could move, and the folks who would have moved before starting a family started having kids and not moving. Upstairs, Dale would go off to war and come home and have three kids in four years. My father always joked that he was too young for WWI and too old for WW II, but he got serious about having kids and had me in ’43 and my sister in ’44, just in case they started drafting older men. Soon the building had eleven kids under ten. One couple who lived across the courtyard from my parents just said, “Hi and goodbye” until the woman had a baby. Then they became best friends ( until my parents were killed in an auto accident) and the newborn daughter Kathy and my sister Joanne would become lifelong friends (that is, until my sister died of cancer). Joanne even followed Kathy to Clark College in Dubuque twenty years later.

But soon the building started losing the families with kids. Dale, his wife and his three sons moved to a small suburb along the old Chicago and Northwestern RR line. Arlington Heights had a population of about 5,000 people. They moved to a house that dead-ended five blocks from Highway 12. We were impressed by the size of their house, the fields that they could play in (The site of a future development, but we knew nothing about developments), and even a big backyard. I imagine that now the house is considered a tear-down waiting for the market to improve.

My mother kept in touch, and Eunice would come to my parents’ funeral, but I never saw the boys again. My brother reports that they grew up to be typical white suburbanites of their day, so it’s just as well. We also moved; we made it within four short blocks of the suburbs, but we didn’t quite make it to the burbs.

The white movement to the suburbs has been characterized as a flight. I don’t believe it. The folks in my building moved because they needed a second bedroom, an expandable attic, a garage, and a place for the kids to play. At first, at least, people didn’t move for “better schools;” they moved to schools that weren’t overcrowded and new. Our parents wanted new and they were happy to leave behind the old cities. They used to brag (and it was half true) that Edison Park was really just like a suburb, but in the city.)  But they also left behind their old friends, the old neighborhood and some of its old ways. Sometimes, now when we look back, we wish that somehow we could recreate those old ways.  Some of the grandchildren of those folks who moved to the burbs have moved back; they might not stay, but they are trying to recreate urban life.  I have a young friend who grew up in Niles and now lives in an apartment building six blocks from my old apartment building.

Climate Change has smashed its fist into our face.

Halloween Weekend, 2011

In northwest Illinois, this year’s late summer and early fall is going to go down in the history books as one of our most memorable.  It’s times like this, that I wish I was a poet. It would be so cool to be able to describe the wonders of nature including our miraculous weather. It has been drop dead gorgeous. Day after day, the sky has been pure and clean, and as bright blue as the skies over a Greek isle. The temperatures remind one of heaven. So far, we’ve had just a touch of frost. Every few nights, there has been just a tease; just enough to kill the tomatoes and peppers and coat the car windows, but not quite enough to blacken the still stunning geraniums and mums. The frost whispers that winter is coming, but not yet. The trees have never been more spectacular.

It was a godforsaken July, with days of record heat and torrential rains. The ferocious rains tore up roads, ripped out culverts and destroyed bridges. Saddest of all, a friend was swept to his death in a flash flood which carried him and his car downstream. Cool winds finally brought relief and moderate temperatures.  What at first we welcomed as a short respite before the dog days of August arrived turned out to be over three months of bliss. The dog days never came.

Here at home, every day, the air is clean. The wind is soft and delicate, like a lover’s touch. In July it had been too hot for the tomatoes and peppers to set fruit, in August, the plants finally developed fruit and the late harvest with its bounty almost made amends for the delayed start. And now, in late October, just after the hummingbirds left, the juncos arrived right on schedule. Now the deer are leaving the timber during the day and are more visible. The young turkey poults have matured.  Most of the corn has been combined and we’ve regained the sense of openness and spaciousness associated with hill prairies.

Today, Sunday, October 30, even as the grey clouds move in low and slowly swallow the sky and as the clouds move from west to east and bring rain and a damp nasty feel, I’m reassured. It is a familiar pattern. I like the cliché a, blustery, November day. It reminds us not of winter but of Thanksgiving; reminds us of all the reasons one chooses to live in the country, the things we have to be thankful for.

To me at least, the weather has become more real lately. Today, as I write, I listen to the wind and watch the grey clouds fill the sky. Right now, I’m watching the wind tear the leaves from the trees. Many of the leaves aren’t quite ready to fall, but the wind grabs them, throws them to the ground and then picks them up and hurls them across the yard.  An hour ago, it was quieter, a lovely dance. A few leaves were lightly falling from the trees and pirouetting across the yard before gently landing on the ground only to get up again, waltz, and twirl across the grass.

 I like to think that since we moved to the country, I’ve become more observant.  I’m proud that I’ve learned to watch for the changes in the light, to the feel air on my face, to see the sumac just a second before it burst into flame, and to note the arrival of the first bluebird and the departure of the last swallow. On the other hand, I worry that it is old age.

I worry that watching the changing of the seasons is a sign not of a new vitality, but a step, however small, toward old age. I wonder how many more falls will I have a chance to be a part of, not just to observe, but to actually experience.  I know that I have seen more than I will see in the future. I’m ashamed to say that many of them passed me by and I wasted away those precious days, my thoughts and eyes someplace else. I was oblivious to their comings and goings. I’m convinced, however, that it is not my heightened awareness of the beauty and mystery of nature or looming old age which has made me more cognizant of my natural environment.

 I think that my heightened awareness comes from a growing realization that climate change is already disrupting our world and that over time our world will become unrecognizable.  We may never have such a long and glorious fall—ever again. Right now, I live in the loving embrace of the four seasons honored in song and poem since the very beginning. From teachers, troubadours and friends, I’ve finally learned to see, to listen for and even smell the world just outside my door and now we may lose it all.

 The tiny changes that have already happened are frightening. As I write this, thinking only about today, putting aside for a moment all that has happened this year, I’m frightened. This weekend, while we in the Midwest are enjoying heaven on earth, the south west is still being destroyed by heat and drought. As the tumbleweeds begin to roll across new deserts, desperate cattlemen are shipping the best of their herds north in a last ditch effort to save them, they’ve sold others prematurely and they have had to stand by and watch still others slowly starve to death. There is no hay not even a blade of grass left in Texas. At the same time, the northeast from Pennsylvania to Maine is covered in record drifts of snow while high tides smash again the New Jersey shore. (Later in the week, a hurricane would come ashore in New Jersey tearing, ripping and destroying everything in its path.) Arizona is still suffering from record heat. In Europe, Dublin is still trying to recover from flooding and Tuscany, one of the world’s most idyllic spots is trying to recover from major flooding.  Around the world, more than half of Thailand is still under water and Bangkok, the capitol and a world famous tourist destination, is threatened with inundation. Cambodia, more poor and backward than Thailand is suffering even worse from the same floods.

Our world is being turned upside down. Climate Change is smashing its fist into our face.

 Global warming is annihilating Nature’s clock, the four seasons; destroying cycles of birth and rebirth; and disrupting age old migration patterns. Everything stands on the brink of destruction. This year it was a friend or two here at home, a few more in New England, four hundred in Thailand; next year it will be more. More fires, more dust storms, more floods and tidal waves, more mud slides, more record snowfalls and cold spells, more dead cattle, more land gobbled up by the growing dessert, more crops withering in the summer heat, and more climate refugees. The world, that has nurtured every generation of humans and provided shelter and a home for the animal kingdom since the first cell divided, faces a worldwide calamity.

We have to put every other issue aside and act. We can’t turn the clock back. We can’t stop the future from bringing more chaotic climate disruptions, but we can stop the worse from occurring, but only if we all act right now.

Contrary to urban legends, fights really are rare

Usually, I don’t like to talk about the fights at school. It seems that it is impossible to talk about a fight or two, even a few fights, without leaving the impression that fights were a daily occasion, which they weren’t.  Police officers will tell you the same thing. Most law enforcement is writing tickets, writing a report on a petty shoplifter or writing accident reports—not very exciting, not like TV. There is a lot of potential for violence, but not much ever happens.  One officer told me, “It’s mainly driving around in the car waiting for the shift to end.”

And that was the way it was in school. With two or three thousand kids jammed into one building, sooner or later there was bound to be a fight or two. And that’s all it was: a fight or two.  One day, I was cutting through the lunchroom. It was late, the lunchroom was empty and all cleaned up. There were two kids, freshmen, playing Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker with plastic lunch trays. They were just fooling around, having a great time. I yelled at them to stop. I hurried over to where they were play fighting. Just as I got there, the kid closest to me swung his tray up and around and hit me in the mouth. They were both terrified. All that happened was that I had walked into the top of the tray’s arc; the tray tapped my partial and one of my two front teeth, whole and intact, hit the ground. I quickly grabbed it, told them I never wanted to see them again and “You better get the hell out of here.” They were scared to death. Just as they were leaving, I said, “Stop. Wait, don’t worry, nothing happened. If you don’t say anything, I won’t take you to the office.” They nodded and I said, “OK, now get the hell out of here.”  Of course, when I went to the dentist, he didn’t believe me. He wanted all the juicy details. I had to disappoint him.

Most fights were over in a flash. I sometimes think that the males depended on the teachers to be there to break up the fight before it got too serious. If two males were fighting in the halls, a crowd immediately formed a ring around the combatants. The last thing the spectators wanted was teachers to break up the fight.  A good fight made a good story, gossip for the whole day. It was hard to get to the fight; the other teachers and I had to dash down the hall, break through the wall that the audience had created to keep us out and then without hurting the combatants,  break up the fight. Most of the time, after a little bravado, the males were happy to have us break up the fight. They had made their point (God only knows what it was) and they had maintained their honor.

Fights among young women were rare, very unusual, but if two young women were fighting it was entirely different from the way many males fought. They completely lost their heads. They freaked out. They would grab each other’s hair or try to and hang on. Then it was nearly impossible to separate them. My friend and I once broke up a fight. Our superior size and weight, the fact that we were teachers, didn’t matter. We had a hell of a time. Finally, we got them separated with much loss of hair. We had to figure out a way to hold them, you couldn’t just grab them anywhere the way you could grab a male and drag them down to the office. Even in the office, we had to stay until they calmed down. The disciplinarian could more easily handle two seventeen year old young men twice as big as the girls as he could handle two still half-crazy young women.  On the way back upstairs, I asked my friend what he did to break up the fight. I hurt her and that’s why she stopped. He replied. “As soon as I was able to get one finger free of all that hair, I just kept pulling on it. I would have broken it off, if she hadn’t stopped.”  In thirty years, I don’t think I ever hurt a student, but he was right.

 He was upset because he had missed out on his daily rendezvous with his latest teacher flame. I had to hear about it all the way back upstairs. I had wanted to talk about what could be done to reduce the number of incidents like the last fight. Anger management wasn’t part of our vocabulary yet, but it made me mad that I’d go back upstairs and do vocabulary or we’d talk about a short story or whatever and never talk with our students about the reality all around, this sense that there was always at least a potential for violence.  

A few days later, I was in a good mood—everything was humming along. I was looking forward to my first period, a wonderful freshman class. They were always ready, always prepared, bright, cheerful and most importantly, on time.  There were two young men in the class still waiting for puberty to kick in who were both madly, blindly in love with the same young woman. She didn’t even know they existed. She was more interested in the older males she saw in the halls. Robert started fussing with Michael or maybe it was the other way around. It didn’t matter. “She’s mine, leave her alone.” “Don’t tell me what to do!” and of course the good old F-word started going back and forth. As I moved down the aisles, they started swinging at each other. These were good kids; they didn’t even know how to fight. When I got there, I pulled them apart and then shoved Robert—much too hard. He went flying over a bunch of desks and landed in a heap on the floor—unhurt except for his dignity.

The class turned on me. “That wasn’t right—you could have hurt him—Mr. Wemstrom, you’re bigger than he is—you could’ve hurt him—not fair—you be wrong—not right. So I had to settle the class down; keep Robert and Michael separated even though they weren’t going to do anything; (later in the hall they would apologize to each other) get the desks straightened out, find out where we left off, find out that we hadn’t started and then I decided, to myself,  “Oh the hell with it.” To the class, “The bell is going to ring in a minute or two (thirty to be exact), just sit quietly and finish the story. We’ll talk about it (the story, not the little fight) tomorrow.”

Robert and Michael wanted to know, “Are you going to take us to the office?”

“No, just sit down and be quiet.” They were relieved. Because they were good kids, if they got in trouble at school they’d also get in trouble at home, and they didn’t want that to happen. And I knew that they had learned their lesson and it was all taken care of.  Except for my black mood and the gossip in the hall, it was already history.

Of course, the class was right. I had overreacted. All I had to do was step between them, snarl a couple of threatening words and it would have ended right there. I didn’t have to take out my frustrations on the two of them, who were in some way still kids—cute kids actually. The students were quiet; they didn’t want to risk my wrath. In the meantime, I was still mad at them, but even madder at myself.  They had ruined my day—I had ruined my day.

The good news was that it was a good class and it continued to be a good class, and over the course of the year Robert and Michael each shot up six inches, discovered basketball and other girls who were as interested in them as they were in the girls. And better yet, they remained friends. And best of all, it remained my best class. 

Shattered Dreams

Duncan was a junior, inquisitive and intelligent. He had fairly good grades. And he hoped his grades were good enough (he thought they were) that he might just be able to get into a good college, play basketball and then on to the pros. And of course, the system exploited his dreams, just as it exploits the dreams of millions of young people.

 He was a promising athlete, a star on our varsity basketball team. Unfortunately, early in the season he injured his knee. It wasn’t too serious and the doctor, not a sports doctor, said that he should be able to play the last half of the season. 

The season was almost over, Duncan was dying to play. Finally the coach said ok. The first half everything was fine. He played well. His teammates looked after him and he had a good first half. The second half the score tightened up, Duncan got the ball. He swiveled to pass, changed his mind, jumped to shoot and he sank the ball. However, coming down, he didn’t land just right and his knee blew up. He never played again.

When he had first injured his knee in the fall everybody treated him like a hero. He hobbled around on his crutches and would wave one in the air like a trophy. After the second and much worse injury, he was quiet, subdued, mentally licked, beaten. The other students picked up on that, were embarrassed and avoided him. After awhile he started to miss class and then he stopped coming.

It’s not just poor black inner city kids who get sucked up into the hype of sports.  About the same time that Duncan was hurt a handsome, personable, bright and intelligent kid was on a work crew that reroofed my house. When he found out that I was a teacher, we got to talking. He had been a star football player at his affluent, middleclass, all white suburban high school. He was courted by lots of Division II schools. Finally he picked a school in Colorado. He was so excited. The coach came to the house, met his parents, his mom served coffee, and he signed the contract. He couldn’t wait for August and training camp. On the third day of camp he broke his leg. 

The coach visited him every day in the hospital. He reassured him that everything was going to be OK. He shouldn’t worry just because his leg was in a cast, in traction and he was missing practice. The coach reassured him he’d be ready to play by October. Then one day, the doctor said, “Well yes, the leg is healing just fine and Brian will be able to walk perfectly normally.  However, I don’t recommend that he play football. To be perfectly honest, he simply can’t play ever again.” The coach never came back. The school rescinded the athletic scholarship and he went back home and when his leg was healed he went back to his old summer job as a roofer. And after a long day, his leg bothers him, but as he said “What you gonna do?”

Most students came every September, but never stayed

The students came and went. Sometimes, the students were there in the morning and gone forever by the afternoon. Sometimes, a parent dropped them off at the front door and they skedaddled out the back door. Sometimes, they had planned to just skip out early to catch Oprah and then come back the next day. But for some reason they never did. Sometimes their mother went back to work and they had to stay home and babysit. Sometimes they lost their own babysitter. Sometimes they got pregnant and decided to use that as an excuse to quit school. Sometimes they moved. Sometimes the gang alliances changed and it was harder to get to school, to have to go through hostile territory. Some did get shot, some were even killed. They would be there on Friday, and on Monday the other students would be passing around the obit from church. Sometimes, if they were cut from a team, they slowly stopped coming.

Sometimes it wasn’t the Gangster Disciples; it was the gangs of dogs. It was 1973, cold snowy, the L was running, but not the bus. It was only three or four blocks from the L to school. I could easily walk that, even in the snow. I started out and there were dogs everywhere—packs of dogs, blocking the sidewalk, snarling and hissing. Let’s face it; dogs scare the shit out of me. The only think I could do was walk down the middle of the street. I was less afraid of a driver who couldn’t see me in the blinding snow, who had no brakes on the ice and no warning that I was wandering down the middle of the street than I was of the dogs.

One time I told that story in class and that got the whole class going. They all had stories about trying to come to school or to go home at night, especially in the dark. Terrance, tall, skinny and with no coordination, had the class in stitches. He described the time he was attacked. He said, “I got away by just jumping up on a car and then I just jumped from car to car to get away. Lucky for me, the dogs got tired before I ran out of cars. I did leave some dents in the cars, but just on the hoods, maybe on the roof or trunk but nothing too bad, honest.” He smiled, they all laughed and I had to play the teacher and point out that the destruction to personal property was not funny. They all laughed again.  They had all heard Terrance’s story before. They loved the embellishments, the pack of dogs got bigger with every telling; the number of cars grew. They all loved a good story and they all love the storyteller’s ability to make the story better with every telling. The first time Terrance told the story he climbed up on a car and simply waited for the dogs to go away. His audience asked, “Is that it?” And they all love being able to tease their teacher about being afraid of a few dogs. (And yes, they did enjoy those same qualities in the stories they read).

 Sometimes there was no bus money, no money for clothes, or no money for all the extra fees that the school and even the individual teachers wanted. School should be free, no locker fees, no towel or gym fees,  no musical instrument rental fees and no student purchases of so-called extra books. No fees, period. No free or reduced lunch forms. Simply free breakfast and lunch—maybe even a snack or two for everybody.

For a long time sweat suits were in style. Students would get a couple of imitation knock-offs of famous brands in late August at the ‘back to school sales’. And they did look cool in their new clothes. They didn’t look so cool after a couple of washing, however, when everybody realized that there had been more starch than fabric in those outfits and then because that was about all they had, they got pretty old pretty fast.

The system tried to enforce a rule: “no coats in the class room.” And of course, there were all the reasonable reasons. If the student keeps his or her coat on, it’s like they’re getting ready to leave at any moment; they’re not really settling down, not really getting ready to get to work. And besides, who knows what they may have inside those coats? Truth be told, some of the students wore their coats everyday because they did not have much under the coat except their same old worn-out tops. It was less embarrassing to wear the same coat every day than to wear the same old shirt or blouse every day.

In the seventies and eighties, the only institutes left in many city neighborhoods were public institutes, the post office and the fire station. Some days all you’d see was the bulldozer tearing down another abandoned, burned-out wreck of a house and a squad car cruising the neighborhood “keeping the lid on”.  I often thought that “if the school is it,” that means that the school has to do everything and it should. America lost a whole generation of young people across the country because it would not accept that challenge. The attitude was, “They’re not my kids, screw em.”

The system is nuts. A student is cold and hungry. So he does the sensible thing, he comes to school early. But if he comes too early, the system won’t let him in. He has to stand outside in the cold, sometimes in the rain. Sometimes we’ll let them in, but not past the foyer. “We can’t have them wandering around the building before school. God knows what kind of trouble they’d get into. Do you want them breaking into your classroom?” the disciplinarian calmly warns us.

So we’d suggest, “How about the library?”

“O, yeah, we’re going to let kids who don’t read and who hate books into the library for an hour, just to tear up the place.” He quietly and professionally replies.

On the other hand, lots of teachers came to school early. We came for some of the same reasons. To see our colleagues, have a second cup of coffee, read the paper and catch up on the gossip. All very normal, very human but we couldn’t extend the same privilege to our students. 

At the end of the day, it’s the same thing;” Clear the building. Make sure that only people with a good reason are in the building and in their designated areas and supervised. We just can’t have people…”

So I said to myself. What a happy coincidence. We have students who need academic help and want to come to school early or stay late—to get warm, to eat and socialize. Let’s do it. Let’s create a program for early birds or those who don’t kick into high gear until three o’clock. Let’s feed them, allow them to organize their own group, let them pick something they want to learn more about, something brand new perhaps, anything they want to learn. Let’s hire the teachers, pay the kitchen staff overtime and provide the resources. It may be the “good kids” who want to do more of what they’re already doing. It may be fifteen-year-olds who want to really learn how to read or it may be kids who want to shoot baskets, not good enough for the team but still they love b-ball. If the neighborhood is in chaos, let’s provide the stability.

 I add, smirking to myself, “Isn’t stability one of the prerequisites of learning? Isn’t it a necessary part of the learning environment?”  And the system answers me, “We tried something just like that and it worked just fine, but it was too expensive and it was like running a whole other program. It’s a nice idea, but just not feasible, it’s not practical.

So we do and we don’t want the students in school. We only want them on our terms. Here’s another bright idea, not very original, day care for the students’ children and other neighbor kids. The student parent spends half a day upstairs in school and the other half in the nursery helping and learning how to take care of the kids, including their own kids. And maybe there’s time for a bit of talk about women’s health. Maybe there’s bit of time to have a soda with other moms. Maybe there’s a bit of time for the dads to drop in and help.  It worked somewhere, it was hailed as a model for the future, but it was dropped, because it was too expensive

But of course, when it comes to helping single moms, especially teenagers of color, there is always an underlying nastiness that goes along with the refusal to help. You can almost hear, “Let’s not reward them for their immoral behavior; and let’s punish them by making their life more miserable, more difficult.”  Or, “You know that will only encourage them to have more and more kids.” But we know it works. We know it will reap enormous benefits and we know that even though it will be expensive up front, we know it will save money down the road. And we even know that it is the right thing to do. And still we won’t do it. We wouldn’t do it in the 1970s or 80s, or 90s and we still won’t do it in 2011. It used to make me mad, but now just thinking about it, it just saps my energy—sucks the life out of me.

It always amazes me. Every September, the students show up. Every September, we disappoint them, not the first day, or the first week, but sooner or later we’re going to let them down. We’re always preaching, “Go the extra mile, work harder, apply a little elbow grease, ‘no pain, no gain’.” We preach all that good stuff, but the system consistently, without fail, lets them down. And teachers in turn blame themselves; internalize the pain, swallow the guilt and show up next September, believing that we can make a difference, that things will be different. The kids can’t buck the system and ironically the teachers can’t either. We’re all trapped in a system that was not designed for either kids or adults. We’re both victims.

WE need a bit of magic

I can’t begin to list all the intangibles that go into creating a successful class, much less make one come true.

However, I want to brag a bit about a great class. It was one of my all time favorites. It met directly after my lunch period. I was often late—more than a minute or two. They were always quiet, expectant, waiting patiently.

It was my fault of course, but I had a good excuse. I had an unusually good lunch bunch. We would be right in the middle of solving all the world’s problems, reinventing the school or giving each other a brilliant self improvement list. And then, all of a sudden the bell would ring—just as one of us was going to start the grand finale, the moment of true enlightenment.  And so we’d scurry off to class. Some of us might linger for just a moment or two. And then of course, there was always a student or two who just like me didn’t belong in the halls and needed to be hustled along. I arrived a minute or two late. I’d rush in and I say, “Redd, where did we leave off yesterday?”

And Redd, unlike me was always prepared, always ready, and he’d answer, “Mr. Wemstrom, we just started to read ACT II of Purlie Victorious. We just started the watermelon count when the bell rang.” I’d ask if everybody remembered their parts from yesterday, the class would nod and we’d begin. Maybe we didn’t have forty minutes like we should, but we had a great thirty minutes.  And then all of a sudden the bell rang startling us, bringing us back to Chicago. They’d moan and groan as they left. On the way out I’d yell, “Finish tonight and we’ll read and talk more tomorrow.” Then they'd be gone and I wondered who ever invented such a retarded system.

By the time the class got to February, I relied on Redd completely. When we were reading Purlie Victorious, he asked about sharecropping, Jim Crow, or what else Ossie Davis wrote. When we read The Learning Tree, he asked why they didn’t talk more about blacks in the US History book. I told the class he was right the books should spend more time talking about African Americans in the standard US History books and not just in the Afro-History books. And I said we shouldn’t be on the third floor reading literature and studying history on the second floor. And we were off and Newt and Kansas were left far behind and God only knows where we’d go from there, but the students liked Newt and we’d be back in Kansas the next day. It was all good.

  I had discovered that the class was interested in whatever he was interested in. If I got too longwinded, he’d interrupt, ask another question or change the subject. If we were doing something the class liked he’d want to stretch it out a bit. No telling what boring stuff was coming up next.

If I was attempting to do something that the class wasn’t interested in, he knew just what to do. I’d come rushing in slightly out of breath and before I could ask Redd for my cue, he’d ask me a question. “Mr. Wemstrom, yesterday you said… or we were talking about… or I saw on TV last night that….” And we’d be gone. But not just the two of us, he knew just how to do it, so he had the whole class interested.

Redd was tall, over six feet, all muscle, built like a basketball player. But he didn’t like sports. He never said, but you could tell right away he wouldn’t like anything competitive, with winners and losers. He didn’t like anything that involved hurting people, even for fun. He was gentle, quiet and a natural leader.

A couple of years later, I had his sister in class. It was a good class. We were all about business and we got a lot done. One day, I asked his sister how Redd was doing. She answered, “OK”. A lot of students were like Redd. After high school, they just did OK. They were smart enough to go to college or learn a skill but their skills weren’t quite good enough to get in or they were worried that they weren’t quite good enough and were afraid to apply and even try.

She repeated that he was doing OK and then she said, “You know, Terrence (his sister was the only one who used his first name) came home from school every day when I was in grammar school and he talked and talked about your class. I couldn’t wait to get to high school so I could take your class. So now, I’m in your class and you know what, it’s just OK. It’s better than a lot of classes, but there’s nothing special about our class.  We work hard and we learn a lot and you’re a good teacher, but it’s not special. My brother was really lucky.”

Donna was a good student. I recommended her for the honors track and when she graduated she went off to college.

And you know what? School ought to be special. And when we talk about test scores and good classes, we forget to talk about magic. And yes, school should be magical.

Slowly beginning to settle in

The students found the room and decided on a desk more quickly than they had on the first day. They settled down and waited. They knew that perhaps not the second day, but soon a little drama would be acted out. The class was interested in this scenario which is performed every year in every class: who was going to run the class—the teacher or some of the students. The second day and perhaps the rest of this very short week the students and the teacher would both be sizing up the lie of the land. Some teachers started with an advantage or handicap based on their reputation.

With some teachers the answer was obvious they were going to run the room. First someone would have to cautiously test the waters. Some teachers responded immediately and the student knew right away he was going to have to be the class clown or the pain in the neck in someone else’s class. Sometimes the test worked. It looked like the teacher was going to be a pushover. Perhaps that would be enough for one day, but soon one or more of the students would try something else, something small, just to get a clearer picture of the situation. They knew they still had to be careful because some teachers have a high tolerance level, but you’d better not cross that line or else you’d be smacked down. And the third group, the group that the students were looking for, were the teachers who either never had had classroom control or over time had lost it and they would be the pushovers.

So the first week or so everybody was getting to know each other. It was a mix of first impressions, hearsay, the little jockeying that was going on and even the time of day. Between classes students would compare notes.

 “You’ve got Lorenz? Boy you’re lucky!”

 “You’ve got Breitzer? She’s good.”

 “Kader, he’s lots of fun.

“ Milkowski? Watch out, he’s tough.”

 “Lalagos? He’s nice and if you pay attention, you’ll learn a lot.”

Mrs. Thomas? She’s really nice. You’ll like her.”

Most students liked a little fun and a little chaos never hurt to break the monotony, but basically most students wanted an education and they may not stick up for the teacher, but they were on the teacher’s side.

So we all started explaining to the students our objectives and goals. They wanted to know about homework, tests and grading policies. We pretended that those issues weren’t nearly as important as establishing a road map. We wanted to talk about learning, not grades, but the students knew that grades were the most important goal, the only outcome that counted.

Notice we didn’t ask the students what they wanted to do to learn, but we told them nicely, of course, what we wanted them to learn. I often thought that Hyde Park Career Academy was so fortunate to have Jackson Park, Lake Michigan, a golf course, the Japanese Garden and a one acre fenced-in natural area right across the street, an ideal science lab. The lake itself and the shoreline connected Jackson Park with the Lake Calumet Harbor region. If you knew what you were looking for, literally only steps from the Outer Drive and hundreds of thousands of cars, this was the place to start a biology class.  This is still one of the richest and most important ecosystems in the mid-west. In September and October, and again in April and May, with migration under way, beaver moving back and forth between the park and Calumet Harbor, another rich eco-system, the groomed gardens and plants and trees dating back at least to the World’s Fair, why would anybody want to be inside?

So the biology teacher was going to start with the cell, “the building block of all life.” And, yes, it is important and yes it is a great way to start and yes many students, but not all, get it right away. But we have to remember what the goals of the curriculum were. The science curriculum talks about goal number one: high school biology was to introduce students to high school science, the scientific method etc. etc. But all high school science was really to prepare students for college biology and college biology101 was to prepare students for the next bio class and perhaps biology major. Someplace in that heady mix of cells, formulae, and the laws of gravity, students are supposed to gain an understanding and appreciation for the natural world. Sadly, they don’t. And, sadly, it’s another missed opportunity.

And to compound the ironies. We would send our successful students off to good colleges and they would come back at Thanksgiving and ask why HP didn’t have electronic microscopes. One student said, “You know, I really felt dumb, the first day, when the professor said let’s get started and I didn’t know how to use my microscope.”

And there were and there continue to be lost opportunities. The world famous Museum of Science and Industry is only six blocks away. I don’t remember any teacher ever taking a class there. The University of Chicago was also less than a mile away and there was one collaborative program between the university and the school for a few short years and the AP students went to the Court Theater once a year, but that was it. (As a matter of fact, it was not a good idea to be a young, black male walking across campus. The University had a convoluted relationship with our school and the community and being black just seemed to complicate everything.)

But the tyrannical bell schedule ruled. Don’t tell me about the importance of bell schedules, I’ve heard about the importance of bell schedules for thirty years and all the defenders and proponents of bell schedules are wrong.

But there’s the bell and it’s time for U.S. history.  Four precious minutes—to hang out in the halls with one’s friends and then on to history. Now, if something in biology had caught a student’s interest, too bad. Photosynthesis might be intriguing, but you can only think about it third period, now it’s time to switch gears and think of the War of 1812.  The student either had to forget it or store it quickly in the biology box in his brain because now it was time for history. Every day, every student would get a dose of science, an ounce of social studies, a dollop of literature, a tiny bit of composition, a milligram of mathematics, a smidgen of volleyball and a quick dab of acrylics. Contemplation was not part of the high school curriculum. The students were right; it’s all about Friday’s tests and on to the next unit, the first unit is history.

The Students' First Day

The Next Day

So finally we were ready, more or less. The students wouldn’t all come the first day and some would only come and get their schedules and then hang around outside: “I just wanted to check out my program.” Others claimed, “You don’t do anything the first week, so why should I come?” Most students came to school not because it was expected of them, or because their parents forced them to come to school or because there was nothing else to do or because even though the food wasn’t great it was free; but because they wanted an education.

Most people think that teachers teach and students learn. That people are taught to read, count, play the violin, run bases and speak French. That’s what most teachers and most students believe. Then when it doesn’t happen nobody knows what to do.

Most of the students in a big city high school can’t read at grade level and fifty percent will never finish high school (1990). So because we don’t know what to do, we all play the blame game. The teachers blame the parents or the students; the administration blames the teachers and the students; the parents blame each other, the teachers, and their own kids; the students blame their parents, the school, the teachers, each other and even themselves. And of course the blame game only makes things worse.

We all knew and even today twenty years later we all know what needs to be done, but we’re not going to do it. So we’re going to continue to blame each other and continue to complain, “If only the (fill in the blank) would shape up and take some personal responsibility for academic failure, we could solve the problem.

So on the first day, I’d help clear the halls, go to my first class, settle everybody down and get started. One part of my brain would be asking students how was their summer, others if they were happy to be back ( we all thought that was a good joke a little lame, but pretty good for a teacher), and then I’d talk a bit about the coming year. In the fall of 1971, by the end of the first week I’d know everybody’s name, first and last. By 1999, I’d know everybody’s name by the end of the year, well just their first or last names, not necessarily both. But in the meantime in another part of my brain I was thinking about Lyndon Johnson and his War on Poverty. He was the last guy to get it right.

I remember when I started I could always tell the students from a late 1960s Title 1 classroom. They’d still be behind, but even a year or two in a Title 1 classroom had made a difference. So, I’d stand there talking about Gordon Parks or Romeo and Juliet and thinking what if those kids had had eight years of a model classroom instead of two. And later, I’d see a student in the hall who had disappeared last spring. She explained, “My mom got a job and I had to stay home with the kids.” Just as matter of fact as could be, she explained that her mom got laid off, so she was back until and if her mom got another job. And again I’d think of LBJ, who said there are no separate educational solutions, no separate housing solutions, no separate employment solutions; you simply had to do all three at once. And of course nobody listened and now nobody remembers and things just simply and slowly get worse.

I used to teach reading in what were called reading labs. They worked; except they didn’t help. A student would be doing great in reading lab, mastering fourth grade reading material, moving on to fifth grade and then on to sixth grade during the course of the year. However, when a student left our class and went to his other classes and had to do work on or near grade level the success he was experiencing everyday in lab quickly turned to failure in his other classes.

My last reading class was terrific. Two of us were team teaching with an aid. We had fifty students. But only twenty-five, thirty tops ever came. There was a core group of twenty to twenty-five who came every day. So Sharon and I divided the work. I settled down the students, introduced the new units, did some general teaching, and kept the class moving along. Sharon was the specialist. She’d work with a few students at a time. She’d zero in on a particular area and work with a couple of students and get it right and then go on to another little group. She was the brains of the operation. Our teachers’ aid, Mrs. Cooley, was amazing. She could play the bad cop, be the mother figure, the confidant. We had a small office next to the lab. That became Mrs. Cooley’s room. We didn’t call it time out but that’s what she’d do with a couple of students who needed to chill. They would sit with Mrs. Cooley and it always amazed Sharon and me, but in a few minutes Mrs. Cooley had those students working away. She’d also help with a little make-up work, do some testing, help keep the records and listen to the students.

But that doesn’t describe what she did. She created an atmosphere, an ambience. Students wanted to be with her for an hour whenever they could. They wanted to study with her, or help her with some of the classroom housekeeping chores. They wanted to do well in the class for her. They wanted her to be proud of them. Sometimes Sharon and I were jealous, students wanted to sit in Mrs. Cooley’s little room and do their work in there.

She had never seen the inside of a college classroom, but she was every bit as good as Sharon and I with our fancy degrees. She knew all about the art of being a good teacher. Over time, teacher aides who were actually hired to help teachers in the classroom were eliminated. The penny-pinching accountants from downtown had never seen Mrs. Cooley in action. Of course, if they had, they wouldn’t have recognized what she was doing. They would have seen a middle-aged black woman just sitting around talking to a few students. She was so slick that for months when we first met her, even Sharon and I didn’t know how much she was doing.

Oh yes, it would have been expensive, but just imagine if every student who needed that kind of attention actually received it. When the student left the lab and went to geography, the geography teacher could also have an assistant, and there would be room to spread out, and there would be enough varied materials that the teacher really could individualize, at least to a degree. Imagine a geography room with lots of maps, atlases, not just topographical maps, but other types of 3-D maps. Imagine if there was lots of drawing paper and students started by making maps of their own street, and then their neighborhood, and then writing about it instead of memorizing the seven this and the five that and the fifty this. Imagine if there were field trips to the Loop or even across the street to the Japanese Gardens. I know computers have probably made some of this possible today. But I wonder.

It always struck me as strange that one couldn’t tell the difference between an English, history or math classroom except for some scribbles on the chalk board.

It always struck me as strange that every encounter outside school is always one-on-one. It doesn’t matter, from the banker to the shoe clerk to the waiter it is always a one-on-one inter- change, but in school it’s always how many students can the administration jam into a room and into the school itself before the teachers rebel. It doesn’t make sense.

Back To school
I
For the first twenty-five years of teaching, I looked forward to the first day. If I had
taught summer school, I would have liked another week or so, but I was ready. However, there would come a day in late October when the folks, who had taught summer school, including me, would be walking down the hall one afternoon and we would turn the corner and walk smack-dab into a brick wall. We hadn’t realized we needed a longer break until bam! And then of course it was too late. If I hadn’t taught summer school, I was ready by mid-August to get back to school, anxious to get back into the swing of things.
Everybody looked good the first day. Lots of teachers were dressed up. Many of the white teachers had tans, they had lost five pounds of that old winter fat, their clothes fit a bit better and they had a little bounce in their step, a tiny swing in their hips, as they hurried from one meeting to another. The women looked especially good—a little sexier, a little younger and a little bit more enthusiastic.
That was all destined to change over the course of the coming year. The white teachers would lose their tan, take on a pasty look as the year dragged on. The black teachers would go from the fresh look of summer to kind of a dull, gray, dusty complexion. But that would all come later. On Tuesday, everybody was bright and fresh and full of optimism. Many of them were Cub fans, after all, and this was ‘the next year’ that they had been waiting for. We were excited to see each other. Many of us hadn’t seen each other all summer.
“What were every body’s summer vacations like?”
“Did you really work as a house painter all summer?”
“Do you still like selling beer at the ball park? And will you still be doing it weekends?”
“Did you find a new babysitter? We hope she works out better than the last one.” (And hopefully, we won’t have to hear your litany of daily complaints.)
There was a lot of catching up to do. We wanted to here if Maryanne’s daughter got off to college. “Was Tom’s son’s wedding as lovely as everybody imagined it would be? Where are the pictures?”
“Was Pete still dating Angela?”
And, “Did Ken have another new girlfriend in addition to his wife? Just one?”
Everybody got there early for coffee and rolls. Bubbly and excited, we headed for our first meeting. It was the same old, same old. The only interesting stuff was the introduction of the new teachers. And, then it was on to attendance: tardies, cuts and absences. A little bit about discipline: “Remember each teacher has to be his or her own disciplinarian. The office can’t take care of everything. It’s your job to see that it doesn’t get serious enough to warrant outside help.” And then a special reminder about the seriousness of controlling and monitoring hall traffic, the need to get to one’s hall guard post on time. And especially, “If every teacher could stand at their doors until the halls were cleared, we wouldn’t have a hall problem.” But of course it never worked and we always had a hall problem.
I was the union delegate. I always got a minute at the end. “When you get your rosters, check to see that your classes are in compliance with class size. If not, I can take care of it right away. And it’s easier to do it now. Just let me know.” Class size was one of the few things that we felt that we had a little control over, at least in high school. Even when the classes were in compliance, they were still way too big. Much too big when all the literature said, “Individualize, try a variety of activities to match different learning styles. Don’t teach to the whole class; help individuals learn at their own pace.”
By the day’s second meeting, usually the department meeting, the bubbles were getting a bit flat. But still we were all looking forward to an early and long lunch and some beer. The department chair tried to start out positively. She’d re-introduce the new teachers. We all marveled at how young they looked. And we wondered, “Were we ever that young; did we ever look that good; were women that sexy twenty years ago?”
And then, she got serious, There was only a limited amount of paper for the risograph copier. If people didn’t use it sparingly, she’d have to ration the paper. She wouldn’t like it, but she would, if we forced her. “Fair’s fair, after all.”
“No books until the second, maybe the third week, give the students a chance to get here, get the program changes taken care of and get your classes organized and then we can think about books.” This was always met with a groan, especially in English. Many teachers don’t really need a book every day, but they liked the comfort of having them there just in case. “A nice back-up just in case” they’d mumble. “A crutch”, the department chair would sigh.
I was in charge of the English Department bookroom. Already the teachers were coming up to me. Couldn’t they just get a room set? Could they just get in for a minute and check, double check how many copies of English Literature: From Beowulf to GBS there really were. They would stand extra close, almost touching. Their bodies hovering just near enough, trying to tantalize, hoping that I might say, “OK, just this once.”
“Take the rest of day to get your rooms ready; remember, you can pick up your class rosters; don’t forget lesson plans are due at the end of the week; a bulletin board in each room would be nice; we need a volunteer to do the department’s hall bulletin board; don’t forget to get a signed book card for every student when we do check out books. And she’d conclude with a sigh and a whisper, “Don’t spend the whole afternoon at lunch, remember you’re getting paid for a whole day, try and get back and do a few things.” And then she’d whisper, “Jimmie’s?” “At Hyde Park, it was always Jimmie’s”, we’d stake out the middle room. Others would go to Medici’s, especially the ones who would fight over the bill, who didn’t believe in simply adding 20% and dividing the bill.

II
Just three hours ago our spirits were soaring; our heads were in the clouds.
Over Labor Day weekend, and even coming to work that morning, I had made plans. No more procrastination—as soon as I collected the papers, I’d grade them, record and hand them back and even take time to discuss them. I promised myself that finally I’d reread all those stories I had assigned over the years and try a fresh new approach. No more of the same of old same old. No more winging it. Leave the ad-libbing to the late night TV punsters. All those newspaper and journal articles that I had snipped all summer had lots of good ideas. I’d try some of them.
The teachers who took summer classes came back all fired up. They were going to do journaling, have a class room library, let the kids read young adult literature. Get the kids ‘hooked on books’ and then they’d worry about the classics. Hey, they were going to slow down, read less, but have the kids drill down, read more carefully. Read something contemporary, maybe try some black lit. It never worked. The system wore them down. Other teachers thought the idea of teaching Judy Blum was a hoot, “You can’t be serious?”
There were no books for what they wanted to do. The department chair would repeat, “It’s not our year to order books. You should have told me last spring; I can’t order books today and have them here tomorrow. What are you thinking? Are you thinking?” Some of this isn’t said out loud, but it’s in the air. If you want to do something different do it on the QT, get your own books. “Order a room set from Dell. Make the kids buy them.” One developed a sixth sense after awhile. One learned the lay of the land. It helped if you were young, attractive, especially good or very gregarious. It made life easier.
Driving south on Lake Shore Drive or north on the Dan Ryan we’d all have these pep talks with ourselves. Boy we were up, we were ready, we’d do it all and we’d do it right.
Later in the year, we’d all read the articles in the fancy ed journals or more likely in Parade Magazine—Johnny can’t read, can’t read a map, still doesn’t know his tables, and worst of all, he can’t write. Those articles laid a guilt trip on most of us and ruined many a perfectly fine Sunday afternoon. We’d take every one of those articles to heart. We practiced self flagellation. When we got to school we’d berate each other. “I can’t teach juniors Macbeth, if you don’t teach sophomores the structure of a Shakespearean play.” My problem was I couldn’t pronounce much less spell denouement.
Every article accused us of not doing our job; we simply had to do our job better. So we’d incorporate a vocabulary unit into our lesson plans, the history teacher would spend more time teaching geography as part of his unit on the great westward movement, the algebra teacher would try to squeeze in a review of the multiplication tables. And then the following week more articles, more finger waving, more of the old blame game, “Johnny can’t spell, nobody teaches civics, don’t sacrifice the classics for black lit, teach more black lit, and don’t water down the curriculum, ‘For God’s Sake.’”
In the seventies we had fought to open up the curriculum a bit. After that we would never quite agree on what or how or when to do anything. We were all beginning to do a bit of black lit; some of us did Jane Austen so we had the women’s lit thing covered (kind of). To Kill A Mockingbird was already popular. Seriously, it is a great book, an instant classic, but also, it was perfect for us. It’s written by a woman, with a female heroine, it was contemporary (almost), it was about a black guy (kind of), the reading level was not a problem and, most of all; the kids loved it (most of them). And we could easily talk about white prejudice because they were southern whites. It didn’t challenge white teachers.
To Kill A Mockingbird should have taught us something. If we had looked around, we could have found similar books. Instead of saying if they’re going to college they need to read…, when they take the state exam, they better have read…, to get ready for next year, they should read…. In retrospect, a lot of teaching was about missed opportunties.
And we’d ask, “Where are the new books, the extra resources and most importantly, the planning time? We need time to prep, to collaborate. We can’t team teach, redesign the curriculum, and teach brand new books without more planning time?”
Instead of answers, we’d get, “World lit is Euro-centric. You must take a multicultural approach. Teach the literature of all the peoples of the world and put it in a historical, geographical, and social context as well as literary perspective.” We respond, "You’re right, but you’ve got to remember we were taught the ‘New Criticism’ (I know not so new now.) We’re willing to change, but we need guidance and support.” But next week the press and the principal would both have a new idea or two. More homework, more thoroughly graded. Pop quizzes at the beginning of the period. It worked at Quigley Preperatory Seminary thirty years ago ( the 1950s). It will work here now.
In the meantime, we had five classes to teach, perhaps a study hall to supervise and a homeroom to monitor. In the meantime, what about sex? It was everywhere. Ken was out and about, unobtrusively, talking to a teacher here and there, everywhere. Fishing he called it. Not every cast lands a fish, not every cast gets a strike but a good fisherman always brings home the catch. Not to his wife of course. His wife had blurted out after a wee bit too much Chardonnay and after one of Ken’s slightly more blatant than usual flings, “I don’t want to hear anything from anybody about anything.”
Bill had assured Mary Ann that no, he wasn’t married and yes, he could see her often, but mainly after school, some evenings, but never on the weekend. When her girlfriends found out, "They asked, "Did she really believe him?” To themselves they said, “She couldn’t possibly, it was too obvious. She had to be desperate to believe such a creep—such a rat.” But, there was more than one woman who would have traded places with Mary Ann regardless of the future consequences and perhaps they could changed the outcome lived with the situation.
The funniest one of all of course and people laughed for years was when three very proper and very conscientious students went back to the art room on their lunch period, they quietly let themselves in and got started on their projects then they heard the distinct sounds of pent up passion finally released coming from the art supply closet. It was their art teacher and another teacher from down the hall. They quickly left, swearing never to tell a soul, and of course the rest is history.
One day we were all sitting around have coffee and someone said, “Hey where’s Joey? You know I haven’t seen Joey for a couple of days.” No one seemed to know. There were about six of us having coffee and as soon as the two women teachers left, one of the guys leaned forward, we all leaned forward and he said very seriously and very quietly, "Someone saw him over the weekend with Tonya." He was divorced. We all agreed that he had gotten screwed; we couldn’t imagine why anyone would cheat on Joey. Everybody loved him. And, of course, Tonya was a student. Everybody loved her, too. Not a great student but pretty good, attractive, but more than that self assured, mature, in our little world she seemed grown up, sophisticated. But of course she wasn’t any of those things. The boss got him transferred and that was the end as far as we were concerned. We never saw Tonya again and nobody ever asked about Tonya.
We worry about scope and sequence and ignore the obvious. Every class has its own chemistry. A morning class is plagued by tardiness, a late afternoon class suffers from mental fatigue, a class with more boys than girls or the reverse will act differently than a class with the normal distribution. A male teacher will affect the dynamics of a class as will a female teacher. And homophobia of course is rampant.
A straight teacher can walk into a classroom and before the bell talk about the trip he, his wife and kids made to Brookfield Zoo and most students are at least momentarily interested, but a gay teacher couldn’t walk into his classroom and talk about his and his partner’s trip to the same zoo. A gay teacher couldn’t talk about his partner.

To Bird is to experience life anew

The past two mornings, there has been a first year immature Baltimore oriole at the feeder; last week, there was an immature rose-breasted grosbeak at the feeder. Yesterday, Patty saw a pair of sandhill cranes on her run. Every time we see something the least bit unusual we get excited. We are so lucky; we live in a part of the world where we can still, for a little while longer, take these sightings for granted—more or less.

We’ve seen the cranes, not often, but fairly regularly in the Plum River bottoms near Loran Rd. for the last four or five years. They are actually, along with the eagle, one of nature’s great comeback stories. Every time we go walking, even if we just hear them, we’re thrilled. In other parts of the state, Canada Geese are considered a nuisance, out here, to hear a flock of geese calling as they fly across the sky is still amazing. When we first moved here, we had no idea that there were so many wonderful birds right outside our front door. Just one more example, we had to get out the field guide and check and double check until we finally learned that the wonderful birds, with the shrill call, which try to take over the pastures and hay fields every spring, are killdeer. We’ve learned to recognize them and seeing and hearing them every morning is a joy.

As I write this, I can look over the top of my computer screen, out the window into the yard and watch dozens of birds. We’re not knowledgeable enough to know why they come and go, hang out and disappear, appear and reappear, but we love every curtsy, bow and turn in their endless aerial dance. Some mornings, the feeders are crowded with gold finches. And then puff! they’re gone for a week or two. But the sparrows, a lone pair of nuthatches, and of course the house finches (which I stubbornly insist are purple finches) persist.

It used to be that the grosbeaks would pass through spring and fall on their way someplace else; this year, they stayed. The orioles missed a year but seem to have nested nearby again this year. The mourning doves are wonderful but their plaintive call can be a bit wearing. But, then with a touch of regret in her voice Patty comments, “You know there haven’t been any doves around lately.” But, later that same day, one will appear strutting along the roof’s ridge line. Thanks to Patty’s nest boxes, the bluebirds are regulars now well into early winter. It’s a corny, worn out old cliché, but still there is nothing quite as exciting as the unexpected flash of blue.

It’s still warm, humid, and a bit muggy and the occasional thunder shower still loudly proclaims, “This is August! It is supposed to be hot and humid with isolated thunder showers!” But it is also the beginning of fall. The kingbirds suddenly appear on the electric wires. We wonder, “Where have they been all summer?” The redwinged blackbirds, which have not only been quiet but nearly invisible since nesting ended, are just beginning to reappear. For the next couple of months, we’ll watch the blackbirds and swallows begin to gather together in preparation for their journey. But it’s early; they’re not really serious yet. Hanging out seems just right, so that’s what they’re doing.

Is bird watching exciting because we’re getting old and that’s all we’re up to? There are young birders of course, but most of us have gray hair and arthritis. We like to think that one of the benefits of maturity is a bit of wisdom. We’re finally beginning to sort out what’s important and what’s not. And waiting for the cedar waxwings to return each fall and hang out for a week in their namesake and eat the juniper like berries seems more important than ever.
T

After nearly thirty years (1971-1999), at the time I retired, some things had changed and some things were sadly still the same.

At my first faculty meeting, on the west side in September, 1971, the principal, the assistant principals, the disciplinarian and all the teachers complained about the high rate of absenteeism, the excessive number of tardies, and the amount of traffic in the halls long after the bell. At my last faculty meeting, this time on the south side, twenty-eight years later, people were still complaining about the exact same things. They were all suggesting, demanding actually, for the umpteenth time, implementation of the same old policies that had consistently failed for thirty years.

But other things had changed. When I started teaching, most of my students had either been born in the South or their parents had been born in the South. And many of my students still went home, down south, for all or part of the summer. Actually, they sometimes didn’t get back until mid-September. Their lame excuse was that schools started later down south. When they were in the north they were busy trying to assimilate, which was more important to them than learning to be a better reader. They knew that they were “country” and they were trying desperately to become Chicagoans. The biggest insult was to call someone “country”. In the seventies, during the holidays, I often had the students talk or write about southern traditions such as food or raccoon hunting. One year I had the young women compare their mothers’ sweet potato pie recipes. One girl trumped everybody by bringing me a half of a pie. It was delicious. Of course, she got the best grade for the assignment.

When I left, nobody was from the South and the connections which had been so vibrant were literally dying off. One final irony, in the nineties, newspapers were reporting that successful northern inner city students who went back down south to go to college never came back north.
When I started teaching, students still read the daily newspaper. So in reading or English I was forced to say, “Alright put the paper away; it’s time to do some work.” The two or three in the back, who had brought the paper with them mainly as protection from boredom, quickly proceeded to go to sleep. One time, I came in a minute or two late and all the young men were gathered around the class’s best reader and he was reading the sports section to the group, but mainly to Marcus, the star of the varsity basketball team. The team had won the night before, surprising everyone, and the news had made the Sun-Times. After that, reading the sports section to Marcus became an accepted part of class. The team was on a winning streak, and because they had been perceived to be losers from the get go, the Sun-Times sports writer had labeled them the “Cinderella Team.” So twice a week, the morning after the game, we would all take ten minutes to read the paper and another ten minutes to discuss the game.

Marcus couldn’t read, but he was a phenomenal basketball player. He was short, skinny and not very aggressive, except on the court,like the rest of the team. But somehow, they were able to win most games all season right up to the finals. When the season ended, the class lost some of its pizzazz; sadly it was back to business as usual. After awhile, Marcus stopped coming to school. I later learned that even at the famous Big 10 schools, well into the sixties, it was normal for seniors not to come back to school after the last game. Word around school was that Marcus was in the park shooting baskets for quarters and then a little later, nothing.

When I left teaching the kids didn’t read the newspaper, didn’t bring it to school and didn’t steal it off their neighbor’s front stoop.
When I started teaching I had to guard my own newspaper. Not only would students who would never steal a book, steal my paper; but teachers, my friends and colleagues, who would never steal a book, would steal the crossword, the sports section, the horoscope, demand just a quick peek at Ann Landers or at Friday’s movie section. The only part of the newspaper which was safe was the actual news section. When I left teaching, nobody had wanted my newspaper for a long time.

Look at the missed opportunities. Couldn’t we have talked about the war, basketball, the daily paper and one of the most important migrations in modern history and been more successful,to boot? Wouldn’t our students have learned more?

Broadway Ave.
Uptown, Chicago 1965
I asked my friend if he could recommend a bar in Uptown, a poor neighborhood on Chicago’s north side. I didn’t want to always be drinking in a yuppie bar in Chicago’s hot new Old Town neighborhood. I was too shy around the girls and whenever anybody said, “Hey guy, what did you think of last night’s game?” I never knew what they were talking about. My immediate reaction was to ask what game. But I had learned that wasn’t the answer. And even though I took great pride (and still do) in the fact that I don’t know a hockey stick from a five iron, I didn’t want anybody to know that I didn’t follow sports, period.
So I thought that I’d go and hide out in a “country” bar.
My friend said that was a bad idea. He explained that each bar on Broadway reflected a community down south in Tennessee or Kentucky. So for example, not all of course, but most of the patrons at the Four Leaf Clover came from the same community in western Kentucky. And the last thing you want to be is an outsider in one of those places. And I’d be an outsider three times over, I didn’t live in the neighborhood, I wasn’t from Appalachia much less a particular valley and I looked like a college kid even though I was a stupid dropout.
He said, “You’ve got to understand the process. Some guy moves up here, gets a job in some factory assembling something like cameras or televisions, finds an apartment and sends for his wife and kids. In the meantime, he’s learning the facts of life.”
Maybe he works at Bell and Howell making cameras. It’s non-union, doesn’t pay very well and the foreman loves to say, “Oh by the way, if you don’t like it here, you can leave, we can replace you in a flash. Your kind are coming in here every day looking for work.” Then he finds out that Uptown is a neighborhood that’s seen better days to say the least, even though the rents are high. And when he wants to move, he finds out that people west of Western Avenue don’t want “hillbillies,” they won’t rent to them. So in the meantime, he calls his buddy or kid brother back home and says, “Hey, I can get you a job where I work and next week an apartment is coming up for rent in my building.” He doesn’t tell his buddy about all the bull; he can find that out on his own. He just misses his friends and family and besides if he can eat crap, so can they.
“But the tavern—that’s their place, no women whining about grocery money, no kids asking for money for school supplies, no landlord talking about the rent, no bosses yelling about keeping up with the line, nobody telling them you’re just a ‘hillbilly.’ So the last thing in the world they want to see is some kid coming in and gawking at them. They’d fix your clock, right quick.”

The Ubiquitous Coffee Mug

The ubiquitous coffee mug

When a couple gets married, they often receive a beautiful set of China as a wedding present and a set of everyday dishes. They now have two sets of dishes and probably twelve to eighteen pairs of cups and saucers. Like many people, they won’t use the cups and saucers except for special dinners, because they prefer coffee mugs. So next, they inadvertently start building their coffee mug collection. It starts out innocently enough. First, a couple of cute mugs from their honey moon, next a pair of mugs from their favorite restaurant and then some Holiday mugs to help celebrate the season. Now they’re on a roll. Their employer gives them a worker appreciation mug, they start bringing back one or two souvenir mug from each of their vacations and they give and receive gag mugs. Soon people realize when all else fails buy them a mug and the mugs start rolling in.
Not to worry—there is always the garage sale. And folks don’t mind weeding out their collection and unloading ten or fifteen of their least favorite mugs. The only problem with garage sales is pretty soon one begins to buy other people’s mugs. And the number of mugs again starts to grow. Again not to worry. The interior design folks have the solution. Hang a decorative mug rack on the wall and display your best mugs for the whole world to see.
I got to thinking about the abundance of mugs this morning because I was trying to find room for two new mugs myself. And I’ve been there, done that. I’ve gone through all the steps outlined above. Collecting mugs; ending up with two sets of mugs, the holiday mugs and the regular mugs; to now we “specialize” in handmade mugs.
This all started out as a reform. No more commercial mugs. Just mugs from potters, bought at their pot shop where we could watch them throw the mugs and talk to us at the same time. For a while that worked just fine. Each of us had our favorite mug. We judged them: favorite color, weight and the feel of the handle in one’s hand. We were pleased with ourselves; another successful attack on rampant materialism.
However, it dawned on me this morning as I was admiring our growing collection of handcrafted mugs that I was back in the same old place. I could drink coffee every morning for nearly two weeks and never drink out of the same handcrafted cup twice. If I drank once from all of the mugs and cups in the house including the ones that are strictly for “decoration” I could easily go over three months and never drink out of the same cup or mug twice.
Like most Americans, we’re not wealthy, but it seems that we always have ten or fifteen dollars for a couple of mugs either for ourselves or for gifts. It’s goofy.

A new school but really just the same old same old

I was young teacher on Chicago’s Westside. It was early October, the school year was a few weeks old, but already everybody, students and teachers alike, were getting into the swing of things.
Latoya use to come and visit me on my hall guard post on the school’s lower level. She was suppose to be someplace else-maybe lunch where she didn’t fit in, in study where she didn’t know how to study, or maybe in class where she’d be in over her head. I probably should have turned her in for cutting.
Our school was Orr Academy. It had just been open a few weeks, a brand new building. The previous spring, while the students were still in the old building, the administration had asked the students to vote on a new name for the new school. Their first choice—an absolutely perfect name –was Mark Clark and Fred Hampton Academy. Clark and Hampton had been two Black Panthers gunned down in their beds by the Cook County State’s Attorney police on orders from John Mitchell, US Attorney General in the Nixon Administration. And kids, being kids, their second choice was General George Patton, the hero of a recently released Hollywood movie. The school board named the school Orr after a turn of the Twentieth Century white Pennselvyian, streetcar conductor and union organizer.
The school was originally going to be build north of Chicago Ave. which at the time was the line dividing black and whites. The land had been purchased and the homes torn down. Everything was all set. Then one day the Alderman happened to visit the old school. It was nearly all black. He couldn’t have a mostly black school in a white neighborhood in his ward. The site was moved south of the line. Sound strange? No that was business as usual. A few years later the alderman, a favorite crony of the mayor would go to jail for corruption.
The school was on the corner of Chicago and Pulaski Avenues. As far as the students knew, it had always been Pulaski Ave. But in the 1930s, the street’s name had been changed from Crawford Ave. to Pulaski (to curry favored with the growing number of Polish voters) and for years people fought over the name change. Some Chicagoans were never going to accept the idea that a street was going to be named after a Polish person even though he had fought in the American Revolutionary War. For over twenty years, they fought back and forth in the courts and finally the courts upheld the name change. Ironically in a few years, when Dr. King’s birthday was made a national holiday and some whites felt that they needed another holiday, a white holiday, and Pulaski who now had a large enough following was honored with a holiday to make sure the blacks did not get one up on whites.
Latoya came to visit almost every day. I provided her with a refuge for a half hour or so. Latoya didn’t know, the other kids didn’t know, but if she ever had a future she would be beautiful. But she hadn’t bloomed yet. She was still just a kind of cute, shy, quite, awkward fifteen year old in a school where she didn’t have a clue and couldn’t possibly succeed.
The last time she came, she talked. She just didn’t answer my questions about school, home and her neighborhood. She talked because she had something on her mind. She said,” You know, this brand new building. We all looked forward to coming here, all last year and all last summer, we just couldn‘t wait for school to start in the new building.” And then she stopped and looked away and then as she looked down she continued, “You know, it’s just the same as our old school—just exactly the same—no different. Just like every other school I’ve ever gone to”
She was in pre-algebra and didn’t know her tables, she was in world geography and wasn’t sure how to get downtown. Her books were especially chosen for students like her. They were high school texts “watered down”, “dumbed down” as some of her teachers said. The teachers bragged that they had picked the perfect books, the reading level was seventh grade, but with ninth grade content. She had a fifth grade reading level, no study skills, no one had ever read to her, she had never heard of the Cat in the Hat, It was 1973, adults were just beginning to discover black lit., she probably never hear of Maya Angelou, Langston Hughes or Gordon Parks. Nobody had ever taken the time to read to her, to read with her, to help her pick books that she’d be interested in. She couldn’t possibly do regular school work or follow the regular routine.
Naively, I tried to tell her that it wasn’t all bad. I told her that there were good teachers at Orr who would be happy to work with her. She had good, well meaning teachers and she had to give them a chance, she had friends from the neighborhood, it wasn’t as bad as she thought. She could stick it out.
As I was giving my little speech, I knew it wasn’t working and it didn’t work. I never saw her again. There were a thousand freshmen in the brand new building that fall; next fall there would only be five hundred sophomores.
And—she was right; the new building was just like every other building.

The Streets of Chicago

The Streets of Chicago
I
In the early1990s, I was tutoring GED students as a volunteer on Chicago’s north side at a small non-profit community center. The young professionals were busy gentrifying the surrounding neighborhood. It wasn’t immediately noticeable. The main arterial streets still looked seedy, rundown and hopeless, but the side streets were quickly being transformed. Each of the restored turn of the century homes was a lovely little gem. The young professionals patted themselves on the back. They were urban pioneers. People wrote about them in the Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine, in the Reader, and a famous professor had even written a book about them. Little did they know about the other human dramas, the other stories which were being acted out right in their midst
That very gentrification was forcing the little community center to move. The old building had been sold and the lofts were going to become condos. The realtor was going to make a killing; the contractors and developers were going to make a bundle and IKEA, Crate and Barrel and the interior designers were going to clean up. It was explained to the staff and students that the school was only going to move four blocks north, no big deal. Some of the young men looked sick. They called me over and explained that the director didn’t understand. They couldn’t go there during the winter when it gets dark so early. The leader of the little group explained, “Some of us are in a gang, but not all of us. But, it doesn’t matter; none of us can go there. It would be asking for trouble. If the school moves we’ll have to quit.”
The school moved; the students quit, the school recruited new students (students who just weeks before couldn’t go four blocks south). And the original students? Who knows, nobody ever saw them again.
II
Back in the early seventies, the Chicago Board of Education was under immense pressure from the US Department of Justice to integrate the public schools. Of course nobody on the City Hall’s Fifth Floor or the Board of Education wanted to comply. They came up with a token gesture, Permissive Transfer, which said that a student from an overcrowded school could transfer to a school which was under enrolled. That sounded wonderful to students living on Chicago’s Southside, especially ones who lived near the old Jackson Park-Howard St. el line. All they had to do was get on the el and travel to the north side and get off the el at Bryn Mawr and either walk or take a bus to Senn High School. Which they did. At first everything was cool. And then it started. If one or two black students were by themselves they were harassed by the Thorndale-Jarvis Organization. The TJOs famous for their steel toed work boots had decided that “they” weren’t coming into their neighborhood. Eventually, the only way to get to school was for the black students to wait at the el station until there was a big enough group that nobody would bother them and then they would proceed to school in a group. Once inside the school, everything was more or less OK, but they had to eat together and they knew better than go anyplace by themselves especially the washrooms. After school, it was the same routine, round up the group and then as a group head for the el station. As you can imagine, Permissive Transfer wasn’t very successful. But then it wasn’t meant to be. The Board’s attitude, “If some dumb kids took it seriously, if some dumb kids thought they finally had a chance for a better education, too bad. Nobody ever said it was going to be about their education.”
If you think I’m just rehashing old history, read on. The TJOs had learned from their parents, from their teachers, from the Mayor, the Cardinal and the local priest that blacks meant nothing but trouble. They were only acting out what was discussed at the dinner table and everywhere else that whites gathered.
Later, the fight for dominance would be between the old TJOs and the new Asian immigrants. Again, the young professional and suburbanites who were frequenting the neighbor for the wonderful Vietnamese and French/Vietnamese Restaurants on Argyle and Broadway were oblivious to what else was going on in the neighborhood. And besides, they would have said, “Oh no, you’re mistaken. Young Asians are all hard working, driven by their parents to succeed in school and to excel in every pursuit. That can’t be true.” But it is true; all poor kids have to fight for survival on our city streets.
Everybody thinks of the west side as Chicago’s port of entry. They forget that for the last fifty years, the north side has been the port of entry for Appalachian whites, for immigrants from the old Indochina and now from the Middle East. Now adult Iraqi immigrants are trying to take back the streets from the gangs so that the streets can be safe for their children. What an irony—the Iraqis flee their own country, come to the States looking for safety and they have to fight to make their neighborhood streets safe for their own children.


III
It’s perverse. School administrators, if they have to contend with gangs, prefer a one gang school. A single gang school is relatively calm. No major fights or disruptions. If the recruiters tell a kid, “join”, the kid doesn’t have much choice and that can be a problem for him but not for the school. So there is drama and there is tragedy, but it’s all muted below the surface.
However, the school is only part of a larger community. And sometimes what goes on outside the school effects the school. Occasionally, on a Monday morning, a teacher will ask, “Does anybody know where Marcus is today? He’s was here on Friday.” Someone will quietly answer, “He was shot.” Sometimes, early in the morning, I would see small groups of students clustered together in the hall. I’d go up to them and ask what was going on. Someone would show me their friend’s obituary from previous night’s church service. I’d mumble something and remind them that they should get to class.
Big city neighborhoods surrounding a school are dynamic, in flux, always changing. An African American teacher who lived nearby in a middle class neighbor once told me, “We knew something was up. All of a sudden, here were these young white boys in good cars driving real slow down our street. I told my husband to drive around and find out what was going on. He did and he came back and told me they were dealing drugs on the corner. Now, I ask you, how did these white boys from the suburbs know what was happening, on my street before I did?”
And like my teacher friend, sometimes those of us in the school were the last to know. The neighborhood gang structure was changing. It didn’t have anything to do with kids or race; it was all about the money. A neighboring gang was moving in, trying to take over some of those street corners that sold drugs to middleclass white people. The gang fought back. Eventually the fight spilled into our school. The school did what it could to control the situation with little help from the police. A serious fight broke out which lasted almost two whole days. The police, on the second day, finally, noticed and came to the school’s help. They broke up the fight outside while the school dealt with the fights inside the building. The police made arrests and hauled people away.
However, peace wasn’t really restored in the school until the invading gang decisively won on the streets, out in the neighborhood.

IV
Big city high schools are like small towns. Their hallways are like the town’s streets, dynamic and full of life. I was a young substitute teacher in the spring of 1971. I was sent to Austin High School, on the city’s far west side. The school was still trying to recover from the horrendous transformation that follows the upheaval and chaos when a school goes from white to black. I knew one side of the story. The previous winter I had student taught at Taft H.S., an all white, far northwest side high school which had a small tightly knit group of former Austin teachers on the faculty. They never tried of complaining about how “They had ruined one of Chicago’s premier (white) schools. How the Board did nothing to help the white teachers, did nothing to help the old school. Every day they kvetched about how they had received no help from downtown. Besides what could anybody do with “them?” “They won’t read, can’t write. They can hardly speak English. They shouldn’t be in high school. They’re not even city kids; they should go back down south where they belong.”
When I got to Austin the kids seemed just fine. I got along OK and they did the small things I asked them to do in their teacher’s absence. One day, we were talking. One of the girls, a leader in the division (homeroom) started by saying, “You know what use to bug me? If there was a fight in the hall between two white boys the teachers would break it up right away, if there was a fight between two blacks they’d break it up right away, if there was a fight between a white and a black they’d wait to see who was winning. If the black boy was winning, they’d break up the fight right away, but if the white boy was winning they’d let the white boy get in a couple of more licks first.”
The white teachers, “We were glad to get out when we could”, were wrong about the students. The students were just fine. The girl in the division room may have exaggerated a bit, but basically she was right.
V
At another school, a few years later, which was also trying to recover from the transition, a teacher was complaining in the teachers’ lounge, the small town’s coffee shop, about a black student who had corrected her. Her voice was quite, but full of venom. “I called him a boy. He told me he wasn’t a boy. He said, ‘Boy was the white man’s name for slave and I’m not a slave and don’t call me a boy again.’ I ask him how old he was. He told me fourteen. I told him he was a boy and he could go look it up in the dictionary. He got up and left the room. What can you do with ‘these people?’?” Some of us looked away, but some were softly nodding their heads in agreement. They would never say it out loud, they wished that their friend wouldn’t say it out loud, but she was right.
VI
He and I were colleagues. He was a black scientist teacher and I was a white English teacher. It was summer and we were sitting on my front porch watching the last of the rush hour traffic try to beat the system by cutting down my side street. We were discussing a special project that he and I were working on for school. We got to reminiscing. I told him about washing dishes in high school to save money for college. He told me about being a door to door magazine subscription salesman to make money for college. He said, “I usually worked the black neighborhoods. But one day, I thought, “Hey what the heck I’ll try Oak Park.” (And that’s how Clarence talked. Heck not hell. His students loved him. Quite and serious.) There’s a lot more money out there than on the west side. Things were going good all morning. I made more commissions that morning than I usually made in two or three days on the west side. Then about two o’clock a squad car pulled up to the curb. They ordered me over. They asked me who I was and what I was doing in Oak Park. And didn’t I know that I didn’t belong there. And didn’t I know that I’d best leave. I told them that I had a right to be there. I showed them my identification from the company, my sales sheets, and that people must have thought it was Ok because they were ordering magazines and writing checks. They said they didn’t care and that come dark they come looking for me and if I wanted to work till then find, but be gone by dark. I never went back.

VII
I taught night school in the early 1990s on the south side and never worried about my safety. Some of my students did, however. When they found out I taught in the evening and after we had talked about my Haitian students which fascinated them, they got to the main subject. I had told them I went down the street got a couple of hotdogs and fries and went over to Wooded Island to eat my dinner. The street wise young men told me that I couldn’t do that. Sounding more like my mother than my students they told me that the Island wasn’t safe, even during the day. They apologized about their language, but they explained that the place was a meeting place and a pickup place for gays and that I was just asking for trouble if I went there. I told them I’d stopped. I lied to them just like I use to lie to my mother. I continued to go over there and eat my dinner which was more of a threat to my cardiac health than anybody looking for some fun.

VIII
Later that same year, as usual, I went to my favorite hot dog stand for dinner. And because it was cold, gray and already getting dark I headed straight back to school. On the way back, just a block from school, within sight of the building, I was startled out of my day dream. A half dozen young men had spread out across the sidewalk in front of me. They looked like an NFL scrimmage line. “Oh no,” was all I could think. Then one of them said, “He’s OK, he’s my teacher.” They parted to let me by and I walked through exchanging mumbled “Hey” and “waddup”.
Sometimes when we make pronouncements we don’t always know the whole story. It’s hard to know the whole story. It’s hard to know that young professionals are basically well meaning, that most kids regardless of labels want an education, that many teachers are in situations that they didn’t create, no one helps them and they don’t know what to do and their frustration sometimes turns to anger. And knowing so little about our own streets is not much help.