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.