Commentary : A Power Day in the Classroom
My beard is turning gray. My hair is getting thin, and now and then I whip my glasses off to read the small print. In short, I am getting a little long in the tooth. The majority of mornings for the past 20 years have seen me turn the key in a classroom door. A lot of openings, a lot of roll-calls. So much repetition demands a little reflection.
After 20 years I am fast approaching a point in life when things should begin to clarify, when the bits and pieces of the educational puzzle should groan into place. But this is not happening, at least not in any dimension or context recognizable to me. No venerable guru has approached me with answers to such long-sought questions as why we reinvent the wheel and why the tail keeps wagging the dog. I sometimes wonder if the educational system is not patterned after the expanding universe theory, in which the center cannot hold and everything is flying amok toward annihilation.
Down the runways of succeeding years, educational fads and theories have pranced their way before the lights like Christian Dior and Yves Saint Laurent models. Advertised with great fanfare and promise, they have endured about as long as last year’s fashions. Yet almost every fall a new batch of lovelies is trotted onto the runway with all the hoopla given their predecessors until they, too, are discarded with the previous year’s failures.
Remember when computers were going to change our lives?--they haven’t, not yet anyway; when “new math” replaced “old math” only to be replaced in turn by “old math” in the guise of back to basics; when strand testing was the odds-on favorite, now it’s out to pasture; when “creative writing” succumbed to “power writing”--the “power paragraph” and the “five-paragraph essay.” Who could ignore that combo? They goose-stepped up and down the ramp displaying their wares. Discipline and exposition were in. Creativity and description were out. Students were failing in synthesis, analysis and telesis, and something had to be done about it.
Well, the dust has settled, and the results are in. According to the state Department of Education, power writing thrives only in schools. The rest of the literate world ignores it. Another dry hole. Sigh!
However, as I turn the key in my classroom door neither that assessment, nor the knowledge that 50 million to 60 million Americans are functionally illiterate, weighs too heavily on my mind. What I’m really pondering is how well my backyard shed, which took me two years to build, will hold up come the first wintry blast. Will it stand firm or explode in a thousand nuts and screws across the yard before some midnight wind, kind of like the power paragraph? About seven minutes into the journal assignment I get the “Can (not may) I go to the bathroom?” question. Seven minutes of non-power writing can do that to one.
I forage for the bathroom pass in the drawer with the several dozen old readmit slips--many from last year--but can’t find it. Someone stole it, I guess. Hastily I scratch a note. She leaves. I follow--four seconds later. Yup, my hunch was right. She is heading for the bathroom by way of the South Forty. Decision: Should I call her back or attend to the rising crescendo behind me? I decide to grease the squeaky wheels.
Every day in the classroom is not a successful one. After all, life is a bell curve, and although it comes into stark conflict with the current attitude of only “excellence” will do, and the “Why not the best?” syndrome, nevertheless the curve is there, grinning behind the facades. This assessment is not intended to be an endorsement of mediocrity, and it certainly is not the stuff of job interviews or curriculum vitae. But in a world in which we are expected to project images of intellectual power, the struggling Willy Lomans in all of us crouch out of sight like frightened down-at-the-heel relatives.
The day rolls on. There are some high points, there are some low points. A student grasps a complex or subtle item and for an instant one gets an idea of what teaching is all about. Some students display compassion and insight, some show callousness and indifference. Others snooze. That, too, is reality. Another student interprets a line of poetry that has baffled everyone, including the teacher. Time to rejoice! Between the myriad interruptions and the dozing something is done. Some days the real miracle is not how well it’s done but that it gets done at all.
By noon I can’t wait to tackle my tuna sandwich. Meal over, I sit and schmooze with those around me. The conversation runs from politics, students and money to life’s a beach only we are not on it.
The bell screams, so back to work we go, some reluctantly, others with a light step, depending on how the day has turned. As Mark Twain might have said, reduced to the small, teaching is not bad by half. The hours are tolerable, the company is good, the pay . . . , well hope springs eternal.
Homeward bound at last, my mind is crowded with thoughts of wife and kids, backyard sheds and Willy Loman. After 20 years, old Willy and I have begun to chat a little.
