Eric
I would like you to bear with me. I taught high school English (and Cinema and Computer Assisted Instruction, and Humanities and a half dozen other electives) for nearly forty years. Reflection is an important component to learning, and now that I am retired, I am learning from plenty of reflection. Besides thinking about family, including the loss of some family members), my thoughts always seem to return to my students—-the ones from whom I learned and those whom I may have failed. All of them haunt me still. This blog will be a serialized retelling of my experiences with them. The names have been changed to protect the innocent, as well as to protect the guilty, but except for dialogue recreated from memory the stories are true. I hope you find them as interesting.
Eric
Every time I stand in the stream for a while, trying to fool trout with my homemade tied fly, my thoughts flow back to them. Oh, I think of other things as well: growing up in the Bronx and later the suburbs of New Jersey, hunting and fishing with Mahogany Jim, my father, making meatballs with my mother Lee, making out with Maria, my high school sweetheart after a movie and a malt in my dad’s Buick, chanting and yelling and screaming and dying and hoping my Villanova college basketball team will prevail at the Palestra, meeting and marrying and loving Polley, and enjoying and growing with my four children. Those memories all float along the current as I fish, but eventually and predictably, my thoughts always return to them.
Like the time I was fishing Grayling creek outside of Yellowstone National Park. There were no grayling fish (a species of the salmon family) in Grayling Creek but it was supposed to harbor some nice brown trout. I left Mike and Jim, my teaching colleagues and flyfishing mentors, and slipped down the bank and into the stream. The stream was narrow and not too deep. I made my first decision: I would fish a Parachute Adams dry fly upstream.
I made a few casts to likely lies and worked my way upstream, casting behind rocks, ahead of rocks, near downed trees, in eddies. A half hour passed with no luck, but as I rounded a bend in the stream, a mountainside suddenly lit up with a blaze of natural colors, of wild blue flax and orange daylily and sticky purple geranium and yellow salsify and crimson clover, all backdropped by deep green American mannagrass. I stopped my casting and let my eyes, in fact, my whole body, my whole being, take it in.
Lifetimes passed.
A distant rumble shook the air around me, lightly at first, but then louder and stronger and all the flowers on the mountainside seemed to shrink as the Harley Davidsons zoomed by on the road high above the bank I had been fishing.
Eric. It was my first year of teaching. Or maybe it was the second. Graduate school was still fresh in my brain. I received a Masters in English by engaging in literary discussions involving Shakespeare’s Great Chain of Being, Sapientia and Fortitudo as forces in Beowulf, the Modernist temperament in Hemingway’s work, literary naturalism and its connection to Darwinism, Buddhist influence on Emerson’s Oversoul. All these great questions, all these literary explorations of life and its meaning I was anxious to share with my eleventh grade students. I had to rethink my approach when we read aloud Arthur Miller’s play, Death of a Salesman in my first period class.
“Where……were……you…..all day?
Silence.
“Who’s playing Willy Loman?”
Silence. A hand goes up.
“Oh, Eric. Thanks, Eric. Go ahead.” Eric was short for his age, his denim jacket and denim pants a little too baggy, and he possessed those muppet eyes, his eyelids perpetually drooped halfway over his eyes.
Eric began his part. “Wil….ly. I sud…den….ly”
“Eric. You don’t have to read the name of the character who is saying the line. Just read after the colon.”
“What’s a colon?”
“It’s your intestines, dirtbrain!” Class laughter.
“Tom. Quiet! Eric. The colon is two dots, one above the other.””
Eric gave Tom the finger and returned to the page.
“Sud…den…ly….couldn’t…….drive….any……more.”
The other students in the class were only slightly better readers than Eric. This play was going to take a couple of millennia to read aloud, and even after they read the words, they could not process the ideas behind the words.
And Shakespeare and Hamlet were part of the curriculum we were required to study.
Hamlet’s soliloquy might take up the entire second semester.
And I had five classes of readers like Eric.
Henry Bouquet High School was named after a colonial military Pennsylvanian who apparently slept one night in Bouquet township. Like most other high schools in the area, Bouquet High School practiced tracking, students assigned to levels based on, supposedly, reading levels and counselor input. Honors students went to the Harvards of the collegiate world, level one’s a step below, level two’s college or technical school, and level three’s the factory. What tracking in reality accomplished was the continuing stratification of the peoples of the United States.
The unwritten policy declared that new teachers would be thrown into the pit, assigned five classes of level threes, non-readers all, students frustrated at their inability to win at the game of school, and often young people suffering from a lack of parental support. Some level three classes made the inhabitants of Blackboard Jungle look like the student body of Little House on the Prairie. Confronting five classes of level threes was the administration’s ordeal, its trial by fire, its sink or swim mentality with little support for new teachers as they tried to educate students many of whom did not want to be educated. The reasoning was, apparently, if the teacher survived the gauntlet of five level threes, they might just survive a teaching career.
I listened to Eric read and thus I learned early on that a class discussion of Chaucer’s satire on church abuses and Augustan satire in general was not in my immediate future.
Essay on Death of a Salesman. “In a well-organized essay supported with examples from the text, respond to the following: What comment does the author make about the American dream in the play? Give reasons for your answer.”
Eric’s response: “He says people shouldn’t dream because it’s stupid.”
I called Eric to my desk. He shuffled forward, wiped his nose on his denim jacket, looked down at my shoes like he always did and listened to my suggestions. My effort was to get them to talk about what they knew, even if they found it difficult to write it down.
Two months later, Eric’s essay on a short story was two paragraphs, two paragraphs of misspellings and absent punctuation, but I watched him write. He exhibited the classic signs of thinking, hunched over his paper, pencil held tightly as he scribbled, tongue protruding from a corner of his mouth. He tried, and he had a reasoned answer to the question.
I called him up to my desk.
“Eric, this is a major improvement. You developed your ideas and you supported them very well. This is intelligent writing. We have to work on mechanics, but this is such an improvement, I am giving you an ‘A.’”
A switch flipped. Eric’s eyes were almost totally wide open, a smile broadening his face. “Shit! I never got an ‘A’ before on my writing……Sorry, Mr. M. I mean ‘God damn!” I nodded and Eric returned to his seat. He worked even harder on his next essay.
I was beginning to learn. We were on a number grading system, but I couldn’t really tell the difference between a paper that received an 87 and a paper that was an 88. And what standard was out there? I was learning. The only realistic functions for grades were as motivating factors. If I could motivate Eric to work harder and think more and thus learn more by giving him an “A” then that was what I would do. And years later, if I needed to make an honors student who thought everything he wrote was Pulitzer Prize material, work harder by knocking down his ego a bit and giving him a “B” rather than an “A” then that is what I would do.
Late in the semester I was summoned to Mr. Leadbeater’s office. Lincoln Leadbeater became an assistant principal because, as he unwittingly confided to all present at a social gathering after one too many rock and ryes, he got tired of reading and grading papers as an English teacher.
In Leadbeater’s office was the social studies department chair, Reginald Rochester II….Dr. Reginald Rochester II.
What was he doing here?
“Mr. Maltese, please sit down.” Leadbeater pointed to the creaky wooden chair in front of his desk.
“Dr. Rochester and I have been looking at the grade distribution for all the English classes.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well,” Leadbeater puffed out a cloud of dark gray smoke from his pipe. “we have a problem.”
“Problem?”
“Yes. You have five classes of level threes. Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
Leadbeater looked at a printout. “That is one hundred and forty two students. Correct?”
“I guess so. Sounds right.”
“And you have given out seven A’s for this last marking period. Correct?”
“Correct.” That is what this is all about. Too many kids failed or had C’s and D’s. I had heard that principals in Philly would just change the failing grades to passing or higher to make the school look better. Would the administrative guardians of Bouquet High do the same?
“I can explain that. Most of my kids come from disadvantaged families. They work ten hours after school to pay their car insurance and don’t read their assignments or do their homework. Half the ones that got an “F” were absent three out of five days a week. Many of them are tired from working after school, and all they want to do in class is sleep, which I won’t let them do.”
“I see.” Another puff of gray smoke from Leadbeater’s pipe drifted to the ceiling. “I don’t think you understand. We are……concerned…. about the seven A’s.”
“The ‘A’s?”
“Yes.”
I was confused. Sort of. “The kids that got A’s earned them because they attended class and worked hard when they were in class.”
“I see. But the work they turned in was not as good as work from, say, an honors student?”
“Probably not.” I was becoming angry. “So what? These kids worked hard, did the assignments to the best of their ability. I don’t see a problem.”
Reginald Rochester II was standing by the desk and virtually hopping from one foot to the other. Finally he blurted out.
“You don’t seem to understand. If your level three students get A’s, it wreaks havoc with the grade distribution.”
“How so?” I was becoming snotty.
Reginald Rochester II turned beet red.
“Class rank is affected. A student in your level three class who receives an “A” might be higher in class rank than an honors student who gets a “B” in a more challenging course.”
“Class rank, competing for grades, is an abomination.’
Reginald Rochester II was about to explode. There were rapid puffs of gray smoke from Leadbeater’s pipe emulating Native American smoke signals messaging an imminent attack by the cavalry.
Continued in next blog…..