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The Children in Room E4: American Education on Trial by Susan Eaton is assigned reading for my public policy and education class this semester. It’s very readable – more pop than academic – so it’s a refreshing break from the scholarly articles that are most of my homework.
One passage in particular reminded me of teaching at Dunbar. I usually feel like I am now every bit as confused as I was two years ago, but reading this I actually felt like the time I’ve had away gave me some valuable perspective.
The Children in Room E4 traces the history of the Sheff v. O’Neill Connecicut Supreme Court case in which students sued the Hartford public school system to racially integrate schools. Eaton intersperses this history with her experiences observing in the Harford public school elementary classroom of Ms. Luddy, and focuses particularly on the experiences of a student named Jeremy. This passage occurs on page 268, when Ms. Luddy has taken her class to spend the day with another fourth grade at a mostly White, suburban school in Marlborough, Connecticut.
‘Did you see here how kids can just walk around this school? There’s a kind of trust,” Ms. Luddy commented to me in Marlborough. ‘If you see a child walking down the hall at Simpson-Waverly? [the school Ms. Luddy teaches at in Hartford] I’m automatically asking, “Ahh, excuse me, exactly where are you supposed to be?” It’s different.’
Order, predictability, and obedience were important at Simpson-Waverly.
‘Why,’ Ms. Luddy asked me one day, ‘do the lines have to be straight? I don’t know. I do it, but I don’t know.’
Quiet, straight lines reflected schoolwide culture. Ms. Luddy kept straight lines, not in response to an explicit rule, but to honor a crucial convention. She could justify the quiet. ‘The quiet teaches them consideration for others,’ she’d said. ‘But the straight thing confuses me.’
Marlborough’s hallways were less quiet. Teachers permitted chidren to cluster into social groups. The kids could whisper. Simpson-Waverly’s silent, arrow-straight lines didn’t inspire imitation in Marlborough. Mike Larkin, the third-grade teacher I’d spent time with there, had said, ‘They have to be quiet, respectful, and I have to keep track of them. But I never think about the lines, in fact. Never.’
The rigidity outside Ms. Luddy’s room aside, her class was more than a decorous, functional room. It was a reliable sanctuary within a chaotic, unreliable neighborhood. But what happened in Simpson-Waverly out beyond Ms. Luddy’s safe haven? What kind of things happened at Simpson-Waverly that didn’t happen at Marlborough?
In the corridor at Simpson-Waverly, the dour (white) chaperone lightly but repeatedly slapped the hands of first graders who sucked their thumbs. A ((black) former vice-principle hollered at a second grader, ‘You should be ashamed to say my name. Don’t you speak my name. Don’t you dare. And get that foolish hat off your foolish head.’ A (black) substitute teacher hurled insults at a fifth grader: ‘lazy, rude, foolish.’ Another substitute (black) screamed, ‘Shut up.’ A third substitute teacher (Asian) declined conversation with children. A visibly exasperated, young (white) teacher pushed a whiny, jumpy child against the wall (hard) and back into a line. I overheard a teacher (black) say scoldingly to a child in the hallway, ‘What is wrong with you? There is something very wrong with you.’
A school’s culture, I’d long found, reveals itself most discernibly far from the classroom.
Several aspects of this text struck me. The culture at the school I taught at was exactly like this, if not more brutal. Not only did I get used to it but I considered my adaptation to it a matter of survival and in some contexts a kind of warped pride at being tough.
On a first date with a Miami Teaching Fellows middle school teacher in Liberty City, he regaled me with the vivid recollection of him twisting a fat, aggressive eighth grade girl’s arm behind her back as he escorted her to the office after a particularly brutal, extension-ripping, nail-breaking fight. As he wrangled with the still-seething teenager he whispered under his breath, “Move again and I’ll fucking break your arm.” I’d imagine that many women he’d date (and in fairness, I’m sure he wouldn’t have told it to those who were not in similar situations), would not find this either amusing or attractive. I laughed and shot back with a story of my own.
Typing it for this post, I focused on how strange it is that Eaton inexplicably notes the race of each offender. (I have to say that I don’t think I’ve ever heard a white person use the word “foolishness” before). Why does she do this? Why does it matter? Does it seem worse for white adults to verbally or physically abuse Black and Latino children because of our country’s history? Can we excuse, but not condone, what a reader of Eaton’s book might to consider to be “that aspect of black culture?”
I do think it’s important that she provides racial labels here. Being white (and young and little) had an enormous impact on my teaching experience. No one expected me to be able to control students, especially my students. I got real mean, real fast and my first year I won the dubious honor of “Rookie Teacher of the Year” based on classroom management alone. My kids might have also made the most academic gains, but no one noticed. What mattered was that I pushed the security button less, never got locked out of my classroom, and when an administrator came in my room the kids were sitting down.
Within the first month in the classroom, I said and did things to children that I never could have imagined before. Reading Eaton’s passage makes me cringe, not because of the simple truth that no child should be treated with such belittling hostility, but because I said and did things like that, things that I am not proud of. I cringe because someone who did not experience what I did would think that the adults portrayed are bad people, but I know that, while they may or may not be bad people, they are definitely functioning as a part of a bad system.
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