Tag Archives: teaching

Symphony Christmas, 5 of 10

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Because I intend to publish the novel from which this excerpt comes, Symphony Christmas will not be placed in Backfile.

The class couldn’t decide whether to be upset at having to wait to read their papers, or happy at the thought of getting music instead of work. The last few students put down their pencils and Neil started the tape. Garfunkle sang with sweet melancholy about Mary, born in a trailer, who shone like a gem in a five-and-dime store. Without the music, the words would have meant little. With the music, it became a lament for loneliness and abandonment that even eleven year olds could understand.

After the last chord had died away, Neil shut off the machine and began to rewind. Laura Diaz said in a small voice, “Mr. McCrae, can we hear it again?” A dozen of the students added their appeals to hers.

“Sure,” Neil agreed. “First let me give you these. I typed up the words and ran them off so you could understand them better.”

This time through about half of the children followed the printed sheets as the music played.

“That was neat!”

“Yeah, but sad.”

“Neat but sad is exactly what I think of it,” Neil agreed. “Does anybody want to hear it one more time?”

They did, and it carried them to the break.

*****

When they came back, Oscar Teixeira accused him of deception by announcing, “Mr. McCrae, this wasn’t a real party and I never did get my candy!”

“You’re right. It wasn’t and you didn’t. This was something I cooked up to teach you something. We will have a real party on the twenty-third, and you will get your share of the candy in about five more minutes.

“Meanwhile, I want you all to think back to how you felt when you got your candy.”

Their faces told him that they remembered, and he could plot who had and hadn’t gotten candy by their smiles and frowns.

“All right, who can tell me why I gave more candy to some than to others?”

“‘Cause you wanted to,”  Tony replied.

Neil ignored him. Finally Sean Kelly said, “You gave lots of candy to the good kids and not much to the ones who aren’t good.”

“How much did you get, Sean?”

Those who sat near him and had seen his single piece of candy, laughed. Sean held up one finger.

“Sean, do you think you are a bad kid?”

“Well, I have been getting in trouble with Duarte.”

“Yes, you have, but that doesn’t make you a bad kid. And that wasn’t why I distributed the candy the way I did. I had another reason in mind.”

Duarte said in sudden disbelief, “You gave the Mexican kids more than you did the white kids!”

“Did I? If I did it was an accident. Or rather, it was because my reason has something to do with how your parents live.”

Suddenly Elanor had a realization  She shouted out, “You gave the poor kids more than you did the rich kids!” Then she raised her hand, because she had forgotten to do so in her excitement at understanding something the “smart” kids had missed.

“Elanor, you are absolutely right.”    continued

Symphony Christmas, 4 of 10

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Because I intend to publish the novel from which this excerpt comes, Symphony Christmas will not be placed in Backfile.

Neil has distributed Christmas candy unevenly around his class of sixth graders.

“Mr. McCrae,” Stephanie Hagstrom demanded, standing bolt upright beside her seat in surprise and dismay, “what are you doing?  You can’t give some people more candy than others.  You just can’t.”

All the children were looking at him now. He nodded sagely and said, “Why can’t I?”

“It’s not fair.”

“Why do I have to be fair?”

Tony Caraveli was probably the only one enjoying the exercise. He had a pile of candy and he liked confusion. He shouted out, “Because the school board will get you for it.”

Neil had to grin. “Tony, you have a beautiful sense of how things really work. You are right. The school board would get mad at me. But what if I chose to ignore them?”

“You won’t.”

That part of the conversation wasn’t going where Neil wanted it to go, so he turned back to Stephanie who was still standing in the aisle looking like Liberty Leading the People. He asked, “Why do I have to be fair?  Is life fair?”

“Yes,” she said defiantly.

He raised his eyebrows and invited the rest of the class to comment. They all but shouted Stephanie down, and the essence of their opinion was that life was not fair. “All right,” he said, “I want you to think of one time when life was not fair to you.”

Almost every hand went up. Neil waved his arms and said, “Wait! Just wait. I want you to take three minutes to think of the very worst way life has been unfair to you. Now think!”

They couldn’t wait. They couldn’t stand it. They twitched; they seethed; they bubbled. It was like watching a pressure cooker. Finally Neil said, “Okay.”

This time, every hand went up, but Neil simply got to his feet and began distributing paper. “I want you to write down what you just thought of,” he said, and a collective sigh rolled through the room. 

“Mr. McCrae,” Bob Thorkelson whined, “can’t we just tell you?  Please.”

Neil shook his head.

“Please!”

“Write it.”

They knew from long experience that there was no appeal to the command to write. They took up their pencils and within seconds the room was silent except for the scratching of graphite on paper.

Meanwhile, Neil got his tape deck out from under the desk and put the Garfunkle tape in it. He had already cued it to the second cut on the back side. When most of the students had laid their pencils aside and raised their hands again, Neil said, “Since it’s a party, I thought we’d have some music.”

“Mr. McCrae,” Tanya wanted to know, “don’t we get to read our papers?”

“Later.”    continued

Symphony Christmas, 3 of 10

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Because I intend to publish the novel from which this excerpt comes, Symphony Christmas will not be placed in Backfile.

Rosa desperately needed for someone to hold her, and tell her she was good and pure and valuable.

Neil could not. He could not touch Rosa, or any of his girls.  Carmen could and did, Fiona did when she was so inclined, Pearl mothered them all, and students came from everywhere to be hugged by Donna Clementi. But no student ventured near Glen Ulrich; and Tom Wright, young and friendly as he was, kept them at arm’s length.

Women teachers can hug and touch. It is expected of them. It is “motherly”. But let a man teacher touch his girls and he is a lecher; let him touch his boys and he is a pervert.

It isn’t fair, but it is the way of the world.

After a while, Neil went to his tape collection and put on Art Garfunkle’s first solo album. He juggled the fast forward until he found the cut he wanted, then listened to it twice through. Then he took pencil and paper and ran it through until he had the words copied down, then typed them onto a ditto master. 

*****

On his way to school the next morning, Neil stopped to buy a bag of Christmas candies. The first hour, the students read, and when they returned from their break to start the second period, Neil announced that they were going to have an early Christmas party.

That met with uniform approval, and none of it was silent. He added, “Just stay in your seats. Rafael, please give everyone a paper towel to use as a plate. I have some Christmas candy I’ll distribute as soon as Rafael has finished.”

Rafael worked quickly and a festive atmosphere filled the room. Neil waited until the boy had taken his seat again, then went around giving out candy.

He gave Duarte one piece, Sean one piece, Rafael five pieces, Laura Diaz eight pieces, Raul Fuentes six pieces, Stephanie one piece, and Oscar no candy at all; and so on, around the room.

As soon as they noticed, the fireworks began.

“Hey, you got more than I did.”

“Mr. McCrae, I only got one piece!” (This Neil ignored.)

“Get your hand out of my pile.” – “But you got more than I did.” – “So what?  Its mine now.”

“Mr. McCrae . . .?”

“Hey, what’s going on?”

“That’s no fair!”

“That’s cheap!”    continued

Symphony Christmas, 2 of 10

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Because I intend to publish the novel from which this excerpt comes, Symphony Christmas will not be placed in Backfile.

Neil is reading papers written by his sixth grade class.

Lauren Turner wrote:

Every year we go to my granmas house for christmas. she has a great big living room where we all put our presents. I get presents from my mom and dad but nobody else gives them to me. I mean I get presents, but my brother always gets twice as many and they are always neater than mine and i don’t think its fair ! ! ! !

Oscar Teixeira wrote:

My Dad gets me chemistry sets and sport shirts and ties and last year he got me a calculator. What I really want is a baseball mitt and a football.

Stephanie Hagstrom’s paper was well written, in beautiful handwriting, and decorated with candy canes in all four corners.  She detailed what presents she got last year, told how happy she was to have Christmas with her parents, and told what she expected to get this year.

Rosa Alvarez’s paper was not so well written, although it showed great progress for her. It said:

This year I don’t think we will have much of a Christmas because my Daddy has lost his job and Mommy’s job at the bank doesn’t give us much money.  My Oldest brother has gone back to Mexico, but Daddy said that what money we have will go to buy toys fo the little kids.  That’s OK, I don’t mind.

Neil lay back on his couch and wiped his eyes.

He remembered fellow teacher Carmen’s voice the first day they had looked at his students’ folders. Carmen had told him about Rosa. Then she had passed him Stephanie’s folder, and had said, “This is Rosa’s competition. She will take all your time if you let yourself be seduced by success. Stephanie will sound smart because she had mastered English; Rosa will sound stupid because she has not.

“The Stephanies of this world always get more than their fair share.”

He thought about them for a long time. He loved both girls, not merely in a vague way as he did all his students, but intensely and personally because they had both come early to his attention and he knew them well. Stephanie knew her own worth; her parents had taught it to her early. But Rosa was one of the meek ones. She desperately needed for someone to hold her, and tell her she was good and pure and valuable.    continued

Symphony Christmas, 1 of 10

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This is from the novel Symphony in a Minor Key, a complex book with a number of intertwined story strands. This excerpt describes the experiences of Neil McCrae, a teacher, during Christmas 1989, leaving out a good deal of material you would have to read the whole novel to follow. I particularly like this piece because it is not a story. It doesn’t have a beginning, middle, and end, and everything is not wrapped up in a shiny Christmas bow at finis.

Symphony Christmas
Because I intend to publish the novel from which this excerpt comes, Symphony Christmas will not be placed in Backfile.

On the day appointed for Neil’s evaluation, the principal came earlier than Neil had expected and sat down before the tardy bell had rung. The more mature students tried to look at him without seeming to do so. The others just stared. Neil rapped the desk for attention and took roll. Then he said, “I had intended to tell you today that Mr. Campbell would be coming by for evaluations, but he has gotten here sooner than I had expected. How many of you have been through these teacher evaluations before?”

Probably all of them had; a third of them remembered it well enough to raise their hands.

“Who can tell me what their previous teacher told them at evaluation time?”

Tony Caraveli thought he could remember. Neil distrusted the devilish look in his eye, but told him to go ahead.

“Make me look good!” Tony said.

The children all laughed, but it had a nervous and restrained sound. Bill Campbell did not react, which made them more nervous. Neil said, “Whoever told you that was probably joking.  Who else can tell me?”

Sabrina said, “Ms. Thompson told us to just be ourselves and act like there wasn’t anyone in the room.”

“Good. That is just what I want you to do. Ignore Mr. Campbell; it won’t hurt his feelings.”

This time the children’s laughter was more relaxed, and Bill acknowledged it with a wave of his hand.

Neil read to his class for twenty minutes from The House Without a Christmas Tree. He led a discussion about the story, and from that drew the children into talking about how their families celebrated the season. Neil made notes from their discussion on the chalkboard, then told them to write a paper on Christmas in their homes.

Neil’s lesson plan had been worthwhile but unexceptional. He had not intended for it to be earth shaking, but when he sat at home that night reading the papers, he found that he had cut close to the bone.

Casey Kruger wrote:

We don’t hav Christmas at our house.  My parents say that it is a peagan rittul.  Jesus was born in a stabul and din’t have any presents, so we don’t have any present either.  I wish we did.

I would really like to have a real Christmas this year.  continued

59. Don’t Look at Me

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dont look topDuring my last couple of decades of teaching, my friend Crystal got me into several situations I wouldn’t normally have experienced. She was a teacher of second language students whose dedication went above and beyond what anyone could expect. Because of my respect for her, and my affection for the students we shared, I occasionally found myself doing extra things to back her up.

For several years she had taught a summer writing program for new English learners which included a guest writer. Funding for the guest writer dried up and I was the only writer she knew, so I volunteered to step into that role.

I only had two pieces which were age appropriate, so the first year I taught a poetry lesson using There Am I (see post 8. Written on 9-11). I talked shortly about myself, read the poem, led them through brainstorming, and set them to writing a poem.

One lesson teachers have to learn is when to back off and shut up. I have aquired that skill, but it’s been hard for me. At the appropriate time, I sat quietly at the head of the table for fifteen minutes while they worked.

I knew some of these strudents from having them in large classes, but I did not know them well. Many of them I did not know at all. We had seen each other on campus, but they were sixth or seventh graders who had not reached me yet.

They were under my eye. That is a powerful phrase. They had to produce for a man they did not really know. If they had been students in my regular classroom it would have been easier, but not easy.

They had to write, under my eye, and then they had to submit what they wrote for judgement.

When I was a child, I loved school, but I have no difficulty understanding why so many hate it. As I watched these children try to write, I considered how I would have felt in their place. Then I took up paper and wrote a new poem while they worked.

dont look full

Technical note for fellow bloggers. Since the theme I use does not allow full control of vertical and horizontal spacing, this poem had to be written on a drawing program, converted into a JPEG, and inserted as if it were a picture.

57. Going to War

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220px-The_USS_Arizona_(BB-39)_burning_after_the_Japanese_attack_on_Pearl_Harbor_-_NARA_195617_-_EditIn 1941, Americans were of two minds about the war in Europe, but after the December seventh attack on Pearl Harbor there were no more questions about whether to fight.

Forty years later, things were not so certain. In March 2003, Bush Two was ready to take America to war and those of us who had seen this movie before were not convinced he was wise.

*****

That year, like every year, I had already taught the story of the space program in eighth grade science. Explaining its origin requires compressing fifty years of history into a forty minute presentation suitable for eighth graders.

World War One left Germany crushed by post-war treaties, the Great Depression made a bad situation worse, Germany rebuilt and, following a madman, set out to take revenge. This drove Russian and America into temporary alliance. During the war, America developed the atomic bomb and Germany perfected the V2 rocket. Russia – and the Russian winter – destroyed German forces on the Eastern front. The rest of the allied forces entered France and fought their way into Germany. Germany was divided among the conquerors; the allies split into two camps, America, France and England on one hand and Russia on the other; and World War Two morphed into the Cold War.

What does that have to do with the space program? Everything; it was both the why and the how. Fear by Russians of American nuclear might, and fear by Americans of Russian nuclear might, led both sides to seek superiority in space. And the same gargantuan descendants of the V2 which brought about the fear, also carried astronauts and cosmonauts into space.

The space program was an offshoot of the Cold War, and the Cold War had shaped my 2003 students’ world before their birth. Now war in Iraq was going to shape their future, and I felt obligated to help them understand the situation. But how do you teach about a war that hasn’t happened yet? And how do you tell the truth impartially to students whose parents are sometimes hawks and sometimes doves?

I chose to present two lessons from history.

I told my students the story of Neville Chamberlain returning from Germany to Britain, waving the agreement that he and Hitler had signed which guaranteed “peace in our time”. I explained that Hitler had only signed it to buy time to complete preparations for war. Then I told them of Kennedy and Johnson fighting a proxy war in a country they did not understand, and sliding down the slippery slope to disaster.

The two historic events presented two very different lessons. From Chamberlain, we learned that if you must fight, then attack before it is too late; from Kennedy and Johnson we learned not to start a war for the wrong reasons in a country you don’t understand.

I explained to my students that those were the lessons of history that our leaders had to consider in choosing whether or not to attack Iraq. No one could know with certainty which lesson would apply to the present situation. Only time would tell.

That was twelve years ago. Now we know.

55. Voices in the Walls

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220px-Sunnyside,_Tarrytown,_New_YorkIn the 1970s I was an enlisted man, a tech in the oral surgery section of a Naval Hospital in California. It was an interesting position. Like servants in a proper British household, or like house slaves on the plantation, we were seen but ignored when the officers conversed. We knew everything they talked about; they had no idea what we said about them.

Our new Captain, just back from a deployment in the far east and looking forward to retirement, said to his colleagues, “I’m really glad to be back from Japan, but now I can’t wait to get back to America.”

He was joking, but he meant it, too. He was from one of those mythical places like Vermont, and California didn’t look like home to him. I understood him completely. I was born and raised in Oklahoma, but even to me, historical America meant New England. Despite the fact that Washington, Jefferson, and Patrick Henry were all Virginians, and the fact that the Declaration of Independence was written in Pennsylvania, if you say 1776, most Americans will think of New England.

For me, that’s because of textbooks. In the mid-fifties, elementary history textbooks did not contain photographs. No doubt it was a matter of technology and economics, but what those books had instead were beautiful line drawings, frequently sepia toned, which not only showed aspects of the colonial world, but looked like they could have been drawn in 1740. I remember one in particular, representing the tobacco trade. A wagon sized barrel, lying on its side, was hitched directly behind an ox and self-rolling down to the water, where an apple cheeked ship with a single square sail was standing in to receive it. It opened up my landlocked Oklahoma heart and made me love the sea a decade before I saw the sea. I’ve been looking for a copy of that old textbook for many years, but it may be a blessing that I haven’t found it. The reality is unlikely to be as fulfilling as the memory.

As a side note, the thesis I wrote for my second masters degree, thirty years later, was on American maritime history.

I didn’t visit the northeastern part of the United States until I was pushing forty, and it was everything I had dreamed it would be – as long as we avoided the cities. My wife and I spent most of our time in the countryside, and visited cities primarily for the museums. D. C. and Philadelphia were inspiring; Valley Forge and Chadds Ford were beautiful beyond belief, at least at that season. The list could go on.

I also got a gift in New York, in Tarrytown. We were visiting the Washington Irving mansion when a tour guide told us that the house had been a station on the underground railroad, and that the family could sometimes hear noises through the walls when escaping slaves were hiding in the basement.

True, or just a good story? I didn’t know and I didn’t care. I just knew that I had been handed another novel for my to-write list. As of now, I’m 45 pages in and I’ve been stalled there for a long time. I’m not sure if I need to go from first person to third, or if there is some other problem that my subconscious has not yet rolled out into the light, but Voices in the Walls will get finished, eventually. Meanwhile, I will be using it as the centerpiece of an extended discussion of race, starting in mid-January of next year.

48. No Child Left Behind

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bad mathFor twenty-seven years I did everything in my power to teach well. On the whole, I succeeded, because I was in a small school where I could do my job with minimal interference.

This is a letter sent to PBS in 2007. The seeming lack of timeliness is of no consequence, because the stupidities of the educational bureaucracy are a rare constant in an inconstant world.

I just watched your piece on No Child Left Behind, which quoted disaffected classroom teachers. Thank you; your coverage was dead on. The only failure was that, in their calm professionalism, your teachers understated the disaster that NCLB has visited on our schools.

You reported on the heavy reliance on multiple choice tests, but that is only the beginning of the story. Children are being taught, and tested on, material which is roughly one year beyond their ability to comprehend. Algebra is now being taught to all eighth graders. It used to be a ninth grade subject. As a result, not only are many eighth graders failing Algebra, they are also failing to get the previous eighth grade curriculum which would have prepared them for ninth grade Algebra.

This process has gone on throughout our schools. Instead of making what we teach more challenging, we have taken the same old subjects and pushed them downward, so that we are teaching children, from kindergarten to junior high school, materials that are basically beyond their comprehension. What they used to learn easily when they were developmentally ready, they now fail to learn because it is taught too soon.

A favorite phrase of NCLB supporters is that it has raised the bar. It hasn’t. The bar is the same, but the athletes are all shorter now.

We are told that all children must perform at grade level. Being at grade level means knowing what a typical child of a certain grade should know. If a child has a fifth grade level proficiency in math, it means that he knows as much math as the average fifth grader.

To say that all children must perform at grade level is to say that all children must be at or above average. When Garrison Keilor says that the children of Lake Woebegone are all above average, we know he is joking. NCLB says it with a straight face.

NCLB says that every year our children must learn more. What a contemptible lie. Every fifth grade class arriving in our classrooms knows exactly as little at the class before them, and faces exactly the same challenges during the year. If we are teaching our children correctly, they will learn what they need to learn, and what is natural for them to learn, during that year, at that age, and at that stage of their development. Then, next year, with a new group of students, we will do it all over again.

If we are doing our jobs correctly, our scores should not go up from year to year. They should stay the same, saying that once again this year we have done exactly as much as we should have, and that our children have learned exactly as much as they were able to learn.

NCLB began with a good idea, that we should make sure our second language, poor, and ethnic students don’t fall through the cracks. What it became is a massive bureaucracy of terror, completely divorced from reality.

This is nothing new. Twenty years ago the good idea that black students should have access to literature brought about Whole Language, an approach to teaching that gave us an entire generation who could not read. NCLB has taught an entire generation of students that they are failures, and has taught a generation of teachers that their job is to administer tests, follow orders, keep their mouths shut, and forget educating their students.

36. Halloween 1988

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I wrote full time from 1975 to 1983, starved out, and took a day job that continued for the next twenty-seven years. I became a teacher in a small middle school in central California. In 1988 and 1989 I began writing again, using that experience in the novel Symphony in a Minor Key (see yesterday’s post). This is Neil McCrae’s Halloween from that book.

220px-Clarke-TellTaleHeart“What is Frankenstein’s favorite food?” Lisa Cobb asked.

Neil looked up from his desk to see that she was in tutu, tights, and dancing shoes. She was taller than the average sixth grader with more maturity in her face but still flat chested, so she looked the part of a ballerina. For the last several weeks she had been coming in to spend the time before school in Neil’s room, but she rarely approached him. She just hung around with her friends Sabrina and Elanor.

Neil said, “I don’t know, what is Frankenstein’s favorite food?”

“Hallo-weenies.”

Neil grinned and she ran off, pleased with herself.

Not since May, when Neil had first come onto the campus, had it seemed so different from a high school.

Neil found that he did not miss the feigned world-weariness of his high school students at all. He missed their conversations, and he missed the sense of camaraderie that came of teaching near-adults, but they were too staid. In their own way, following their own values, high school kids were as puritanical as any Pilgrim that ever rode on the Mayflower. Peer pressure was like the rule of the church patriarchs, looking over every shoulder, examining every action by the yardstick of current fashion. Everything not required was prohibited.

These children were in a different kind of transition. Their teachers encouraged them toward maturity, and most of the time they conformed. But on Halloween, they were all seven years old.

When the bell rang, the students came in reluctantly, and Neil chose to overlook their tardiness. He also raised his voice and spoke over their conversations while taking roll, rather than try to quiet them. Then Neil sent Greg and Rosa to close the drapes and a hush of expectancy came upon the classroom.

The drapes let in only a little light, certainly not enough to read by. Neil opened his desk drawer and took out a pair of candles on matching brass candlesticks that he had borrowed from Pearl. He lit them. He moved them so that they threw his face into harsh relief and projected his shadow, huge and menacing, on the wall behind him. He opened another book and read:

True! — nervous — very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?  The disease had sharpened my senses — not destroyed — not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute.  I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth.  I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad?  Hearken!  and observe how healthily — how calmly I can tell you the whole story.

He read The Tell-Tale Heart through to its grisly conclusion, timing himself by the clock on the back wall so that he reached the denouncement when the narrator cried, “. . . tear up the planks! here, here — it is the beating of his hideous heart!”, just half a minute before the period ended. For those long seconds after he had finished, the classroom was tomb silent.

Then the bell rang.

Half the students leaped to their feet screaming, then broke into laughter, and went out for their break repeating juicy bits of the story to one another. Neil sat back with a feeling of satisfaction, mixed with amusement at his own self-indulgence.  There was a lot of theater in Neil McCrae, but he kept it on a tight leash. Once in a while, though! Just once in a while it felt good to cut loose.