Today, near the end of my first block, I heard a knock on the door. I had already had several "guests" this morning, and I was in no mood for another. When K- thrust his slip and textbook towards me, my heart sank. I left my class to shout themselves into oblivion and litter my room with balled up papers, and stepped out into the hall with him. He handed me his withdrawl slip, with GED scrawled along the bottom and his textbook, in immaculate condition. It had probably never been opened. I asked him if he'd thought it through. I took his hand, wished him luck, and gave him my number, telling me, if he ever needed any help with that GED, or if he ever needed anything at all, to please call me. You know you can call me anytime K-. I know Mr. G.
So that brings me to a paradox. K- was a huge discipline problem nearly every single day he was in my class, although such days had become increasingly rare. If he wasn't sleeping, he was entertaining. He is quite intelligent, but like so many of my students, he lacks that self-starting drive, he cannot begin an exercise unless he is sure of all the steps that he needs to follow to get to the end. He doesn't try something he doesn't know how to do, and because he missed so many days, he never really knew how to do anything. Except graph lines in slope intercept form. He did that better than everyone else - in fact, I let him teach the class one day.
But what is school going to do for K-? Or R-? There are some children who just don't seem to be cut out for school. I know that to the established bourgeois it's a heretical thought. Even before we could understand the meaning of the world school, we were told it was the only way to success. Without school, we're nothing. Anyone who drops out, who decides that there dreams might be best served elsewhere, is misguided. Dropouts are illiterate crackheads, we are taught, or they soon will be.
I don't think I could ever devalue education. But what my kids recieve here is not an education. My good kids just go through the motions. My best kids recieve some training. But no one learns to think, and it kills me. I'm not helping - I have my own set of motions that I put them through, and none of those are designed to get kids to think on their own. No one develops a vocabulary other than the 50 or so words that they hear on the street. But they need a sprawling vocabulary, not to impress anyone, but to be able to vocalize to themselves what they think, feel, and experience. In many ways, our language provides the framework for our thoughts, and it is nearly impossible for our thoughts to rise out of that framework. As a math teacher, I am convinced that math is also a language, and that knowing more math allows a person to have deeper thoughts.
And yet, my kids aren't learning this language. They are learning how to jump through hoops. I have no idea, even, how to teach it. All I can do is expose. I need to start exposing my kids to more things, to more beauty, as Mr. Kozol said. There is so much beauty in the world - tucked in among the pages of an old book, spread out across the horizen in waves of purple and orange and sunset, there is beauty in both natural and cultural objects. While my kids can appreciate natural beauty (although, with the limited framework of language they may never be able to describe it well) they are a long way from ever picking up Dostoevsky and seeing the beauty of that great author's insight into the human mind or from leafing through a volume of Ginsburg and being moved to the point of being ready to abandon everything and become a noble bum.
So why stay in school, if it cannot or will not teach one to think deeply, to analyze, to ask the right questions and to find the beauty in all things? To get a degree to get to college to get another degree to get a job to be happy. This is what we middle class often say, when we can't find a real reason to go to school. What we leave out is the money. If we aren't going to school to become enlightened, to stretch our minds and fill the new spaces with as many facts and ideas as possible, then we just going through the motions to get a job, and the only reason anyone every gets a job is to get paid. So, when the noblest of motives no longer fits, we choose the shallowest. This somehow fits well with our bourgeois duplicity - it is shallow to act solely for money or power, yet that is the very foundation of the success for which we are all indoctrinated to strive.
Was K- wrong to dropout? It hurts me, because I tried to be his reason to stay, when he wasn't being enlightened, and he wasn't getting any closer to any material rewards in the form of his diploma. I failed, but hey, the odds were high against me. That seems to be the way things are in this job. But should I be upset about his choice, ignoring the fact that I'll miss him like hell? Did he do the rigth thing? I know he doesn't have any big plans right now. I doubt he has any plans beyond this weekend. But he has so much responsibility - he just became a Dad - and so little preparation. I'm just really worried about the kid.
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