One Room Schoolhouse: The Academy of Free Thought
Best of Class
by Debora Black
People ask and, yes, it is true that teaching in a city public school district is often a bit tough. But in my opinion, reading and writing with passionate teenagers—the essentials of my job as an English teacher—is one of the best jobs a person can have.
Even so, many of my students did not enter my classroom with any of the same optimism or receptive and industrious disposition with which I had always attended school. Consequently, I spent a lot of time rehashing my own youth to figure out answers to questions like, why did I like to read? What made me into a writer? How come I always wanted to get the A and be one of the smartest people in the class? Why did I like and respect my teachers? In answering these questions, I believed I could show my students all the lasting pleasures to be found in words, artistic pursuit, and self esteem.
I share a few of my observations and experiences with you now—parents and students—in case you might discover some useful applications for your own worlds.
KNOW YOUR ROLE
My parents took the position that every family member has a role. It is the job of the parents to bring home the bacon, and it is the job of the kids to bring home the grades.
As many of us know, providing a steady flow of sufficient income to the household is not particularly easy, especially in a downward trending economy like the Biden economy, especially when so much of our pay is cleaved off by high and ubiquitous taxes, especially if we are a single parent, especially if the jobs we enjoy doing are not the jobs that bring down those big salaries that others have, and especially if we have a somewhat limited skill set to begin with. However, parents do not have to be rich in order to provide a solid financial foundation, and next to love, a solid financial foundation is indeed the number one stabilizer of the family unit. Your best effort on this task is going to reap the best result in your home.
Truthfully, my parents made this look simple. But I have found that making one’s own way in the world is actually pretty hard and have often wondered how my parents were able to raise four kids with my father being routinely absent for periods of six months and more. My father was an Air Force officer and the breadwinner of our family. He was often stationed overseas on temporary military duty in Vietnam and other locations. Nevertheless, the paycheck was delivered perfunctorily even though it came at a great cost.
Whatever the work situation, I have very often seen that parents don’t give themselves enough credit for bringing home that paycheck. Instead of being proud of that achievement, they feel guilty that it doesn’t provide their children with luxuries. I know for sure that your child does not need athletic wear from lululemon, limited edition NIKE’s, or iPhones. Instead, kids need to learn to respect the family budget and your hard work. This will teach your kids to take care of the things you give them, and it will teach them how to save and manage their own money.
My mother ruled the roost. Her days were filled with house cleaning, grocery shopping, meal preparation, and the logistics of moving four children through their days and nights. This was a full-time job. My mother had no notion that she should be the “friend” of her children. She was simultaneously a loving mother and the authority of the house. She had no problem being the hammer. We kids knew that if we got out of line at school or in the neighborhood, our mother would let us have it. As a consequence, my mother never had to actually throttle any of us. What she did was far worse. We had to apologize to whomever we had slighted. That was awful. It’s funny that I never knew that my mother was a tiny little thing. I came home one day from college or some early adult absence, and I seriously thought she had shrunk.
My mother also had no perception that she, the first college-educated woman in her family, had also to be pursuing a career outside of the home. The reality is that if you occupy multiple full-time duties and are succeeding at one of your jobs, the other job is probably losing ground. And if by some extraordinary effort and fortitude you are able to be both the top producer at work and at motherhood, I would have to wonder if you were actually happy or mostly just exhausted every day of your life.
As for us kids, the school week was our workweek. We were required to keep our bedrooms clean, and we were required to go home directly after school, change out of our school clothes, and get our homework done before we could go out and play. While in high school, we didn’t have to change clothes, but we had to do homework before hanging out with friends. The fact is, since we were in college prep courses, we had so much homework that we didn’t get to hang out very much during the school week—which was probably a good thing.
BE AN A
Every school year is a new start. For me, the English teacher, every fall was alive with all of the new reading material I had selected to share with my students. For the students, fall presented a pristine new slate where the behavior mistakes and poor grades of the prior year had evaporated. In that place of new beginnings, I started a custom that was at first my own experiment. Rather than beginning my classes with negative and boring discussions of rules and lists of progressively severe outcomes for multiple infractions of those rules and so forth, I started by saying something like, “Students, as of this moment I am giving every single person in this class an A. That’s right. Every single one of you has an A. And everyday that you come to this class, I am going to help you keep your A.” My concept was that instead of starting with zero and asking my students to build their points toward an A, I simply reversed the psychology by providing the 100 points up front and turning the goal into an opportunity to produce the quality work that would maintain an A status. To young people who faced a lot of challenge and defeat already, this made the A reachable and real, without sacrificing standards. When I started opening day with such a strong statement, it created a stir. Eyes widened, smiles appeared, and the students sat up a little straighter. This is more like it, this is something I can do, the body language seemed to suggest. Examples of how a student could keep an A included completing assignments with an eye for high standards; making corrections to incorrect answers to earn back partial credit; identifying places in one’s writing to make revisions and producing those revisions; evaluating 2 or 3 pieces of writing and selecting the best one to submit for the grade. Volunteering to read out loud and sharing personal writing in front of the class earned points. Helping others and keeping our classroom organized and respectable earned points. Everything we did was organized around success. Later I read Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander’s book, The Art of Possibility, which was about getting A’s and being an A person. The Zander’s book far expands what my basic concept had been, and the principles the writers present can be applied to many facets of our lives. I recommend it to any parent for an overall strategy on how to deal with raising your kids with achievement in mind. What I like most about the book is the tactics help young people decide for themselves that they are an A person. This decision is preceded by a student’s own self-examination and their own written statement on how they will keep their A and be an A person through specific acts. If you read the book, you might be surprised at what lives in the hearts and minds of young people. I found some of that information quite moving.
A CLEAN, WELL-LIGHTED PLACE
My mother kept a spotless house. As soon as she decided we were old enough, my older sister and I helped her dust and vacuum. We set the table for dinner every evening, and we washed the dinner dishes at night. Occasionally my mother did special things for us. She was a creative person, so she would go to all assortments of sales—garage sales, library sales, and school sales—and buy us odds and ends for our bedrooms. Our desks, dressers, and books came from such excursions. My mother would restore the old pieces of furniture and turn them into something special. She also bought new unfinished pieces—toy chests and wall hangings that she stained and overlaid with decoupage. My mother liked to complete these projects in secret and place the items in our rooms while we were at school. On any random day, one of us might come home to discover one of her creations. In the end, our bedrooms were transformed into beautiful spaces with plenty of books and a desk to do our schoolwork.
Given that experience, it’s no wonder why one of my favorite reading assignments that I liked to use in the first week of school was Ernest Hemingway’s short story, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. This particular piece is a one scene story set in a bodega occupied by an old man who sits alone at a table drinking and two waiters, one young and one middle aged, who talk together at the bar. The young waiter is agitated and moves back and forth between attending to the old man and returning to his opinionated discussion with the matured waiter at the bar. There is repeated reference in the story of the need a human being has for a clean place that is bright and cheerful against the contrast of darkness and shadow, the dirty things of the world, and even death itself.
With my mother’s house and Hemingway’s bodega pulsing within me, after my first year of teaching ended, I spent a few weeks of summer reinventing my classroom. I bought all the supplies I needed and painted the grey-brown walls with bright white paint. It took one coat of primer and two coats of paint to do it right. The room had a beautiful set of tall, wide windows—four across, which looked over an expansive, well-kept lawn where a crisp American flag was always displayed. The window wells were six or eight inches deep. As I had imagined it would, the original taupe paint looked pretty against the new white walls, and the contrast framed the colorful outdoor scene, so I left that alone. I had already ordered prints of some masterpiece paintings. The images were some of my favorites—including Homer’s, The New Novel, a watercolor that portrays a young woman clothed in a long, delicate dress. She is lying across the grass reading a novel. I had a Monet landscape of sunlit trees, a bold Matisse, and a few original pieces that came from an art festival. I spared no expense for my purpose and took them all to a frame shop. The originals were already matted, but I had the thick paper prints dry-mounted and everything framed in gorgeous, modern frames—each selected to compliment the particular piece. I paid the upcharge for anti-glare glass, so that no matter where my students were seated, they would be able to enjoy the pictures. When I picked up the artwork, I was really happy that I had bothered with all of the time and effort in doing the project. The reproductions looked much more impressive, and the originals deserved the special treatment. In the days before school opened, I hung the artwork on the walls. The result was everything I had hoped it would be. The colors popped against the white, and the subject matter transformed the sterile classroom into a warm and inspired place. On opening day, I put fresh flowers on my desk—one of those great old wooden types. When my students arrived, they took quiet interest looking around at everything. I could see they felt different inside this unusual room. I don’t know if it was the portrayal of the bare-breasted mermaid, the wind chime’s metal music, or the fragrance of freesia and fresh cut grass, but after I transformed that space, there were no more spitballs or fistfights breaking out in that room. Beauty and order have that effect.
