11.
Even though I seemed to have mastered teaching as a substitute, if I had to stay in a classroom for more than a week, I generally lost control, or at least felt like I did. In the fall of 1970, I was given a long-term assignment in one of the more challenging all black schools, Raphael Weill, in the Western Addition, otherwise known as the Fillmore. The good thing about this school was that every classroom had a teacher’s aide in addition to a teacher. Some of these aides were excellent teachers themselves without the credentials. Also, there were two of them, very powerful black women, Joyce and Edna, who were friendly with the Progressive Labor Party. The school was in the neighborhood of a co-op housing development built by the Longshoreman’s Union, where a number of PLP leaders lived. The school was an informal focus of party work.
The school was also the “victim” of some wrong-headed liberal reforms, such as the use of Sullivan Readers mentioned above, and the regrouping of classes for reading, so that I had one reading period consisting of 18 boys and no girls, and after I’d exhausted my bag of tricks, they were too much for me. One of the boys was named Michael Marshall, and liked to climb out the window of the 3rd floor classroom and hang out on the ledge outside. His mother was sympathetic, but didn’t know what to do with him either. Through a series of circumstances unrelated to this teaching assignment, I ended up marrying his aunt, Earlean Marshall, some five years later, but Michael was my first exposure to the Marshall family. He straightened out some over the next few years, but sadly, as an adolescent, he fell into the black hole of adolescent schizophrenia, from which he has yet to recover.
So, I was stuck again in my pattern being so overwhelmed by fear that I couldn’t think. At one point, I took one of the boys up on his offer of a fist fight. That afternoon, his father came up to the school while I was on yard duty and confronted me while the whole school looked on. The principal, a black man without much control over the children himself, came to my rescue.
At the same time (this was mid-November), my friend Jeremiah from McKinley hadn’t been given a Teacher Corps assignment yet. So, on another self-destructive impulse, I invited him to join me in my class.
The next day, the principal called me in the office and told me that I couldn’t control the classroom well enough to keep my job.
Our friends Joyce and Edna called a parent meeting on my behalf. To add a bit of drama, Sasha started having contractions that afternoon, so we rushed to the hospital. It turned out not to be labor, so we arrived at the meeting late, with my friends once again standing up for me, this time persuading the principal to let me stay.
So, I slogged it out until the end of January, secretly wishing I hadn’t won the battle. It was hard. I felt bad every day because even after the parents had stuck up for me, I still had very tenuous control of the classroom. And I still couldn’t think. I got confused about giving children freedom, and one time, much to Jeremiah’s amazed dismay, I just let the students do whatever, giving them no instructions. To their credit, they didn’t act up all that much, but they didn’t spontaneously pick up books and start reading either. I did manage to pull off some fairly creative activities with the mixed group, including reading circles reading “Where the Wild Things Are,” and another activity where I had transcribed the lyrics to the Jackson 5 songs currently popular (“ABC” and “I’ll Be There”) and had the students read along while listening to the songs on headphones. Then I managed to pull off some really stupid stunts like bringing in a refrigerator carton for students to… what did I expect? They went looping, jumping all over it, sliding on it, doing those exuberant kid things I wanted to encourage but which hardly lent itself to maintaining the disciplined atmosphere I needed in order to keep my job, to say nothing of my sanity.
I had an aide, Rodney, in the class who couldn’t stand me, who strongly believed that the students needed a black teacher. Black nationalism was all the rage, so to speak, in 1970. The man was angry, and perhaps justifiably, his anger was directed at me. When I brought in the refrigerator carton, he was filled with exasperation and simply removed it. I tried to reach out to him. I let him do some teaching, so he gave the students a spelling test, using random words.
After my son Benjamin was born, I asked my home room class to write to him and tell him what he needed to know. Rodney attacked me: “What makes you think these black kids give a damn about your white baby?”
I tried to get him removed from the class, but the administration refused and instead told me to look inside myself to see why I was having such a hard time with the students – essentially agreeing with Rodney that my racism was interfering with my teaching. And, of course they were right. I was afraid of the students even as I cared about them. Most of all, of course, I was afraid of my own racism. When the semester ended and the regular teacher returned, I couldn’t wait to get out of there.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Sunday, October 18, 2009
My Summer Vacation
10.
That June, Derrick recruited Sasha and I to go to the infamous 1969 Students for a Democratic Society – SDS – convention, held at the Chicago Coliseum. We hadn’t been active in SDS, but that didn’t seem to matter. The PLP was organizing everyone they could to go to the convention to be ready for a confrontation between its own Worker Student Alliance (WSA) Caucus and the rival Revolutionary Youth Movement, a loose coalition of rivals themselves. Thanks largely to the influence of the PLP, both groups considered themselves Marxist-Leninist.
It might be hard from today’s perspective to understand why so many young people were attracted to such a rigid and in some ways moribund ideology. At the time, it didn’t seem moribund at all: the Marxist-Leninist movements around the word seemed to be winning. Consider the year 1968:
• Tet Offensive, Vietnam, pushed US and South Vietnamese forces into defeat after defeat.
• The Cultural Revolution in China seemed to be challenging bureaucracy and establishing genuine equality (we didn’t hear of the excesses until later)
• A student-worker General Strike in France
• Student strikes at San Francisco State, UC Berkeley, Columbia, Harvard, and many other schools
• Kent State, Jackson State, in the US, students protesting the war were being killed.
• Several hundred students killed in protests in Mexico City (leading up to the Olympics)
• Martin Luther King, Jr. is assassinated, and the cities erupt in rebellion, with many black people killed.
These were heady times indeed, and we might be forgiven if we really thought revolution was just around the corner.
The PLP was the more experienced of the groupings in SDS. The party was formed when a group of people split from the Communist Party USA to side with China in the Sino-Soviet dispute. The PLP practiced orthodox Marxism-Leninism, which means that it operated on the basis of democratic centralism. In theory, democratic centralism meant that there would be a thorough discussion of all policies throughout all levels of the party. Then a decision would be made by the National Committee, which would be binding on all members, whether they agreed or not. While the democracy aspect of this process was largely ignored (as it was in most such organizations), the process was effective in organizing people. So, by the time the convention opened with 2000 delegates, it was clear that the WSA caucus had the majority of votes.
As the first vote on direction of the organization came closer, a proposal from the WSA to make fighting racism a key strategy in SDS, the RYM faction, led by Berandi ne Dorhn and others, led a walkout. The RYM faction convened in a neighboring conference room. Because we were unknown in SDS, Sasha and I were asked by Derrick and other PLP leaders to go next door and spy on our rivals. We were aggressively frisked as we entered the room. Given that our politics weren’t ostensibly all that different from the others in the room, it seemed odd that we felt that we were in enemy territory, and the situation was frightening. The RYM faction placed a high value on security, and the room was surrounded by dour looking cadre with armbands identifying them as part of the security force.
From the stage, speaker after speaker attacked PLP. The most effective attack came from a Black Panther leader who called the PLP racist for criticizing the Panther’s for “nationalism.”
The PLP had recently and somewhat simplistically concluded that Lenin’s two-stage revolution strategy, where the party first fights for national liberation and democracy and then for socialism, was the reason that the Soviet Union and now even China were abandoning the international struggle in favor of their own national interests. The PLP was even critical of the North Vietnamese for negotiating with the US. Some of us questioned this party line, but were willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. Given that no other communists in the world held this view other than some tiny PLP offshoots in Canada, Great Britain, and Mexico, it was an arrogant and sectarian position. At the same time, taking such a position took a certain courage and gave PLP a certain purity and independence which, arguably, strengthened it for a time, especially as its rivals spun off into the even more sectarian Weathermen and other grouplets.
As the RYM announced that they were about to take a vote on the expulsion of the PLP and WSA from SDS, someone from the podium announced that the room was being sealed. Sasha and I rushed for the exit, and managed to talk one of the security types to let us out to rejoin our friends in the infinitely calmer WSA caucus. A group of friends of ours from Berkeley were acting out a hilarious skit about how some people could wrap themselves in red flags, brandish Mao’s Little Red Book, and do nothing to actually build the movement among ordinary U. S. workers.
Soon, the RYM faction returned to the main hall, surrounding the WSA caucus. Bernardine Dohrn in combat boots and flak jacket commandeered the stage and announced that the PLP had been expelled from SDS. The reaction of the group was a spontaneous outbreak of derisive laughter, hardly the desired effect. Dohrn then led the RYM out of the door, leaving the “expelled majority” to continue the work of SDS.
There were other ramifications from this split. RYM produced not only the Weathermen, but the Revolutionary Communist Party and the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) as well, but our – Sasha and my – work was done and as we returned to San Francisco, I was proud to have played a role in this “victory” for PLP and became more committed to the struggle.
It’s surprising to me that as I write about these arcane struggles in SDS, I find myself continuing the polemics as if one faction was “right” and the other was “wrong.” There are things in the PLP position that continue to motivate me today, namely the fight against racism and the role of the working class. Yet all of these groupings were hopelessly ultraleft in terms of ever winning over a large section of the U. S. population.
The people with a genuine strategy for change worked in the Eugene McCarthy campaign and the McGovern campaign trying to express the electoral consensus against the war. The PLP did work “secretly” in the McGovern campaign and managed to call a demonstration against him at his own headquarters during the convention, which probably didn’t help.
But, hindsight is 20/20, bla bla, and it makes no sense to fault ourselves for what we didn’t understand.
I met some of the main leaders of the RYM faction – Mike Klonsky, Bernardine Dohrn, and Bill Ayrers -- in Chicago some 35 years later, and was pleasantly surprised to find them working on developing the small school movement in the Chicago school system, precisely the reform I was working on at the time in Oakland. We had all evolved substantially in our politics, yet we were still committed to the same ideals of developing an egalitarian society. (No, I never served on a board with Bill Ayers or went to his house, or did anything other than shake his hand!).
As part of an effort by the Party to keep its teachers close to the working class, I got a job in the warehouse at Wilson-Jones envelope company for the rest of the summer. I had a good time getting the job, creating a persona of a hayseed fresh off the farm, deliberately misspelling words on the application. It was refreshing to have a job where the only stress came from the school boy games the workers played with each other, throwing staples (Swingline Staplers was part of Wilson-Jones) at each other when the boss wasn’t looking. I made a good connection with one of the workers there, and even got the nerve to talk socialist politics to him before I quit to return to teaching.
That June, Derrick recruited Sasha and I to go to the infamous 1969 Students for a Democratic Society – SDS – convention, held at the Chicago Coliseum. We hadn’t been active in SDS, but that didn’t seem to matter. The PLP was organizing everyone they could to go to the convention to be ready for a confrontation between its own Worker Student Alliance (WSA) Caucus and the rival Revolutionary Youth Movement, a loose coalition of rivals themselves. Thanks largely to the influence of the PLP, both groups considered themselves Marxist-Leninist.
It might be hard from today’s perspective to understand why so many young people were attracted to such a rigid and in some ways moribund ideology. At the time, it didn’t seem moribund at all: the Marxist-Leninist movements around the word seemed to be winning. Consider the year 1968:
• Tet Offensive, Vietnam, pushed US and South Vietnamese forces into defeat after defeat.
• The Cultural Revolution in China seemed to be challenging bureaucracy and establishing genuine equality (we didn’t hear of the excesses until later)
• A student-worker General Strike in France
• Student strikes at San Francisco State, UC Berkeley, Columbia, Harvard, and many other schools
• Kent State, Jackson State, in the US, students protesting the war were being killed.
• Several hundred students killed in protests in Mexico City (leading up to the Olympics)
• Martin Luther King, Jr. is assassinated, and the cities erupt in rebellion, with many black people killed.
These were heady times indeed, and we might be forgiven if we really thought revolution was just around the corner.
The PLP was the more experienced of the groupings in SDS. The party was formed when a group of people split from the Communist Party USA to side with China in the Sino-Soviet dispute. The PLP practiced orthodox Marxism-Leninism, which means that it operated on the basis of democratic centralism. In theory, democratic centralism meant that there would be a thorough discussion of all policies throughout all levels of the party. Then a decision would be made by the National Committee, which would be binding on all members, whether they agreed or not. While the democracy aspect of this process was largely ignored (as it was in most such organizations), the process was effective in organizing people. So, by the time the convention opened with 2000 delegates, it was clear that the WSA caucus had the majority of votes.
As the first vote on direction of the organization came closer, a proposal from the WSA to make fighting racism a key strategy in SDS, the RYM faction, led by Berandi ne Dorhn and others, led a walkout. The RYM faction convened in a neighboring conference room. Because we were unknown in SDS, Sasha and I were asked by Derrick and other PLP leaders to go next door and spy on our rivals. We were aggressively frisked as we entered the room. Given that our politics weren’t ostensibly all that different from the others in the room, it seemed odd that we felt that we were in enemy territory, and the situation was frightening. The RYM faction placed a high value on security, and the room was surrounded by dour looking cadre with armbands identifying them as part of the security force.
From the stage, speaker after speaker attacked PLP. The most effective attack came from a Black Panther leader who called the PLP racist for criticizing the Panther’s for “nationalism.”
The PLP had recently and somewhat simplistically concluded that Lenin’s two-stage revolution strategy, where the party first fights for national liberation and democracy and then for socialism, was the reason that the Soviet Union and now even China were abandoning the international struggle in favor of their own national interests. The PLP was even critical of the North Vietnamese for negotiating with the US. Some of us questioned this party line, but were willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. Given that no other communists in the world held this view other than some tiny PLP offshoots in Canada, Great Britain, and Mexico, it was an arrogant and sectarian position. At the same time, taking such a position took a certain courage and gave PLP a certain purity and independence which, arguably, strengthened it for a time, especially as its rivals spun off into the even more sectarian Weathermen and other grouplets.
As the RYM announced that they were about to take a vote on the expulsion of the PLP and WSA from SDS, someone from the podium announced that the room was being sealed. Sasha and I rushed for the exit, and managed to talk one of the security types to let us out to rejoin our friends in the infinitely calmer WSA caucus. A group of friends of ours from Berkeley were acting out a hilarious skit about how some people could wrap themselves in red flags, brandish Mao’s Little Red Book, and do nothing to actually build the movement among ordinary U. S. workers.
Soon, the RYM faction returned to the main hall, surrounding the WSA caucus. Bernardine Dohrn in combat boots and flak jacket commandeered the stage and announced that the PLP had been expelled from SDS. The reaction of the group was a spontaneous outbreak of derisive laughter, hardly the desired effect. Dohrn then led the RYM out of the door, leaving the “expelled majority” to continue the work of SDS.
There were other ramifications from this split. RYM produced not only the Weathermen, but the Revolutionary Communist Party and the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) as well, but our – Sasha and my – work was done and as we returned to San Francisco, I was proud to have played a role in this “victory” for PLP and became more committed to the struggle.
It’s surprising to me that as I write about these arcane struggles in SDS, I find myself continuing the polemics as if one faction was “right” and the other was “wrong.” There are things in the PLP position that continue to motivate me today, namely the fight against racism and the role of the working class. Yet all of these groupings were hopelessly ultraleft in terms of ever winning over a large section of the U. S. population.
The people with a genuine strategy for change worked in the Eugene McCarthy campaign and the McGovern campaign trying to express the electoral consensus against the war. The PLP did work “secretly” in the McGovern campaign and managed to call a demonstration against him at his own headquarters during the convention, which probably didn’t help.
But, hindsight is 20/20, bla bla, and it makes no sense to fault ourselves for what we didn’t understand.
I met some of the main leaders of the RYM faction – Mike Klonsky, Bernardine Dohrn, and Bill Ayrers -- in Chicago some 35 years later, and was pleasantly surprised to find them working on developing the small school movement in the Chicago school system, precisely the reform I was working on at the time in Oakland. We had all evolved substantially in our politics, yet we were still committed to the same ideals of developing an egalitarian society. (No, I never served on a board with Bill Ayers or went to his house, or did anything other than shake his hand!).
As part of an effort by the Party to keep its teachers close to the working class, I got a job in the warehouse at Wilson-Jones envelope company for the rest of the summer. I had a good time getting the job, creating a persona of a hayseed fresh off the farm, deliberately misspelling words on the application. It was refreshing to have a job where the only stress came from the school boy games the workers played with each other, throwing staples (Swingline Staplers was part of Wilson-Jones) at each other when the boss wasn’t looking. I made a good connection with one of the workers there, and even got the nerve to talk socialist politics to him before I quit to return to teaching.
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Substituting
9.
My first assignment as a substitute teacher was to an all black 5th grade class which met on the auditorium stage of a school in the Bayview district. Right away, I noticed something was different. My voice came from a place of confidence deep in my viscera, not nervously from my upper chest. At the first sign of trouble, I wrote down the names of the defiant children, brought them to the office at the first recess, and called their parents. I had no more trouble from the class.
The principal complimented me on how I handled the children. I still hadn’t developed good judgment with regards to authority and still had a self-destructive streak, so I told her all about the racist principal that had fired me from McKinley. I never heard from her or got assigned to that school again.
I developed a bag of tricks that were infallible for the first day or so of an assignment. I would stand in front of the class without saying a word and write on the board : “He Hitz small children.”
Then I would in my mind divide the class into teams. Ideally, there would be two teams, but three or four by rows also worked. Still without saying a word, I would make a grid using roman numerals and give out points to the teams that were sitting with their hands folded waiting for instructions. At the end of the day I would give out packs of M&Ms to the winning teams. I would give points for right answers, as well as good behavior. I would also cheat as much as needed to keep the teams tied. The best days were those in which everyone won.
Usually I ignored the teacher’s lesson plan – if there was one (there often wasn’t). My favorite and most effective initial lesson would go like this: I’d take out a checkerboard and a few pennies. “Who here would like to make some money?” I would ask. Of course everyone’s hand shot up. “Okay. Suppose you put one penny on the first square of the checkerboard.” I’d demonstrate. “Then suppose you doubled that penny on the next square and kept doubling the number of pennies all the way to the 64th square. How much money would you have on the last square of the checkerboard? Take a guess. If you guess right, you can have all the money.” Then I would go around the classroom writing the students’ names on the board and their guess. This way, no one would try to fool me by giving a fake name, or mixing up the names the way classes loved to do when they had substitutes. Of course, most students would guess $1.28. Some of the smarter ones might get up to $256 or even $512 which is the highest guess I ever got. Once I’d recorded all their guesses, I passed out paper and had the class calculate the number. I reviewed how they could either add the numbers together or multiply by 2. “The student who gets the closest will get some of the money.” The students went to work, and my morning was covered. The correct answer is of course 2 to the 64th power, divided by 100. Or $184,467,440,737,095,516.16 or 184 quadrillion dollars. No student ever came close, either guessing or calculating. By lunch time, I would give them the answer and give the person with the highest guess and the highest calculation each a dime, “some of the money.”
I also carried with me some movies I had stolen from the district’s film library. One was a Disney educational moving called “It’s About Time,” an hour long feature that explained relativity and anything else you wanted to know about time, a subject of continuing fascination to me.
The other movie was also an hour long Disney feature called “The Sea” which I would show if I had a multiple day assignment and had a chance to present my unit on water. I would introduce this unit by asking the class to name everything they knew about water, giving a point to whichever team for each answer. I would write the answers on the board. When we finally got to the fact that water is used to put out fires, I showed them my experiment, one I remembered from my basement laboratory at Pine Lake. With great drama, I fetched a glass of water, drank a sip to prove it was water, and then poured it on a mound of sodium peroxide, an innocuous-looking cream colored crystalline powder that burst into flame. It also filled the room with some fairly noxious fumes, but I had made my exciting point about how preconceptions can be deceiving.
I had one more trick which served me well in most schools, and that was to play a Folkways record made by Langston Hughes in 1955 called “The Glory of Negro History.” The format was a dramatized history, a pageant, and black students in 1969 were especially riveted. When possible, I would scour the school for headsets and hook them together so that each student could listen on his/her own headphones.
One time I played this record for a 3rd grade at one of the rare assignments I received to a predominantly white school in the avenues, and had them write their thoughts about it. The principal observed the lesson and called me into the office afterward, questioning whether such an activity was appropriate for young children. As proof of her point, she pointed out one of the students’ written response: “I think I would like to be a slave,” the student had written.
“You can see, she didn’t understand the lesson,” the principal said.
I didn’t know what to say, but I understood the child perfectly, because I had at times felt the same way myself. There is a purity of innocence in the slave experience, a righteousness of victimhood that guilt-ridden whites can only dream about. It was being part of a cause which was incontrovertibly just. And, given that this was 1969, it was about having the power of the civil rights movement at your back.
Nowadays, you sometimes hear people, black people in particular, wax nostalgic for their schools before they were integrated. It is no doubt generally true in the south that the segregated black schools with their committed black teachers served black students better than the “integrated” schools that replaced them. Many whites left those schools and most of the black teachers were simply fired, at least in the early days. But the segregated schools in San Francisco in 1969 were something else.
Going to Hunter’s Point in those days was like entering a war zone, complete with the smell of burning flesh from the meat processing plants in the neighborhood. There were few black teachers. Some of these were both sympathetic to the students and able to control their classrooms sufficiently that real learning occurred. About two thirds of teachers were in control of their classes, but this was a task most of them accomplished by giving students busy work: easy dittos that required little more from the students than coloring skills. Meanwhile, students roamed the halls and left the school grounds regularly. Little effort was made to contact the parents.
Some of the “liberal” reforms that were gaining popularity at the time – open classrooms, individualized learning, learning stations – backfired disastrously when implemented in the “ghetto” schools, as they were known. A classic example was the Sullivan Readers, a self-paced phonics instruction program. Each student worked in their own book. Most of the exercises were fill-in-the-blanks. In order that students would get immediate feedback on their work, the answers were right on the page, concealed by a “slider” which the student controlled. Students became experts at manipulating that slider so that they could find the answer without actually reading the question or revealing to anyone watching that they were peeking at the answers.
At one school near Candlestick Park, my reputation preceded me. While a group of teachers were sitting around the lunchroom, the vice-principal, a shrill Filipina, pointed me out. “Watch out for that one,” she said. “He goes to the parents,” as if it were a crime equivalent to child molesting.
Meanwhile, that spring, Sasha got pregnant. I was excited about becoming a father, and built the baby a rather elegant cradle out of redwood, even though I am not the handiest carpenter on the planet. I enjoyed the LaMaze classes, and to this day use the relaxation chant we learned there to put myself to sleep: “Loose feet, loose ankles, loose calves, loose thighs…” etc. up each vertebrate of the spine, through the cerebrum and back down to the jaw.
My first assignment as a substitute teacher was to an all black 5th grade class which met on the auditorium stage of a school in the Bayview district. Right away, I noticed something was different. My voice came from a place of confidence deep in my viscera, not nervously from my upper chest. At the first sign of trouble, I wrote down the names of the defiant children, brought them to the office at the first recess, and called their parents. I had no more trouble from the class.
The principal complimented me on how I handled the children. I still hadn’t developed good judgment with regards to authority and still had a self-destructive streak, so I told her all about the racist principal that had fired me from McKinley. I never heard from her or got assigned to that school again.
I developed a bag of tricks that were infallible for the first day or so of an assignment. I would stand in front of the class without saying a word and write on the board : “He Hitz small children.”
Then I would in my mind divide the class into teams. Ideally, there would be two teams, but three or four by rows also worked. Still without saying a word, I would make a grid using roman numerals and give out points to the teams that were sitting with their hands folded waiting for instructions. At the end of the day I would give out packs of M&Ms to the winning teams. I would give points for right answers, as well as good behavior. I would also cheat as much as needed to keep the teams tied. The best days were those in which everyone won.
Usually I ignored the teacher’s lesson plan – if there was one (there often wasn’t). My favorite and most effective initial lesson would go like this: I’d take out a checkerboard and a few pennies. “Who here would like to make some money?” I would ask. Of course everyone’s hand shot up. “Okay. Suppose you put one penny on the first square of the checkerboard.” I’d demonstrate. “Then suppose you doubled that penny on the next square and kept doubling the number of pennies all the way to the 64th square. How much money would you have on the last square of the checkerboard? Take a guess. If you guess right, you can have all the money.” Then I would go around the classroom writing the students’ names on the board and their guess. This way, no one would try to fool me by giving a fake name, or mixing up the names the way classes loved to do when they had substitutes. Of course, most students would guess $1.28. Some of the smarter ones might get up to $256 or even $512 which is the highest guess I ever got. Once I’d recorded all their guesses, I passed out paper and had the class calculate the number. I reviewed how they could either add the numbers together or multiply by 2. “The student who gets the closest will get some of the money.” The students went to work, and my morning was covered. The correct answer is of course 2 to the 64th power, divided by 100. Or $184,467,440,737,095,516.16 or 184 quadrillion dollars. No student ever came close, either guessing or calculating. By lunch time, I would give them the answer and give the person with the highest guess and the highest calculation each a dime, “some of the money.”
I also carried with me some movies I had stolen from the district’s film library. One was a Disney educational moving called “It’s About Time,” an hour long feature that explained relativity and anything else you wanted to know about time, a subject of continuing fascination to me.
The other movie was also an hour long Disney feature called “The Sea” which I would show if I had a multiple day assignment and had a chance to present my unit on water. I would introduce this unit by asking the class to name everything they knew about water, giving a point to whichever team for each answer. I would write the answers on the board. When we finally got to the fact that water is used to put out fires, I showed them my experiment, one I remembered from my basement laboratory at Pine Lake. With great drama, I fetched a glass of water, drank a sip to prove it was water, and then poured it on a mound of sodium peroxide, an innocuous-looking cream colored crystalline powder that burst into flame. It also filled the room with some fairly noxious fumes, but I had made my exciting point about how preconceptions can be deceiving.
I had one more trick which served me well in most schools, and that was to play a Folkways record made by Langston Hughes in 1955 called “The Glory of Negro History.” The format was a dramatized history, a pageant, and black students in 1969 were especially riveted. When possible, I would scour the school for headsets and hook them together so that each student could listen on his/her own headphones.
One time I played this record for a 3rd grade at one of the rare assignments I received to a predominantly white school in the avenues, and had them write their thoughts about it. The principal observed the lesson and called me into the office afterward, questioning whether such an activity was appropriate for young children. As proof of her point, she pointed out one of the students’ written response: “I think I would like to be a slave,” the student had written.
“You can see, she didn’t understand the lesson,” the principal said.
I didn’t know what to say, but I understood the child perfectly, because I had at times felt the same way myself. There is a purity of innocence in the slave experience, a righteousness of victimhood that guilt-ridden whites can only dream about. It was being part of a cause which was incontrovertibly just. And, given that this was 1969, it was about having the power of the civil rights movement at your back.
Nowadays, you sometimes hear people, black people in particular, wax nostalgic for their schools before they were integrated. It is no doubt generally true in the south that the segregated black schools with their committed black teachers served black students better than the “integrated” schools that replaced them. Many whites left those schools and most of the black teachers were simply fired, at least in the early days. But the segregated schools in San Francisco in 1969 were something else.
Going to Hunter’s Point in those days was like entering a war zone, complete with the smell of burning flesh from the meat processing plants in the neighborhood. There were few black teachers. Some of these were both sympathetic to the students and able to control their classrooms sufficiently that real learning occurred. About two thirds of teachers were in control of their classes, but this was a task most of them accomplished by giving students busy work: easy dittos that required little more from the students than coloring skills. Meanwhile, students roamed the halls and left the school grounds regularly. Little effort was made to contact the parents.
Some of the “liberal” reforms that were gaining popularity at the time – open classrooms, individualized learning, learning stations – backfired disastrously when implemented in the “ghetto” schools, as they were known. A classic example was the Sullivan Readers, a self-paced phonics instruction program. Each student worked in their own book. Most of the exercises were fill-in-the-blanks. In order that students would get immediate feedback on their work, the answers were right on the page, concealed by a “slider” which the student controlled. Students became experts at manipulating that slider so that they could find the answer without actually reading the question or revealing to anyone watching that they were peeking at the answers.
At one school near Candlestick Park, my reputation preceded me. While a group of teachers were sitting around the lunchroom, the vice-principal, a shrill Filipina, pointed me out. “Watch out for that one,” she said. “He goes to the parents,” as if it were a crime equivalent to child molesting.
Meanwhile, that spring, Sasha got pregnant. I was excited about becoming a father, and built the baby a rather elegant cradle out of redwood, even though I am not the handiest carpenter on the planet. I enjoyed the LaMaze classes, and to this day use the relaxation chant we learned there to put myself to sleep: “Loose feet, loose ankles, loose calves, loose thighs…” etc. up each vertebrate of the spine, through the cerebrum and back down to the jaw.
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