Paranoia

26.

I got my job back in San Francisco, teaching 4 year olds at Laguna Golden Gate Children’s Center in the Western Addition. I fell back in love with 4 year olds, and with teaching. I had a wonderful team of people I was working with, Loretta, Deborah, and Gladys. Gladys was old school, an aide who brooked no nonsense with the children, whose style complemented my laid back ways. I spent much of the spring of 1985 writing and rehearsing a play called “The Rosa Parks Story,” which recounted the tale in short bursts of verse that even a 4 year old could remember. It started with the “Wheels on the Bus” song – children get busses.

On December first, 1955
A great day to be alive.
The wheels on the bus went round and round
And Rosa Parks turned the world upside down

The stress I’d been laboring under in Oakland was replaced by a giddiness, a balloon being filled by helium. That decision to quit was so easy and so liberating, I began to consider quitting my marriage. We had made a fairly strenuous effort to stay together. We saw a marriage counselor. The counselor had us assume the physical positions we felt represented our positions in the relationship. I sat in a chair, Earldean sprawled at my feet. This was uncomfortable, but probably accurate. Maybe what happened is that Earldean felt me pulling away from her and decided the best strategy would be to become more submissive to me – isn’t that what men want? The strategy backfired, because what I wanted was someone to stand up to my patterns of arrogance and superiority. That would have been asking a lot of Earldean.

At the end of the session, the counselor said, “You have some problems, but, if you’re both committed, I don’t see why you can’t work them out.” If you’re both committed. The phrase echoed in my mind over the next few weeks: if you’re both committed….. The fact was, I was simply no longer committed.

The arrival of spring gave me options, at least of where to live: Deer Creek is dismal, nearly uninhabitable during the rainy winter, with the dirt road subject to washouts. But one could live there in the spring, and my job was such – 2-6 PM that I could even commute.

So, on Sunday, April 21, 1985, I told her. “Earldean, I’m sorry. I have to go.” She looked as though I had kicked her in the stomach. But she didn’t try to stop me. I loaded my camper with supplies and left for the Santa Cruz mountains. For what happened next, I will revert to primary sources. What follows is my account of the subsequent events, written days after they occurred. It was a terrifying time, but also the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me, so far.

PARANOIA IN THE ANTI-APARTMEID MOVEMENT: But Whose?
By the Rapid Eye Movement (REM)

This is a true story. Since it is also highly improbable, please bear in mind the old sixties axiom: Just because you are paranoid does not mean someone isn’t following you.

The story concerns my strange experiences in the current anti—Apartheid movement at UC Berkeley and how those experiences may or may not have lead me break with “reality.” This is political drama into psychodrama —— or is it?

The story begins on Sunday, April 21, 1985. On this evening, I leave my wife. We have been married 9 years (together 10). We have spent the last two years exhausting every conceivable alternative to the break—up, including $3600 in psychotherapy, couples counseling, increased freedom, exploring each others’ sexual fantasies. You name it, we did it. The marriage died anyway, as marriages sometimes do.

I drive that night down to a cabin we own with friends in the Santa Cruz mountains to go through the psychological “crash” which I fully expect to follow our break—up. I have taken a day off work (teaching nursery school) so that I could fully experience, “feel,” “own” the pain and grief of the thing, as I have learned I will need to do in therapy and from my previous marriage.

At Deer Creek (what we call the cabin) I feel sad, poignant, but also free. The “crash” never comes. I feel self—accepting, confidant that in spite of everything, I have made the right decision. I come to understand that although my wife is still quite unhappy over the break—up, she would eventually see that it is for the best.
I go back to work that Tuesday, April 23rd, in San Francisco, my regular shift, 2-6 PM. After work, I decide to check out the sit-in at Biko (Sproul) Plaza at UC Berkeley, my alma mater, which had been continuing for some 12 days by this time. It is a sentimental journey. I was arrested in Sproul Hall in the 1964 Free Speech Movement, my political initiation, which was followed by a 16 year “career” of often heavy political activism. This career includes 5 strange years in the Progressive Labor Party in the early seventies, a major split from that dogmatic sect, some 200 demonstrations, organizing in the teachers’ union, leading an post Prop. 13 occupation of a “closed” childcare center in the Black community lasting 18 months. My “career” culminated in a losing but respectable run for school board in 1980, after which I finally burned out and turned my talents to writing and teaching. In the last 4 years, the extent of my political involvement has been attending the semi—annual mobilizations (marches), like a Christian who attends churh on Christmas and Easter. That is, until that fateful Tuesday.

I begin to make friends at the sit—in (I know no one) right away. I like the energy. I sense “resurgence” in the air. The issue, opposition to South African Apartheid through support of university disvestment, I consider critical.

My essential, eclectic, politics are these: political struggle is the cutting edge of human evolution, the object of which is the survival of the species. The greatest threat to this survival is the threat of nuclear war. The way to prevent nuclear war is to struggle for world—wide unity. The way to achieve worldwide unity is to struggle against world—wide inequality. The most glaring example of inequality in the world today is South African Apartheid. So am I thinking, trying to sleep on the concrete mattress of Biko Plaza, the fires of political struggle reigniting in my breast. (To be continued).

Quitting

25.

Meanwhile, my teaching career was becoming increasingly frustrating. I had been rehired part time, working with 2 year olds at John McLaren Children’s Center, up the hill from my house. I was able to augment my position by substituting in the afternoon, in the same classroom. So, I was working for 4 hours in the morning, making a decent hourly wage. Then, after a 3 hour break, I’d return, working with the same children but making about 2/3 the hourly wage. With a split shift, I’d start working at 7 AM and get off at 6 PM, a long day. And the pay differential made me feel positively schizophrenic: what was I supposed to do, work 2/3 as hard in the afternoon?

I was able to teach the children how to spell their names, which was considered “developmentally inappropriate,” but I figured if they could learn it, why not? I did it by making up a song for each child. Tyrone’s song might go: T-Y-R-O-N-E, T-Y-R-O-N-E, T-Y-R-O-N-E, T-Y-R-O-N-E, T-Y-R-O-N-E, BOOM! The children seemed to like each having his/her own song. I had them hold sentence strips with their names printed on them. I think it may have helped them learn their letters.

I started looking around for other teaching jobs, and in January of 1984 I got a job teaching science to 1st through 6th graders at Markham Elementary School in East Oakland, near Eastmont Mall, a perpetually failing shopping center. Most of the classes had 30 students, all of them black. Being a prep teacher was a lot like being a substitute, but I could handle it – at first. I appreciated the uptick in status represented by moving from “child care” to elementary teaching – I just felt more respected. I liked teaching science because it’s the one elementary subject that tends to be “hands on.” I had the students plant beans, mix vinegar and baking soda, and experiment with magnets. I also included a literacy component, reading science fiction to the classes.

One of my favorite lessons involved debunking astrology. I would buy the latest astrology magazine from the drug store and go around the class asking for birthdays. For each zodiac sign, I’d read the description of the person – only I’d mix them up, so for Aries I’d read Leo, for Cancer, Pieces, and so forth. The students were all like yes! That’s it! That’s him/her to a tee! Some of them were quite angry when at the end of class I revealed that I had switched around the zodiac signs.

The job was difficult, but it was gratifying to me that it seemed I had finally, finally gotten a handle on the classroom control thing that had so compromised my career as and elementary teacher. It was helpful that I traveled from classroom to classroom, and frequently the teacher remained in the room while I taught.

I was hired as a long-term substitute, but I pressured the principal, who got me classified probationary.

That summer I had a full 3 months off – which was fun. We spent a lot of time at Deer Creek. I took a class on teaching science from the Lawrence Livermore Radiation Lab, which included a lot of propaganda about how radiation was a part of everyday life, how Coleman lantern wicks would inspire a Geiger counter to clickity-click, but also gave me a lot of ideas for teaching the next year.

The following year, 1984-85, I had my own science room at Markham, which at first seemed to make things easier, but I missed the students’ regular teachers not being in the room. The crowd control piece was trying. The stress was taking its toll. By January, it was as if I just ran out of gas. I couldn’t go to work any more. I couldn’t face the constant testing of the 150 hostile students every single day. Perhaps only a dozen were hostile. But I missed the far more rational curriculum and structure of preschool.

So, I quit. I told the principal that I’d gotten a job teaching creative writing at the community college level – I even gave the college a name: Canada College in San Mateo, and thus was able to leave with the blessing of my colleagues. I had only taken a leave from my San Francisco job and had little trouble foreshortening my leave and returning to my part time job teaching preschool. This was an enormously liberating move. The relief I got from quitting this job inspired me toward my next big move, which turned out not to be quite so simple.

Becoming Unhinged

24.

The politics of the novel became somewhat unhinged from the Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy which I continued to espouse. I sent a draft to my old comrade Kathy and she did wonder about that. I assured her that the quasi-Christian anarchy of the novel were fully compatible with Marxism-Leninism, and I believed that at the time, even as the world was tiring of the failures of Marxism-Leninism, as China repudiated the Cultural Revolution and increasingly turned capitalist, even as glasnost and perestroika were sweeping Leninist orthodoxy out of the Soviet Union, in a way that we hoped would revitalize the Soviet experiment, though these movements turned out to be too little too late. The “party-building” movement, which I still supported, was becoming hopelessly confused by the mid eighties, with group after group biting the dustbin of history.

The novel seemed to require increasing amounts of marijuana to sustain its inspiration. My own grip on rationality was loosening. I would spend many a morning stoned on Thai Stick, dressed as my protagonist – Ben Davis Can’t Bust Em coveralls with the monkey on the pocket and a yellow baseball style cap with blue Mercury wings – wandering the streets of Berkeley and the halls of the UC library stacks following my hero’s journey.
My sexuality became increasingly impulsive, as I imagined my monkeyman to be, and I persuaded Earldean to participate in all kinds of orgiastic experiences the details of which I will spare you. I have to say that she didn’t take that much persuading. She was a trooper in my explorations.

But then I got it in my head that I was in love with Tessie. I wrote her a poem and a letter declaring my love. We went to the beach and cavorted in the sand. It really looked like it was going to happen.

The next day, I was overcome with guilt about Earldean, and when I went to see Tessie I was foolish enough to be honest about it. This turned Tessie way off, and destroyed my chance of making love to her and having the affair that I thought I wanted. I spent close to two years in unrequited pursuit of this woman, who saw the opportunity to keep me on a string and support her cocaine habit, which I dutifully did. She liked to freebase it, at least $20 a day worth. I would join her, even though the drug did nothing for me.

I did some crazy shit around this affair. Tessie had a boyfriend who worked as a fence, marketing the goods which his friends burglarized from houses and cars, a serious criminal.

One night, he barged in on us when Tessie and I were on the couch making out. He grabbed Tessie, hauled her into the bedroom, and started beating on her. She told me I better leave. I did leave, but I was drunk and stoned, and she had told me that she cared for me much more than him. So without so much as a word to Earldean, who was watching my degeneration in agony, fully believing I was having an affair (which, despite its lack of consummation, I can’t deny), I fished the .25 automatic that her brother had given us out of a drawer and returned to her apartment to challenge him. We had words, but fortunately I wasn’t stupid enough to pull the gun. I ended up leaving again, but thinking back on it, I am lucky to be alive.

At one point during this two year affair, our house got burglarized, and I’m pretty sure that Tessie’s boyfriend had something to do with it. I didn’t mention this to Earldean.

Tales of Monkeyman

23.

From here on, the novel diverges from what actually happened. What actually happened was that we incorporated the Geneva Towers Children’s Center as a private nonprofit and were able to raise about $20,000 in grants from the United Way and Chevron (!). We kept the center open for 18 months. It wasn’t always smooth. On several occasions, I came into the office and the parent/teachers, now paid, were sitting around drinking “Bull” (Schlitz malt liquor) while the children played by themselves, with only Eddie watching them.

We hired a head teacher, a Nigerian immigrant, whom I thought as a black man, would be able to supervise the parent/teachers. I underestimated the prejudice of African American parents toward Africans. The parent/teachers did what they wanted, knowing that neither of us, me or the head teacher, had the spine to stand up to them. It was their school, went my liberal reasoning. If they thought it was cool to drink on the job, who was I to challenge them?

I became involved in citywide politics, was elected secretary of a coalition for better schools that was adroitly led by members of the Communist Labor Party, one of the less sectarian sects. We held a march of more than 2000 parents in Sacramento where I got to speak. I got a lot of cheers for invoking the fighting spirit of the parents of the GTCC.

After about a year, one of the students told her parents that Eddie took her to the adult bathroom across the hall and molested her. Eddie was arrested, and we had a number of meetings with our licensing agency, the Department of Social Services. They were after us as well about how messy the place was. We kept our license by a thread.

We applied to the state of California for funding. We came close to getting it. When the state officials came to inspect our premises, I made one of my trademark errors of joking to one of them, a black woman I just assumed would be sympathetic to our cause, “Of course we cleaned up the yard for you.” Two of the inspectors gave us high marks, but the third – I’m convinced it was because of my glib remark – marked us way down.

So, in the middle of the winter of 1979, Geneva Towers Children’s Center, Inc. closed without fanfare. We just ran out of money. There was a possibility of keeping it open. One of our most relentless critics was a woman named Irma who was the president of the Tenants Association. She told anyone who would listen – not inaccurately – that our parent/teachers were all drunks and drug addicts. We were down to a handful of families toward the end. It occurred to me that the only way to keep the center open would be to form an alliance with Irma and kick out Tessie and the parents who fought for the center and were now running it into the ground with their “lumpen” behavior as I might have once characterized it. But I couldn’t do that, so I let it go.

I was still working for the school district. After the layoffs, I worked as a sub in the children’s centers, basically doing my old job at John McLaren Children’s Center, up the hill through the notorious Sunnydale projects. A few months later, I was rehired part time. Rather than succumb to the post-partem depression that threatened to overwhelm me after the GTCC closed, I decided to run for school board. I got some midlevel endorsements, like Cecil Williams of Glide Church and Patty Siegel of the Child Care Switchboard, but I had no money. I considered it an agitational campaign that I knew I wouldn’t win, but would give me valuable experience and a taste for electoral politics, which the PLP had largely scorned, except for ballot initiatives.

I did enjoy the campaign. I became relatively adept at speaking extemporaneously. I got a wonderful campaign manager, a woman named Geraldine Johnson, who was chairperson of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, and a friend of the Communist Party. On one memorable occasion, at a fundraiser at our house – Earldean and I had moved out of the Towers and bought one o the townhouses, also Eichler designed, right next door – she had me do a strip tease for money. It was certainly embarrassing, don’t know if we made much money.

Our platform centered around smaller classes, a teacher training program for classroom aides from the community, and a controversial program to provide “ESL” (English as a Second Language) classes for black students. The idea was that the home dialect of most black families was different enough from “standard” English taught in the schools that black students should receive similar additional resources to those going to Asian and Latino students in the bilingual programs. A program like this was developed in Oakland some ten years later, giving the name Ebonics, and then abandoned after being used as a whipping boy to attack the Oakland schools by white politicians trying – and succeeding – in wrenching power from the black majority school board. It’s still a good idea.

We worked hard, but I came in dead last in a field of 11, behind the Human Jukebox. It was 1980, and on that same election night, the Reagan era began. Even though I got nearly 10,000 votes (it took 40,000 to win) and won my home precinct (Geneva Towers), I was devastated. The feelings I’d been postponing from the collapse of the party, to the collapse of the GTCC, and now to the campaign came flooding over me, sending me into a deep depression.

I decided it was time to start my second career as a writer. I enrolled in the Creative Writing program at San Francisco State. I put politics on the back burner for awhile and threw myself into writing. I couldn’t figure out what to do with the second draft of my novelized biography of Earldean, now entitled Passengers Will Please Refrain, when I stumbled upon a small article in the San Francisco Chronicle headlined “Monkey Man Found in Kenya.” The article described a man who was discovered in the forests near Lake Victoria in western Kenya who appeared to have been raised by monkeys. The story, literally, captured my imagination. A modern-day black Tarzan. I went into high gear (also literally – the novel was marijuana-drenched) and spent the summer of 1982 typing the first draft. I finished in 3 months. I had a thrilling time studying baboons, inventing baboon language, making connections to the mythical axis of Mercury-Hermes-Thoth, the messenger of the gods who was represented in Egyptian iconography as a baboon. One brilliant invention: we (and the satirized scientists in the novel), see baboons picking at each other’s fleas and call it “grooming.” In Tales of Monkeyman, as the novel came to be called, this activity is called la-la-la, or the science of dream-sharing, a psychic connection which permitted it’s practitioners to plug into each other’s nervous systems. In particular, this experience led my human character to have horrific visions of end-of-world. So, he sets out to rejoin humans, gets captured and brought to Berkeley, where his is placed in a monkey experimental chamber, learns English, escapes, and so on. He ends up returning to Africa and training the baboons to become the second sapient species. They don’t need to re-invent the wheel, so to speak. They use Bic lighters to make fire and rapidly learn how to drive Land Rovers and shoot Uzis.

The novel went through various drafts and became my Master’s thesis at State. As such, it won the Walter van Tilburg Clark Prize for the best novel of the year. With help from one of my professors, it was well received at Mercury (!) House, and I received detailed critiques from four different editors. But, they finally turned it down, and, after years of being hawked around to all kinds of agents and publishers, it remains unpublished. Perhaps not for long, though.

On Our Own

22.

I will continue to quote from the novel White Knight a little more. Here is another of the more subjective, second person passages:

Even as you have reached the zenith of your political career (so far), a lurking fear settles into your life like an old friend. As a leader, you fear making a mistake and opening yourself up to attack. But they could attack you anyway. They already have. They have taken your job away. You can collect unemployment for awhile, and you can tell lies about how much time your kids spend with you in order to get a large allotment of food stamps, but even surplus food won't fill that hollow in your belly where the fear lurks. It pisses you off that the system has such a hold over you, that it can mess with your mind simply by cutting off your livelihood, but that doesn't stop you from waking up in the middle of the night in a sweat surrounded by multiple images of skulls with flames flicking out of their hollow eye sockets, followed by visions of terror that lurk in the shadows between dream and memory.

One of these dream memories is of your first year teaching; you are trying to teach a roomful of black elementary children, and they are gradually getting away from you as you try to hold a discussion about a fight two of them had outside on the schoolyard, but the children refuse to take turns, and you feel them taking sides in the fight instead of looking for solutions. You want them to find their own solution, so they defy your authority in ways that have you half agreeing with them, which boxes you in so there is nothing you can do but give in to the chaos, as what had been a fight between two children threatens to escalate into a brawl between the two polarized halves of the class. Another image comes from a memory you have of your first social contact with black people when you are eleven or so and your father invites a black ophthalmologist and his family to your home on the lake, a bold move on his part in those times, and how you take the family on a ride in your family's motorboat but you have no idea what to say and neither does anyone else. The silence grates on the ears in a bone chilling, fingernails on the blackboard kind of way. In another bold move, your father takes this man into his practice but as an associate, not a full partner, and the black family never returns to the house. The shrill silence conjures another image, when you are younger still, the silent black man who clucks at the horse pulling the hansom cab, clopping along the streets of Nassau with your vacationing family, your father, your mother, your sister, [Nicki], sightseeing but the sight you are seeing is of a shantytown of unbelievable at least to your eight year old eyes squalor; the hovels are made from corrugated tin and tarpaper, babies are screaming, your eyes sting from the smoke of the outside fires, the cooking smell mixes with that of the urine, dark people in rags huddle in the darkness, the din of their crowding angry and frightful, while placid looks mask the faces of your family, and you think: This couldn't possibly be real.

The days following our center's official closing are heady indeed. There are a million things involved with running a school, and I don't know what I'm doing. After the first two days, Earldean and Tessie both go back to work, so I'm on my own with Charlene, Sue Ann, Alice, and Eddie. Between us we have to buy, cook, and serve breakfast and lunch, answer the phone -- now listed in our own name, [Geneva] Towers Children's Center, Inc. -- maintain at least a semblance of paperwork, keep the place clean, collect fees so we can buy the food. After the second day, it's pretty clear we're not going to get the school district back. The only pressure we have on them is holding their furnishings, a cost they can easily write off. So we resign ourselves to having to figure out all the steps it takes to get incorporated, independently licensed, and funded. Plus, we have to care for the children.

At first I have to do everything. There is a reason I never went in for administration. I hate telling people what to do, and I despise details. However, after two days of this, I resent even more the others not doing their share.

"Eddie. You seem to handle the children really well. Would you like to teach?"

"Sure!" he says, his eyes lighting up. He's a wiry man in his twenties with dark skin, long sideburns, and narrow features. Earldean thinks he's missing a screw, but he seems to really like the children. He plays with them. He rides tricycles with them. He molds playdough with them. He paints with them. He does naturally just what the modern practitioner of the child centered curriculum is exhorted to do by university level Early Childhood Education programs.

Alice has an obvious aversion to children, and Charlene seems indifferent, so, without my having to say anything, they settle in the office and talk to who knows who on the phone. Sue Ann volunteers to do the cooking and cleaning. So, I'm able to concentrate on handling the money such as there is, buying food, preparing sign in sheets and emergency cards, researching the ins and outs of our legal status, buying insurance, recruiting a board of directors from the community, and doing a little teaching in my spare time. My evenings I spend writing proposals, a skill I have to learn from scratch. I've never been so busy, but I have a great sense of purpose and glean a fair share of manic energy from the aura of victory that the continuing existence of the center reflects.

The Day After Labor Day

21.

One more point about the zone of proximal development before I resume the memoir narrative: it is importantly that zone where a student can grasp the concept with a little help. Optimal learning is not a one-person endeavor: it requires a relationship with at least one other person.

Now then, back to our story. From the novel, White Knight, again:

September 5, 1978, the day after Labor Day, begins with a soft orange glow from the Oakland hills. Unlike most days, I have no difficulty getting out of bed. The adrenalin pumping through my system sharpens the senses and clarifies the mind, as cloudless as the sky.

When [Earldean] and I reach the center at 7 A.M. to open it for the day, there are already people milling about the entrance. The plan is to run a "normal" program with whatever children come and to have our allies from the Towers stand around as a vague threat to any movers that might show up. Meanwhile, we've called a press conference for 10 A.M. As I enter the front door which opens onto the large plaza between the two perpendicular towers, I declare, grandly, imagining myself as Fidel entering Batista's office: "This is now liberated territory."

The phone is already ringing. KCBS tapes an interview. The adrenalin loosens my tongue which in other circumstances might be stuck. "We intend to occupy the center for as long as it takes until the school district changes its mind," I tell them.

Children trickle in for the first couple hours, as they normally do. By 9 o'clock, we have about half the normal enrollment, sixteen children, a bit disappointing, but certainly a more than adequate showing. I am of course the only teacher (Leonora being busy preparing to move to Guyana). I call the children to the rug for circle time. I read them "The Rosa Parks Story," written by myself, about the Montgomery Bus boycott. Children seem to understand about buses. We talk about our struggle. "What special day is it today?"

"Halloween," somebody says.

"Christmas."

"August."

Little Barney says, "They close our school."

"Aha. Give that man a million bucks," I say. "Why do they want to do that?"

"No money," shouts Darnell, drooling, not to be outdone by his brother.

"Right! And do they have the money?"

Silence. Latricia's son Ronnie finally says, "Money for war. Not for black people."

"Ten million bucks for Ronnie! Good answer." Some of the children get restless.

"All right, Clarisse. Look at how nicely Dathan is sitting. Now. Do you know why they have money for war but not for black people?"

Ronnie pipes right in, "Black people too dark. They have to sit in the back of the bus because they too dirty."

"Um, not quite, Ronnie."

"'The law's unfair,'" Barney quotes from the story.

"That's good, Barney. They did pass a law, Proposition 13, which was unfair, and that's why they say they're closing our school. But are we going to let them do it?"

"No!" all the children scream together. This part they get.

I start the song. "We shall not, we shall not be moved."

I explain further: "Today, we're going to be on television. People all over the city will be watching us. How do we want them to see us?"

"Good," says Clarisse.

"That's right, Clarisse. We want to show them that the children of [Geneva] Towers Children's Center know how to act. What does that mean?"

"No fighting," says Ronnie.

"No running inside," says Barney.

"No spitting," says Darnell.

"You got the idea," I say. I am nervous that the adult chaos will mirror itself among the children, and what the television people will pick up is how incompetent we are to run our own school. I bite my scruples and resort to the kind of teaching I generally try to avoid. "People who act nicely while the visitors are here will get a cookie. But, if you do act up, you'll sit all afternoon, got that?" I'm taking no chances.

[Tessie] flies into the room. "They're here! The movers are here!"

"Oh shit," I say out loud, forgetting where I am.

"Ooooo," say the children.

"Shoot, I mean." I leave the children where they are and rush to the door. There's about twenty people from the Towers… all standing in front of the door with their arms folded, glowering at two white men in blue coveralls, themselves looking bemused.

I gently elbow my way through the crowd to talk to the movers. "The people here don't want the center closed down," I explain.

"Hey, no problem, man," says one of the movers, a red bearded man with a pot belly.

"We get paid anyway. We'll just tell them we didn't want to start a riot."

"Just tell them the people wouldn't let you in."

"Great. Fine with us." The movers turn on their heels and return to their truck.

The crowd applauds them. First victory of the day.

By the time I get back inside the center, the children are all over the place, writing on the wall with crayons, spilling paint, riding the tricycles, and two TV stations have arrived with all their equipment. Fortunately, the press and the children are in separate rooms, though the rooms are joined by large open doorways. The parents -- [Tessie], Latricia, Charlene, Alice, Sue Ann -- are all just standing around in awe of the two celebrities, live on the scene reporters well known from the local news shows, one of them a weekend anchorman. I do my best to contain my fury. "Could you help with the children please?" I say to Charlene, my eyes flaring.

She flares her eyes right back at me and says, "I'm not your slave," loud enough for the news people to hear.

The others, who've heard this exchange, suddenly busy themselves talking with the press.

In desperation, I retrieve [Earldean] from the kitchen, where she is busily preparing spaghetti for the children's lunch. "We need some help with the kids," I say.

"Where are all the others?" she asks.

"Busy with the news people."

[Earldean] clicks off the stove and enters the room where the children are. "All right, you guys," she says in a tone which is at once scolding and friendly. "It's time to come to the tables. Let me see who can sit down quietly by the count of three. 1...2...2 1/2...2 3/4...3! Very good, you all made it." In no time, she has the children sitting nicely at the tables, playing with Leggos, playdough, or coloring on paper. Once again, she has saved the day.

In the other room, a third TV station has arrived with its people, and the press conference is about to start without me. Latricia reads the press release we finished last night. She stands tall, dressed in a tailored beige pants suit. She finishes: "The parents are determined to occupy the center until the school district changes its mind. This is our center. This is our community. We will not close." The other parents applaud.

There are questions. "Isn't it true that all the children have been transferred to a nearby center?"

I answer, "That center is nearly a mile away, up hill, through some one of the roughest public housing projects in the city."

Another newsman asks, "How many of the children have stayed behind? It doesn't look like you have a full house here."

I answer, "About half the children came to this school today. We don't know how many went to the new school. Some parents may be waiting to see what happens."

A third reporter asks, "The district says its short of money because of Proposition 13, and you people should be targeting Sacramento instead of them. They say their hands are tied."

I start to answer, "We think they have the money..."

Latricia interrupts me. "[Henry]! Let the parents speak."

"...but you should hear from the parents," I smile, aware I have once again made a mildly racist faux pas, but I'm used to being chastised for this domineering habit and give in good- naturedly.

Latricia speaks sharply, "Let them go to the state for money. We don't care where they get it. We see our job as demonstrating to the whole state that no matter what cutbacks they've perpetrated by passing their racist tax law, we are determined that this center will not be one of them. How many black people do you think benefitted from this so called 'tax relief' measure? How many blacks are homeowners? Ten percent? Twenty percent? How many landlords will now reduce rents? Somebody's got to draw the line somewhere, and we're drawing it right here. We're just saying 'No, you can't do this.'" Again the other parents applaud. Latricia has been brilliant.

"What's the next step?" another reporter asks. "Suppose the school district refuses to back down?"

[Tessie] grabs the floor. "There is no next step. This is the last step. The parents will occupy this center until hell freezes over if necessary. This is our center. This is our community." She tries to take her line back from Latricia, but she is nervous, and her oratory falls flat.

The cameras pan around the center, take a few shots of cute children working intently with the playdough, and begin to pack up their gear.

"What time will this be on?" Alice asks in her gruff voice.

"Probably 6 o'clock," says Channel 5.

"6 o'clock," echo the other two channels.

The rest of the day runs smoothly, powered by our elation at the mornings' victories with the movers and with the press. At 6 o'clock, we all crowd around the TV in Alice's messy apartment, flicking through the channels, looking for ourselves. Alice's walls are painted dark brown with an eye level strip of mirror tiles, numbers of which have fallen down. The formica table -- just like ours -- is covered with dishes full of breakfast's leftover Fruit Loops. Her dirty laundry is piled on the orangish (once orange, now brown) couch. She doesn't bother apologizing.

There is news of Carter meeting with Sadat at Camp David, news of another point increase in the cost of living index, up to 12%, news of a new detergent that can make your clothes whiter than white. There's news of some disgruntled people complaining that Jim Jones is keeping their relatives in Jonestown against their will. Finally, there we are, on all three channels at just about the same time, each for about 15 seconds. Flicking rapidly back and forth, we see that one channel shows the children and remarks at our stubbornness, another has me being interrupted by Latricia, and the third shows most of Latricia's fine speech.

"Shit, is that all?" Alice complains.

"Hey, that's a lot," I say. "We did good. We're gonna win this."

My words are punctuated by a short group sigh which mixes people's various levels of hope and skepticism, and translates to a highly tentative "maybe."

The Zone of Proximal Development

20.

I want to figure out how to integrate my current thinking about schools into this narrative, but for now, I will just jump cut.

It is now February 2010. In the past month, I must have interviewed 50 people to work as tutors in the Oakland Parents Together tutoring program, funded by No Child Left Behind. Since we don’t have much of a training budget, I use these interviews to do some training. I talk about the zone of proximal development (Vygotsky). I say, “This is a fancy way of saying, if you give a students work that is too easy, they won’t learn anything new. If you give students work that is too hard, they will become frustrated and won’t learn anything new. The art of teaching is in finding this zone for each student.”

I continue: “Sadly, the schools have stopped utilizing this concept and now teach standards instead of students. Every teacher at every grade level (at least K-5) is required to be on the same page of the reading program” (I know this is true of Oakland; I don’t know about other districts). “Interestingly, this practice does increase test scores by targeting instruction to those mid-level students who score at the 45th percentile or so, and moving them up past 50, which is considered ‘proficient’ – students for whom the standards are actually in their zone of proximal development (ZPD). But it also leaves the vast majority of students in Oakland who are below basic or far below basic way behind, scratching their heads. This is where we (OPT tutoring) comes in.”

After about the 40th time repeating this spiel to my prospective tutors, a light bulb went off. Why do we tolerate this? This is a ridiculous way to teach. It’s essentially triage, sifting through the wreckage of the school system for the few who might have a decent chance of “surviving,” writing off the rest.

When I shared this story, a friend of mine reminded me that the scripted reading programs were introduced for three half-way decent reasons. One, so that the large number of students in Oakland who moved from school to school would not be lost; two, to make sure that flatland (poorer) students were exposed to the same standards as hill (richer) students; and three, to compensate for the fact that students in the flatlands tended to be served by more inexperienced teachers, who would be helped by the script.

I should also add that there are a handful of superteachers who can teach the standards and at the same time differentiate instruction for those who are not yet ready for standards level work. But, from what I understand, the differentiation happens rarely.

One thing I like about the concept of the ZPD is that it can be applied to almost any situation. It implies that in every situation, there is always an optimal way forward based on understanding what we know and what’s the next thing we need to know. In particular it can be applied to the situation in the schools. We know that the 70s and 80s tried many innovations collectively described as “individualized instruction.” Many children were left behind, so the system shifted focusto the point of obsession on the standards. Individualization tended to give too many students work that was too easy; standards obsession gives too many students work that is too hard. The new ZPD would include standards instruction along with a massive effort to reach students where they are. Tutoring can do this, though it often doesn’t. Tutoring programs need to develop best practices and agree to follow them, rather than rely on the haphazard approaches presently operating. Bringing back teacher aides would be another helpful approach with the additional benefit of providing parents with employment in the schools.

The vision we have for schools is that the K-12 program will embrace the most significant reform program that came out of the Civil Rights Movement: namely, Head Start: (1) Small adult-student ratios, (2) Hands-on, constructivist learning, (3) Collegial, friendly relationships between teachers and parents. We will expound further on this vision later.