Another Fall

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.