12.
After my experience at Raphael Weill, I was delighted to substitute day-to-day. I let go my dream of ever having my own classroom, and enjoyed the stresslessness of going to a different school every day. I also was able to spend time being a father to my new son, Benjamin Cisco.
I had a brief bout of post-partem depression just after he was born – yes, men get it too – in the midst of the stress of Raphael Weill as well, and the feeling was of being trapped. Benjy, as we called him, had a touch of colic, and was sometimes inconsolable at bedtime. Many was the time I snatched him up nervously in his crying fit, took him out to the car, strapped him in his car seat, and drove him around the block until he fell asleep. I had yet to learn the crying was a baby’s job.
I borrowed a little money from my father, and we bought a three bedroom Victorian house in Noe Valley for $29, 500. Sasha and I reached a certain equilibrium, a sweet peace together that I remember exemplified by a scene when we were visiting my parents in Wisconsin. We brought peace to that family as well with the first grandchild. My father stopped getting into edgy arguments with Sasha over the role of women, arguments unsubtly laced with hints of anti-Semitism. One evening, we walked down the hill toward the lake, each of us holding one of Benjy’s hands, chanting as he bounced along proto-walking, “Bookie-na-na…bookie-na-na…” Benjy’s idiosyncratic word for his bottle.
I spent my free time working on a short story originally titled “A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire,” later changed because of the PLP’s shift away from Maoism to “Fighting Back is Winning.” The story was based on the true story of a striking oil worker who was run over and killed by a scab truck. The story was replete with sectarian references to the PLP and SDS, but I felt like I had created a real working class woman character in the guy’s wife, and that I was onto something in my description of how he was feeling as he died, a recurrent theme in my stories and novels.
In the fall of 1971, I stumbled upon an organization called the Organization of Unemployed Teachers (OUT) that had managed to attract the press. I began working in the organization as a Communist. We, a former PLP member and I, formed a committee of the organization called the committee for Jobs in the Public Schools. We called a meeting, got the press to announce it, much to my surprise, and 70 people showed up.
Sasha and I renewed our conflicts around the amount of time I was spending at meetings. We would negotiate legalistic contracts involving hours of meetings traded for hours of child care, and I felt myself running out of hours. By the Thanksgiving, I was ready to call it quits with her. My political work too convinced me that I needed to be all the way in the party. I decided to join the party, and in making that decision, I fully understood that it would cost me my marriage. I didn’t tell either Sasha or the party my decision. I waited until we went on vacation over the Christmas holidays.
The car trip to Baja was unreal. It was as if we were traveling in jello, my secret congealing the air between us. Unable to separate my long-term and short-term goals, I imagined that we would get to the Mexican beach, I would tell her of my plans to join the party, and we would have poignant, good-bye sex as we made our separation plans.
The Baja desert with its prickly pears and mesquite reflected the desolation that had come between us. The beach at Ensenada was cold, dirty, not much a beach at all. The motel was painted a garish yellow even inside, and smelled of urine.
“I want to join the party, Sasha,” I finally blurted on first night in the motel as soon as Benjy had fallen asleep, and we were cuddling together, me filled with these misguided fantasies of break-up sex.
Surprisingly – though only to me – Sasha went off. “You brought me all the way here to tell me you were breaking up with me? With me and our one-year-old child? And you were expecting to have SEX with me after that? Get away from me!”
I sheepishly crawled over the other bed, thinking coldly that I should have waited until after we had sex to tell her. I could feel that hard black knot of coldness in my belly again, that strange voracious singularity like a tiny black hole that sucked up my every human emotion and left me numb.
Cutting our vacation short, we left for home the next day, deep in a cloud of gloomy silence, silent gloom, racing through the desert which had come between us like poison gas, killing every sign of life.
By the time we approached the border, Sasha surprised me again. She started crying. “Henry, I’m not that strong. I know you think I’m strong, but I’m not. Go ahead. Join the fucking party if you want to, if that’s the only thing that makes you feel alive. I can’t stop you. I know I’ve always said it would be a deal breaker, but I guess it isn’t. I’ll live with it some way.”
She was right that I did see her as strong – stubborn even – and that it never occurred to me that she would acquiesce in my decision, that I would have my chance to realize my dreams as a real party member, maybe even a leader some day, and I could keep her and keep our family intact.
I was flummoxed. How could she change the rules like this? I was supposed to be free once I told her I was joining the party. I was overcome with disappointment. And yet, a large part of me was relieved as well. I loved my son, and I didn’t want him to have to suffer from a separation and divorce.
Then she surprised me again. She explained to me that it was okay if I had feelings about needing to leave the marriage – that just having the feelings didn’t mean I actually needed to leave. As we rolled down the highway in her red Plymouth Valiant convertible back into our life, this insight hit me like a revelation: there was a serious difference between having feelings and acting on them. I think from the years of the impulsive sixties, I regarded my impulses as sacred. Here was the first time I really got it that maybe my feelings weren’t all that reliable.
On the one hand this insight started me on the way to a long-term healing process, one that suffered many ups and downs over the next decades. On the other hand, I felt trapped. Here I had come all the way to Mexico to end my marriage and reclaim my freedom, and I couldn’t do it.
Still, I was able to find my love for Sasha again in her very acquiescence to the cause, and I was delighted to be able to finally get inside the party. I called the local leader, Freddy Jerome, when we got back to San Francisco. I asked him if I could join and he said it would be good if I joined. He asked me to make a list of all the people I knew who might have money to give the party, a list I never made. I gave him a manifesto I had written concerning the role of sexism. Sasha had convinced me that the party had a serious problem with women, rarely elevating them to leadership, mostly relegating them to typing and making coffee and sandwiches. My manifesto argued that we would hasten the revolution if we were able to tap the revolutionary fervor of the women’s movement. Freddy took the document in stride. I don’t know if he ever read it.
Showing posts with label competition. Show all posts
Showing posts with label competition. Show all posts
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Early Teaching
8.
It isn’t quite true what I said earlier, that I had never thought of becoming a teacher. There was a moment when William and I were hanging out in Colorado on a break in our undergraduate programs that he turned me on to Summerhill. The idea was that if you gave students enough freedom and enough choices, they would eventually figure out what they wanted to do and take charge of their own education. This concept resonated with my – and a lot of other peoples’ – sixties’ sensibility.
By the time I entered the credential program at Berkeley, these ideas had spread to the mainstream, with numerous elaborations from Jonathan Kozol, John Holt, Herb Kohl and others. The credential program assigned these texts, yet in our visitations to Berkeley schools, it was clear few teachers were implementing the ideas. The classrooms we observed were pretty traditional.
That winter, I started student teaching with a teacher who was trying to implement some choices in his classroom. But when I found myself in front of the class, a horrific anxiety overcame me, a foreshadowing of my future career as a teacher. How do you “control” a class when you don’t believe in controlling a class?
For one of my seminal evaluations, one of my professors came to the class to videotape a lesson. I had planned what I thought was an innovative approach to cooperative learning, using Cuisennaire rods, these color coded wooden sticks with different lengths representing different numbers, so if you put the blue “2” next to the red “4,” the length matched the green “6.” I grouped the class into 5 groups of 5 and gave them each multiple sets of rods. The idea was for them on their own to figure out the relationships between the rods and explain their findings. The students, however, were more interested in their relationships with each other, and began throwing the rods around the classroom. I froze, clueless as how to deal with the situation. Finally, the professor decided that was enough videotaping and the teacher bailed me out by taking over the class. I was steeped in shame.
A footnote: I got a C in the class that oversaw my student teaching, a bad grade in graduate school. I protested, but got nowhere. However, just then the School of Education decided to reduce competition by eliminating grades and utilizing a Pass/Fail system. The great irony was that on my transcript, the “C” was crossed out and replaced by a “P.” But you could still clearly see the “C.” This is a small example of the ambivalence with which the education establishment treated “progressive” reforms. The school system is expert at implementing changes which in reality change nothing at all.
Because of my weak performance in this more liberal class, in the spring, the dean of the ed school assigned me to a very traditional class with a strict black teacher not averse to using the occasional bop on the head to keep things under control. She was a good teacher though, and I thrived in this environment when discipline wasn’t a factor, even when I took over the class for 3 days. I began to find my sea-legs as a teacher, having the class make crystal sets, read Langston Hughes plays, and debate the merits of the contending positions in the Civil Rights movement between Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. My proudest moment, was when white boy (Berkeley was fairly well integrated at the time) from the hills staunchly defended Malcolm’s commitment to self-defense by any means necessary.
I didn’t realize that this would be the only full realization of my potential as an elementary school teacher. Subsequent events prevented me from ever really having a successful experience in my own elementary class.
I got a teaching job in the San Francisco public schools, McKinley Elementary, across Market Street on Castro. 32 students, 5th grade. I was so nervous that first day, and the first month, and the first semester, I couldn’t think. In the first ten minutes of standing in front of the class, I tried to come on tough. A kid made a funny noise. I sent him to the principal’s office, a gross overreaction. Soon many kids were making funny noises. I couldn’t send them all to the office. Soon enough, I lost control. I was totally conflicted and confused about my role, wanting to offer them freedom in the Kohl-Holt-Kozol tradition, also wanting to please Mr. Susoyeff, a stern, bald-headed Russian, a former military officer in command of the school.
It was a mixed class, but it was the black kids that gave me the most grief. I kept them after school, but then in an effort to bond with them I took them to the Jr. Museum up the hill, rewarding their misbehavior, showing myself as a push-over. I tried to set up an individualized reading program as I’d been taught to do in my credential program but it took weeks for me to meet with students one-on-one, and most of them slipped through the cracks.
The children were out of control. Throwing crayons was the one activity the students were into. There were fights. When I tried to make Eddie Johnson sit down, he came at me with a broken bottle. I had to suspend him, violating my principles. I couldn’t do this job, and on a minute by minute basis, I faced my failure.
Yet Sasha was there for me, rubbing my head with sympathy, offering advice, soothing my frazzled nerves.
One day I was so nervous that I got to school and noticed that I had on two different shoes. Luckily I was early, so I raced home and changed, and returned to school before the bell.
I met an intern at the school, a black man who had been involved in the San Francisco State Strike, Jeremiah Jackson. We became friends; he became my first black friend. We had dinner with him and his wife Bliss, a quiet white woman, powerful in her own way.
“The racism at that school is tough to take,” he said. “You look around in the classrooms and all the black boys are isolated at the back of the class and given busy work. Even in the class I’m working in, the teacher professes to be liberal and all that, it’s the same story, black boys in the back.”
“The teacher across the hall from me?” I said. “In the lunchroom, she talks about shoving the black kid’s heads into the pencil sharpener.”“We got to do something, man.”
I wasn’t eager to take this on, I had enough problems. But I took one of his posters, a picture of Malcolm X, and put it on my bulletin board.
The principal hauled me into the office. “You of all people, Mr. Hitz, should know that we don’t need to encourage rebellion among these people. They get enough of that stuff at home. You need to calm them down, get them to work within the system.”
I took the poster down.
A few days later, I was working late in the classroom. At around 5 PM, after all the other teachers had gone, I started to leave myself. Jeremiah was in the hallway on a ladder, plastering posters all over the walls: Huey P. Newton in his classical chieftain’s chair, the Panthers with guns on the steps of the State Capitol in Sacramento, Geronimo, Malcolm, Pancho Villa.
It was January by now, and my class was more or less functioning. The students and I had gotten used to each other. At the principal’s urging, I established three levels of reading groups, also against my principles, but it seemed to be working.
The principal called me in the office. “We won’t be renewing your contract for the spring, Mr. Hitz.”
“How come? I know it’s taken awhile, but my class in finally under control.”
“Really? I was observing the class the other day and Ollie had his feet up on the desk.”
I called Jeremiah. “The same thing happened to me, man! They’re transferring me to another school.”
I spoke with my Party study group leader, a teacher herself, Ann, an earnest woman, nervous herself. “It’s not because of the discipline. They don’t care about the discipline. All new teachers have those problems. It’s because you’re friends with Jeremiah.”
Jeremiah and I decided to fight. We called a meeting of all the parents we knew at one of the parents’ houses. About 10 parents showed up, along Ann and another Party member. We decided to have a picket line at the school on Monday morning and call a community meeting that evening.
Arriving at school that morning seeing the signs, “Rehire Jackson and Hitz,” brought tears to my eyes. No one had ever fought for me like this. Here were black people fighting for me. And Sasha was with me all the way, at my side, whispering little encouragements.
Over a hundred parents showed up at the meeting that night. The beleaguered principal attempted to field outraged comments from the parents. “You want a class where children throw paper airplanes?” he said, referring to my class.
“We don’t care about that,” one of the parents defended me, “We want teachers who can relate to the students, young teachers like Jackson and Blatz.”
Jeremiah and I were called downtown the next day. “I hear you had fun last night,” the Director of Personnel said.
“That wasn’t fun,” Jeremiah said. ”That was serious.”
The upshot was that Jeremiah got his job back at the school and I didn’t. But the Party had been there for me. I moved closer to their bosom. The experience at McKinley had changed me. I got a glimpse of your potential power, of the power of the working class. Just as important, the experience unleashed a power within myself that enabled me to treat students as an ally to their parents, so in many more cases – not all – I was able to stand up to their nonsense.
It isn’t quite true what I said earlier, that I had never thought of becoming a teacher. There was a moment when William and I were hanging out in Colorado on a break in our undergraduate programs that he turned me on to Summerhill. The idea was that if you gave students enough freedom and enough choices, they would eventually figure out what they wanted to do and take charge of their own education. This concept resonated with my – and a lot of other peoples’ – sixties’ sensibility.
By the time I entered the credential program at Berkeley, these ideas had spread to the mainstream, with numerous elaborations from Jonathan Kozol, John Holt, Herb Kohl and others. The credential program assigned these texts, yet in our visitations to Berkeley schools, it was clear few teachers were implementing the ideas. The classrooms we observed were pretty traditional.
That winter, I started student teaching with a teacher who was trying to implement some choices in his classroom. But when I found myself in front of the class, a horrific anxiety overcame me, a foreshadowing of my future career as a teacher. How do you “control” a class when you don’t believe in controlling a class?
For one of my seminal evaluations, one of my professors came to the class to videotape a lesson. I had planned what I thought was an innovative approach to cooperative learning, using Cuisennaire rods, these color coded wooden sticks with different lengths representing different numbers, so if you put the blue “2” next to the red “4,” the length matched the green “6.” I grouped the class into 5 groups of 5 and gave them each multiple sets of rods. The idea was for them on their own to figure out the relationships between the rods and explain their findings. The students, however, were more interested in their relationships with each other, and began throwing the rods around the classroom. I froze, clueless as how to deal with the situation. Finally, the professor decided that was enough videotaping and the teacher bailed me out by taking over the class. I was steeped in shame.
A footnote: I got a C in the class that oversaw my student teaching, a bad grade in graduate school. I protested, but got nowhere. However, just then the School of Education decided to reduce competition by eliminating grades and utilizing a Pass/Fail system. The great irony was that on my transcript, the “C” was crossed out and replaced by a “P.” But you could still clearly see the “C.” This is a small example of the ambivalence with which the education establishment treated “progressive” reforms. The school system is expert at implementing changes which in reality change nothing at all.
Because of my weak performance in this more liberal class, in the spring, the dean of the ed school assigned me to a very traditional class with a strict black teacher not averse to using the occasional bop on the head to keep things under control. She was a good teacher though, and I thrived in this environment when discipline wasn’t a factor, even when I took over the class for 3 days. I began to find my sea-legs as a teacher, having the class make crystal sets, read Langston Hughes plays, and debate the merits of the contending positions in the Civil Rights movement between Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. My proudest moment, was when white boy (Berkeley was fairly well integrated at the time) from the hills staunchly defended Malcolm’s commitment to self-defense by any means necessary.
I didn’t realize that this would be the only full realization of my potential as an elementary school teacher. Subsequent events prevented me from ever really having a successful experience in my own elementary class.
I got a teaching job in the San Francisco public schools, McKinley Elementary, across Market Street on Castro. 32 students, 5th grade. I was so nervous that first day, and the first month, and the first semester, I couldn’t think. In the first ten minutes of standing in front of the class, I tried to come on tough. A kid made a funny noise. I sent him to the principal’s office, a gross overreaction. Soon many kids were making funny noises. I couldn’t send them all to the office. Soon enough, I lost control. I was totally conflicted and confused about my role, wanting to offer them freedom in the Kohl-Holt-Kozol tradition, also wanting to please Mr. Susoyeff, a stern, bald-headed Russian, a former military officer in command of the school.
It was a mixed class, but it was the black kids that gave me the most grief. I kept them after school, but then in an effort to bond with them I took them to the Jr. Museum up the hill, rewarding their misbehavior, showing myself as a push-over. I tried to set up an individualized reading program as I’d been taught to do in my credential program but it took weeks for me to meet with students one-on-one, and most of them slipped through the cracks.
The children were out of control. Throwing crayons was the one activity the students were into. There were fights. When I tried to make Eddie Johnson sit down, he came at me with a broken bottle. I had to suspend him, violating my principles. I couldn’t do this job, and on a minute by minute basis, I faced my failure.
Yet Sasha was there for me, rubbing my head with sympathy, offering advice, soothing my frazzled nerves.
One day I was so nervous that I got to school and noticed that I had on two different shoes. Luckily I was early, so I raced home and changed, and returned to school before the bell.
I met an intern at the school, a black man who had been involved in the San Francisco State Strike, Jeremiah Jackson. We became friends; he became my first black friend. We had dinner with him and his wife Bliss, a quiet white woman, powerful in her own way.
“The racism at that school is tough to take,” he said. “You look around in the classrooms and all the black boys are isolated at the back of the class and given busy work. Even in the class I’m working in, the teacher professes to be liberal and all that, it’s the same story, black boys in the back.”
“The teacher across the hall from me?” I said. “In the lunchroom, she talks about shoving the black kid’s heads into the pencil sharpener.”“We got to do something, man.”
I wasn’t eager to take this on, I had enough problems. But I took one of his posters, a picture of Malcolm X, and put it on my bulletin board.
The principal hauled me into the office. “You of all people, Mr. Hitz, should know that we don’t need to encourage rebellion among these people. They get enough of that stuff at home. You need to calm them down, get them to work within the system.”
I took the poster down.
A few days later, I was working late in the classroom. At around 5 PM, after all the other teachers had gone, I started to leave myself. Jeremiah was in the hallway on a ladder, plastering posters all over the walls: Huey P. Newton in his classical chieftain’s chair, the Panthers with guns on the steps of the State Capitol in Sacramento, Geronimo, Malcolm, Pancho Villa.
It was January by now, and my class was more or less functioning. The students and I had gotten used to each other. At the principal’s urging, I established three levels of reading groups, also against my principles, but it seemed to be working.
The principal called me in the office. “We won’t be renewing your contract for the spring, Mr. Hitz.”
“How come? I know it’s taken awhile, but my class in finally under control.”
“Really? I was observing the class the other day and Ollie had his feet up on the desk.”
I called Jeremiah. “The same thing happened to me, man! They’re transferring me to another school.”
I spoke with my Party study group leader, a teacher herself, Ann, an earnest woman, nervous herself. “It’s not because of the discipline. They don’t care about the discipline. All new teachers have those problems. It’s because you’re friends with Jeremiah.”
Jeremiah and I decided to fight. We called a meeting of all the parents we knew at one of the parents’ houses. About 10 parents showed up, along Ann and another Party member. We decided to have a picket line at the school on Monday morning and call a community meeting that evening.
Arriving at school that morning seeing the signs, “Rehire Jackson and Hitz,” brought tears to my eyes. No one had ever fought for me like this. Here were black people fighting for me. And Sasha was with me all the way, at my side, whispering little encouragements.
Over a hundred parents showed up at the meeting that night. The beleaguered principal attempted to field outraged comments from the parents. “You want a class where children throw paper airplanes?” he said, referring to my class.
“We don’t care about that,” one of the parents defended me, “We want teachers who can relate to the students, young teachers like Jackson and Blatz.”
Jeremiah and I were called downtown the next day. “I hear you had fun last night,” the Director of Personnel said.
“That wasn’t fun,” Jeremiah said. ”That was serious.”
The upshot was that Jeremiah got his job back at the school and I didn’t. But the Party had been there for me. I moved closer to their bosom. The experience at McKinley had changed me. I got a glimpse of your potential power, of the power of the working class. Just as important, the experience unleashed a power within myself that enabled me to treat students as an ally to their parents, so in many more cases – not all – I was able to stand up to their nonsense.
Saturday, August 15, 2009
High School
3.
My real schooling in the art of competition began when I started boarding school at 15. My father had gone to Phillips Exeter Academy for a year after graduating from public high school in Milwaukee. It was assumed that I would go there as well, and I wanted to. I wanted more academic challenge than I was getting at Country Day. Most of all, I wanted the prestige of going to one of the pre-eminent prep schools in the country.
My parents drove me there from Wisconsin. I remember the feeling as we arrived on campus, the feeling of arriving. I had made it. I was in precisely the place I needed to be. I looked forward to the hard work, to the challenge, to the competition.
The campus was impressive: beautiful red brick ivy covered Colonial style buildings, spacious grounds. Swarmed over by boys in sport jackets and ties, rushing to their classes, where they sat around the famous oval Harkness tables in groups of 12-15. I was eager to join the ranks of the truly well educated.
Then I got hit with David Copperfield. I had always liked to read, but I wasn’t a terribly fast reader. I had never encountered a book anywhere near as just plan thick as David Copperfield. We were given assignments of 50 pages per night. Plus, I was taking French, German, Math, and Physical Sciences, all with ample amounts of homework.
I would lie on my bed surrounded by books, a flutter of panic in my chest, and fall asleep. For the first time in my life, I just couldn’t keep up.
It got so bad, that going against my complete terror of admitting that something was wrong or of saying much of anything for fear of saying the wrong thing, I lingered after class one afternoon and spoke with my English teacher, Mr. Wheat. “I’m having a hard time with David Copperfield, Mr. Wheat,” I said timidly.
“Well, Hitz,” he said authoritatively. “You’ll just have to read it twice.”
It was years before I ever asked a teacher for help again.
I got a D in English on my first report card. I was devastated. I went into a funk so deep that the only way I could feel remotely human was to give up.
My sister Lisi, the one true intellectual in my family who was 12 years older than me, had given me Catcher in the Rye and The Billie Holliday Story, that previous year. On my own I had discovered On the Road. My D in English inspired me to embrace a rebellious persona. I started dressing as sloppily as I could without violating the dress code and hanging out in the butt room – a room in the dorm where students with parental permission were allowed to smoke, and spent most of my time “punting” – just not bothering to do my homework.
I was even able to redeem my English grade a bit by writing a disingenuous satire of the beats that earned me my first and only Exeter A+.
But in retrospect, that D set off in me a depression that sank me for years. I had descended from second in my class of 20 at Country Day to 150th out of 200 in my class at Exeter. The fact that the playing field was more prestigious didn’t much mitigate the gloom.
My roommate Peter Aldrich was having difficulty as well. Peter was an affable Catholic boy from Wellesley, and we got along. He had the distinct advantage of having an older brother at the school who was a hockey player and a brain, a member of the coolest house filled with the students who excelled in both athletics and academics, but were cool about it, not all “Pozo.”
There was this odd cultural debate going on at Exeter at the time between the “Pozos” and the “Negos.” We were so special, the debate was even written up in Time Magazine, though how the debate got started and who coined the terms I couldn’t say. It wasn’t very profound: the Pozos saw the glass as half full, the Negos, half empty. About that deep. I quickly adopted a persona which was the “Negoist” of the Negos. The glass is completely empty, I would have said.
Being Peter’s roommate, I got to sit with this elite bunch in the dining hall, so I was able to at least seem like I was with the in-crowd. That protected me from the worst of the hazing. It didn’t take long for me to figure out that the real curriculum at Exeter was hazing.
The hazing ranged between a mild jockeying for popularity points to cruel applications of shaving cream. The iconic gesture was a cock of the head and the squealing of air forced through pursed lips targeted at anyone, even a friend, who might say something slightly uncool, or a scapegoat for whom the raspberry was a gesture of utter contempt.
I remember one point in my first winter. It was already dark when I was on my way to the dining hall, filled with anger probably about having to put up with so much pettiness in my classes. A small tow-headed boy with glasses, a “prep” as we referred to the freshmen, made the mistake of crossing my path. I slammed him into the snow bank with a full body block.
Peter’s brother Dwayne witnessed this assault. “Did you just slam that kid into the snow?”
“I did,” I said, smiling proudly.
“Wow,” Dwayne said admiringly.
There was an elaborate, arcane language to the hazing that went something like, “Du bist ein nammmmmy-keeehoouutt!” that would be hurled at some target, a dominance gesture similar to what baboons might make in the wild, an utter dismissal of the target’s humanity.
With few exceptions, the teachers were stern and cold. They expected excellence, and if you didn’t measure up, you were subject to scorn. My French teacher, Mr. Beaumont, was a classic example. He had a twitch himself, rumored to be the result of a World War II trauma. His eyes would blink at odd times, his body would suffer periodic tremors. My French pronunciation was admittedly weak, and I was exceedingly nervous performing in front of the class. Mr. Beaumont took great enjoyment out of belittling my accent, mocking me, inciting the rest of the class to laugh at me. “Monsieur Eetz,” he would say. “Did you DO the homework?” Sometimes I had done it, and sometimes I hadn’t, but the harder he mocked, the less I did.
Thanks to Mr. Beaumont, I do not currently speak a language other than English, though I am seriously challenging my embarrassment to learn Spanish.
Between Mr. Wheat, Mr. Beaumont, and my second year English teacher, Bobby Bates, I had some of the worst teachers imaginable at what was supposed to be one of the best schools imaginable. All told, at Exeter, of the ones I can remember, I had 2 excellent teachers, 4 so-so teachers, and 3 rotten teachers – a ratio I suspect that is not that different from what most students experience in High School.
With class sizes of 12-15, there was no excuse not to get individual attention. But with the exception of the two aforementioned excellent classes, I got next to none.
There was one adult in the entire school over three years that took a genuine interest in my welfare, who talked to me about things I needed to talk about, who manifested any human warmth: the janitor of my Hoyt Hall, my dorm, Lon. I don’t recall his last name. He was a down home New Hampshire man, full of the ay-yups and other distinguishing features of the dialect. He was probably about 50 years old, tall, with thinning, gray, wavy hair. He wore khaki work pants and a matching khaki work shirt every day. He had a thousand keys on his chain, and you knew when he was coming by the rattle of his keys. He would joke around with us about sex. We could talk to him of the girls we fancied. It might have even been he that slipped us the 2 inch by 2 inch blue copy of “Behind the Green Door,” more than a decade before the movie. Here in this rarefied enclave of the owning class filled with heirs to unimaginable fortunes, the one breath of humanity came from the working class. This lesson was not lost on me.
As I later came to embrace Marxism, it became clear to me that this school was training us to ruthlessly exploit the working class, to be the oppressors of the empire. The coldness and cruelty were deliberate efforts to force us to stuff our own feelings so that we too could become cold and cruel with impunity in the face of the blatant moral iniquity that our privilege represented.
At my 25th Exeter Reunion, in the middle of the major fundraising pitch immediately following the lobster dinner, I made a speech. “My unwritten Exeter novel is entitled ‘Gadfly in the Ointment,’ so I would be remiss if I didn’t fulfill my role. What’s wrong with this picture? You take a magnificent campus, fill it with the finest teachers, state-of-the-art libraries, laboratories, and gymnasiums, class sizes of 12, you take all these fabulous educational resources and you lavish them on the people who need them absolutely the least…” Peter, one of the leaders of the meeting, said, “That’s my old roommate,” not proudly I would say, “Exeter alumni are very generous in their communities…” said another leader.
A surprising number of people came up to me afterward and thanked me, but most of the rest of my classmates simply kept their distance.
The irony, though, is that lavishing all those educational resources on the privileged still doesn’t result in very good education. As long as we have an economic system based on competition, the entire school system, including the ghetto schools and the elite academies, will serve that system, and will itself be primarily based on competition. In the arena of social competition, the vast majority loses, and the winners win but a few crumbs of privilege at the expense of their humanity.
A small example: Exeter routinely taught calculus to its seniors, and I learned all the formulas and thought I more or less got it as it referred to the area under a curve. It wasn’t until I studied physics in college that someone told me that calculus was invented by Newton to explain the acceleration of gravity. How much more meaningful it would have been to have known that from the beginning. This goes back to the argument about constructivism: students learn from their experience. What if the teacher had led us through Newton’s process of deriving calculus by experiment?
I did get one important thing out of my education at Exeter: I learned how to write fiction. We were given assignments to write short stories, at least 3 or 4 a year. By my senior year, I had figured a few things out. One was not to take so many classes. I even found time to write a short story for extra credit for Mr. Finch, one of the two excellent teachers I experienced. The story was about a man walking alone in the desert, dying of thirst. He hallucinates a bus stopping for him, and tries to get on, but the bus is a mirage, and he dies. The story was a good summary of my emotional landscape at the time.
Years later after my son Benjamin graduated from Lowell High in San Francisco, itself a prestigious school, albeit public, I asked him how many short stories he had been assigned to write.
“None,” he said.
I wasn’t particularly homesick at Exeter. I wasn’t aware of missing my parents, for whom I had little respect. I missed my friends, but compensated for it by writing them letters and mailing them with obscene references on the envelope: “Don’t give up the shit.” To the dismay of my friends’ parents.
When my youngest son, Slater, now 14, expressed interest in going to Exeter a few years back, I told him no. Even if the school had changed now that it was co-ed, I wasn’t willing to sacrifice my relationship with him. Because even the students who flourished at Exeter or any boarding school for that matter will lose much of their relationship with their parents. In the adolescent years, you need your parents more than ever, even as you believe the opposite. You need someone to stand up to the awful feelings that spew out of you, someone even to target them at so that you don’t turn them inward against yourself. That’s the role of the parent of an adolescent: give them something real to rebel against, something, or someone, who knows deep down that you don’t really mean all the mean things you need to say.
Even as it cost me my relationship with my parents, I liked the independence I had at boarding school. My sister, Lisi, who was in her late twenties, lived outside of Boston at the time, which was 50 miles south of Exeter. She was a curator at Sturbridge Village, a restored Colonial town that demonstrated how New Englanders lived 200 years before. She signed me out to go to her house on Thanksgiving my first year, and got me drunk on martinis. After that, she would sign me out whenever I asked, so that I would go wherever I wanted.
On my first trip to Boston on my own, I went to the famous Harvard Liquor Store on Harvard Square, where they reportedly served anyone, and nervously tried to buy vodka. “How old are you?” asked the elderly clerk.
“18,” I said. In reality, I was 15.
“You have to be 21,” the clerk said.
“Oh, I thought it was 18,” I mumbled on my way out. Disappointed, I made my way back to town, got a $10 room at the Copley Square Hotel, and wandered around downtown Boston. It wasn’t long before I came upon Sculley Square, the closest Boston had to a Skid Row. And what should appear before me like a revelation but the Old Howard Burlesque Theater. The sign said you had to be 18, but they didn’t check. I paid my $3.00 and settled into the dingy darkened theater that smelled of urine and the deodorant cakes they put in the urinal. There were perhaps 10 other denizens of the street in there with me. They had a terrible live orchestra and some seriously awful comedians. But the girls! The strippers! Dancing, prancing across the stage in their sparkling outfits. These moments made it all worth it. Off came the wardrobe parts, one by one. First the sparkly gloves, the sequined vest, the shimmering blouse, the dazzling skirt, down to sparkly bra and g-string. The bra snapped off and her nipples had pasties on them with dangling jewels she loved to swing around. And on my very first visit, in puritanical Boston in 1959, Miss Tempest Storm shimmied her g-string loose and revealed her magnificent bush of pubic hair, and I came in my pants. My romance with sleaze had begun.
The Old Howard was the antithesis of Exeter, a monument to failure, and I felt right at home.
In the spring of my Lower Middle year (that’s sophomore in English – places like Exeter always have to be different), I made another foray into Boston, this time armed with a newly minted fake ID. It was crude as hell, Naval ROTC, but it was laminated and had a picture of me, and it apparently took the liquor dealers sufficiently off the hook to make a sale. I scored 3 pints of Smirnoff, stocking up
for the Spring Dance.
I had invited a girl from Pine Lake, one of my gang who was spending the year at a Boston finishing school. We’d gotten drunk together and made out the previous summer, though the next day she made sure I got the message that she didn’t mean it. But I was sure she was as hungry for friendly companionship as I was, so I was certain she would come. I rented a tux and everything.
She decided not to come, and I decided, unconsciously, to see if I could get kicked out of school. I dressed myself up in the tux and drank one full pint of the vodka. I sang that song from a few years back all over the dorm: “A white sport coat and a pink carnation, I’m all dressed up for the dance.” (“Once you told me long ago, to the prom with me you’d go, now you’ve changed your mind it seems, another boy will have your dreams…”)
Mr. Dunbar, a straight-arrow math teacher and baseball coach, a guy who had upbraided me for my slovenly appearance on more than one occasion, made his dorm rounds as usual and came upon me puking in the bathroom. He said to one of the other students (my roommate Peter had of course gone to the dance with his girlfriend from Wellesley, MA), “Get this guy cleaned up and put him to bed.”
So there was a spark of humanity on the faculty after all. I didn’t get kicked out.
Why I stayed at the school is a question. While my father would have been disappointed if I had dropped out, he at one point in the summer before my Senior year, did give me that option. It was summer. You can forget how much you hate school in the summer. And, the promise of the prestige of an Exeter diploma kept me going. To say nothing of those wild weekends at the Old Howard Burlesque Theater in Boston.
Fortunately or unfortunately, drugs other than alcohol, cigarettes, and caffeine hadn’t hit Exeter yet in a big way. There was a story of a track star who attempted to buy peyote from a Texas mail order house. It was still quasi-legal, but they would only sell it to doctors or scientists, so he had to forge the name of the chair of the science department, whose name was John C. Hogg. The track star must have been a little nervous, because when he signed the name he wrote Hoggg. He got caught. For an ordinary mortal, this would have been cause for expulsion or even prosecution. But he had broken half the track records at Exeter (probably on benzedrine), so he was given restrictions, the mildest form of punishment. He had to be in his room at 8 o’clock every night for a month.
Some of the lessons of my Exeter experience were bitter. Prior to Exeter, I was overly shy and athletically spastic, but I knew I was smart. Exeter took that sense away from me and I hated it for that. My fantasies hadn’t developed a politics, but they were angry. On Saturday nights, the school showed movies in the gym. Not ordinary movies, not Ocean’s 11, or Visit to a Small Planet, or Sparticus, but artsy-fartsy movies like The Seventh Seal, Sundays and Cybelle, and Jules and Jim. I enjoyed what I could understand of the movies, but my favorite part was my fantasy of climbing up on the basketball hoops with a machine gun and mowing down every last one of the students. The name of that movie was If, which didn’t come out until 1968, about a group of British boarding school boys taking over their school with guns, which resonated with me absolutely.
Toward the end of the summer before my senior year, there appeared in the Milwaukee Journal, a letter entitled “The Pine Lake Snob Curtain.” It told of an experience the writer had of fishing on Pine Lake. Residents of the lake sailed, they didn’t fish, by and large. The fishermen were working class folk who brought their boats in on trailers and launched them at the required (and resented) public access point at the north end of the lake. The letter writer’s companion made a bad cast, and the hook went into his – the writer’s – eye. They docked their boat at the nearest pier and went up to several of the mansions, but no one would let them in even to make a call.
The last party of the year on Pine Lake on the Labor Day weekend was called Cup Night, at the Country Club, where they handed out trophies to the winning sailors. I wasn’t among the winners – I had given up that competitive struggle several years ago when we graduated from sluggish X class kid’s boats, -- with which I had won some races – to 20 foot C class scows, which were too big for me to handle properly. But I could party, and the Club didn’t hesitate to furnish us with champagne in exchange for our signatures on our parents’ accounts. So by 1 AM, I was fairly looped. I had my own jeep, which my father bought to haul boats, not explicitly for me, but I was the one who drove it. And that night, after the party, I intended to drive it to my friend Bill Wright’s house.
We lived at the end of a mile long private road which intersected near our house with another road through the Brumder estate, a collection of houses, perhaps 10 in all, of people related to the Brumders, an old Milwaukee family with fingers in most of Milwaukee’s main industries. But the Brumder Road had a gate constructed of chain link fencing, and the gate was sometimes locked, as it was this night. In my mind, this gate represented the Pine Lake Snob Curtain, and I wasn’t going to let it keep me from visiting my friend.
So, I switched the jeep to 4 wheel drive and drove right on through, bending the gate a full 15 degrees until it popped open. Exuberantly, I drove to my friend’s. It was thrilling of course to do something so terribly bad, of course. But there was a righteous political edge to this thrill. I was fighting the system for the working class fishermen.
The next morning, my mother woke me claiming the Chenequa police wanted to see me. I got up, still slightly high from the previous night’s celebrations.
“Did you drive through the Brumder Gate last night, Henry?” Chief Lutz asked point blank, an elderly cop with a big belly.
“Me? No, I didn’t.”
Like real policemen, they had me drive the jeep to the scene of the crime in order to re-enact it. My father accompanied me. The jeep had a red hydraulic lift on the front, and it fit the damage just perfectly, leaving tiny flecks of red paint on the galvanized wire diamonds.
“All right, I guess I did it,” I mumbled. Oddly, I didn’t feel bad, certainly not about doing it, but not about getting caught either.
My father spoke. “Well, Chief you do what you have to do. These kids have been experimenting with alcohol, and I’m sure that had something to do with it. But if you need to arrest him, you go ahead.”
“That’s okay, Dr. Hitz. We’ll leave it in your hands.”
If I hadn’t been white or from a family of means, I would have no doubt gone to jail, or at least juvenile hall. My father ineffectually grounded me for the last weekend of the year, and both he and my mother let me know with a barrage of darts from the eyes and little tsks from their lips just how disappointed they were at me, mostly for lying. But I could only marvel at how powerful the act had felt.
As I was leaving to return to school, I stopped by my grandmother’s cottage to say goodbye. She was 90 by then, but still living on her own. She hugged me. “I hear you got in some trouble,” she said. She slipped me five dollars. That woman had class.
I had to meet with the Brumder family lawyer and he got me to agree to make restitution. A month later from Exeter I sent the family patriarch a check for $200, with a note asking him to excuse “my usually but not always latent juvenile delinquent tendencies,” and he sent a message back through my father that all was forgiven.
My real schooling in the art of competition began when I started boarding school at 15. My father had gone to Phillips Exeter Academy for a year after graduating from public high school in Milwaukee. It was assumed that I would go there as well, and I wanted to. I wanted more academic challenge than I was getting at Country Day. Most of all, I wanted the prestige of going to one of the pre-eminent prep schools in the country.
My parents drove me there from Wisconsin. I remember the feeling as we arrived on campus, the feeling of arriving. I had made it. I was in precisely the place I needed to be. I looked forward to the hard work, to the challenge, to the competition.
The campus was impressive: beautiful red brick ivy covered Colonial style buildings, spacious grounds. Swarmed over by boys in sport jackets and ties, rushing to their classes, where they sat around the famous oval Harkness tables in groups of 12-15. I was eager to join the ranks of the truly well educated.
Then I got hit with David Copperfield. I had always liked to read, but I wasn’t a terribly fast reader. I had never encountered a book anywhere near as just plan thick as David Copperfield. We were given assignments of 50 pages per night. Plus, I was taking French, German, Math, and Physical Sciences, all with ample amounts of homework.
I would lie on my bed surrounded by books, a flutter of panic in my chest, and fall asleep. For the first time in my life, I just couldn’t keep up.
It got so bad, that going against my complete terror of admitting that something was wrong or of saying much of anything for fear of saying the wrong thing, I lingered after class one afternoon and spoke with my English teacher, Mr. Wheat. “I’m having a hard time with David Copperfield, Mr. Wheat,” I said timidly.
“Well, Hitz,” he said authoritatively. “You’ll just have to read it twice.”
It was years before I ever asked a teacher for help again.
I got a D in English on my first report card. I was devastated. I went into a funk so deep that the only way I could feel remotely human was to give up.
My sister Lisi, the one true intellectual in my family who was 12 years older than me, had given me Catcher in the Rye and The Billie Holliday Story, that previous year. On my own I had discovered On the Road. My D in English inspired me to embrace a rebellious persona. I started dressing as sloppily as I could without violating the dress code and hanging out in the butt room – a room in the dorm where students with parental permission were allowed to smoke, and spent most of my time “punting” – just not bothering to do my homework.
I was even able to redeem my English grade a bit by writing a disingenuous satire of the beats that earned me my first and only Exeter A+.
But in retrospect, that D set off in me a depression that sank me for years. I had descended from second in my class of 20 at Country Day to 150th out of 200 in my class at Exeter. The fact that the playing field was more prestigious didn’t much mitigate the gloom.
My roommate Peter Aldrich was having difficulty as well. Peter was an affable Catholic boy from Wellesley, and we got along. He had the distinct advantage of having an older brother at the school who was a hockey player and a brain, a member of the coolest house filled with the students who excelled in both athletics and academics, but were cool about it, not all “Pozo.”
There was this odd cultural debate going on at Exeter at the time between the “Pozos” and the “Negos.” We were so special, the debate was even written up in Time Magazine, though how the debate got started and who coined the terms I couldn’t say. It wasn’t very profound: the Pozos saw the glass as half full, the Negos, half empty. About that deep. I quickly adopted a persona which was the “Negoist” of the Negos. The glass is completely empty, I would have said.
Being Peter’s roommate, I got to sit with this elite bunch in the dining hall, so I was able to at least seem like I was with the in-crowd. That protected me from the worst of the hazing. It didn’t take long for me to figure out that the real curriculum at Exeter was hazing.
The hazing ranged between a mild jockeying for popularity points to cruel applications of shaving cream. The iconic gesture was a cock of the head and the squealing of air forced through pursed lips targeted at anyone, even a friend, who might say something slightly uncool, or a scapegoat for whom the raspberry was a gesture of utter contempt.
I remember one point in my first winter. It was already dark when I was on my way to the dining hall, filled with anger probably about having to put up with so much pettiness in my classes. A small tow-headed boy with glasses, a “prep” as we referred to the freshmen, made the mistake of crossing my path. I slammed him into the snow bank with a full body block.
Peter’s brother Dwayne witnessed this assault. “Did you just slam that kid into the snow?”
“I did,” I said, smiling proudly.
“Wow,” Dwayne said admiringly.
There was an elaborate, arcane language to the hazing that went something like, “Du bist ein nammmmmy-keeehoouutt!” that would be hurled at some target, a dominance gesture similar to what baboons might make in the wild, an utter dismissal of the target’s humanity.
With few exceptions, the teachers were stern and cold. They expected excellence, and if you didn’t measure up, you were subject to scorn. My French teacher, Mr. Beaumont, was a classic example. He had a twitch himself, rumored to be the result of a World War II trauma. His eyes would blink at odd times, his body would suffer periodic tremors. My French pronunciation was admittedly weak, and I was exceedingly nervous performing in front of the class. Mr. Beaumont took great enjoyment out of belittling my accent, mocking me, inciting the rest of the class to laugh at me. “Monsieur Eetz,” he would say. “Did you DO the homework?” Sometimes I had done it, and sometimes I hadn’t, but the harder he mocked, the less I did.
Thanks to Mr. Beaumont, I do not currently speak a language other than English, though I am seriously challenging my embarrassment to learn Spanish.
Between Mr. Wheat, Mr. Beaumont, and my second year English teacher, Bobby Bates, I had some of the worst teachers imaginable at what was supposed to be one of the best schools imaginable. All told, at Exeter, of the ones I can remember, I had 2 excellent teachers, 4 so-so teachers, and 3 rotten teachers – a ratio I suspect that is not that different from what most students experience in High School.
With class sizes of 12-15, there was no excuse not to get individual attention. But with the exception of the two aforementioned excellent classes, I got next to none.
There was one adult in the entire school over three years that took a genuine interest in my welfare, who talked to me about things I needed to talk about, who manifested any human warmth: the janitor of my Hoyt Hall, my dorm, Lon. I don’t recall his last name. He was a down home New Hampshire man, full of the ay-yups and other distinguishing features of the dialect. He was probably about 50 years old, tall, with thinning, gray, wavy hair. He wore khaki work pants and a matching khaki work shirt every day. He had a thousand keys on his chain, and you knew when he was coming by the rattle of his keys. He would joke around with us about sex. We could talk to him of the girls we fancied. It might have even been he that slipped us the 2 inch by 2 inch blue copy of “Behind the Green Door,” more than a decade before the movie. Here in this rarefied enclave of the owning class filled with heirs to unimaginable fortunes, the one breath of humanity came from the working class. This lesson was not lost on me.
As I later came to embrace Marxism, it became clear to me that this school was training us to ruthlessly exploit the working class, to be the oppressors of the empire. The coldness and cruelty were deliberate efforts to force us to stuff our own feelings so that we too could become cold and cruel with impunity in the face of the blatant moral iniquity that our privilege represented.
At my 25th Exeter Reunion, in the middle of the major fundraising pitch immediately following the lobster dinner, I made a speech. “My unwritten Exeter novel is entitled ‘Gadfly in the Ointment,’ so I would be remiss if I didn’t fulfill my role. What’s wrong with this picture? You take a magnificent campus, fill it with the finest teachers, state-of-the-art libraries, laboratories, and gymnasiums, class sizes of 12, you take all these fabulous educational resources and you lavish them on the people who need them absolutely the least…” Peter, one of the leaders of the meeting, said, “That’s my old roommate,” not proudly I would say, “Exeter alumni are very generous in their communities…” said another leader.
A surprising number of people came up to me afterward and thanked me, but most of the rest of my classmates simply kept their distance.
The irony, though, is that lavishing all those educational resources on the privileged still doesn’t result in very good education. As long as we have an economic system based on competition, the entire school system, including the ghetto schools and the elite academies, will serve that system, and will itself be primarily based on competition. In the arena of social competition, the vast majority loses, and the winners win but a few crumbs of privilege at the expense of their humanity.
A small example: Exeter routinely taught calculus to its seniors, and I learned all the formulas and thought I more or less got it as it referred to the area under a curve. It wasn’t until I studied physics in college that someone told me that calculus was invented by Newton to explain the acceleration of gravity. How much more meaningful it would have been to have known that from the beginning. This goes back to the argument about constructivism: students learn from their experience. What if the teacher had led us through Newton’s process of deriving calculus by experiment?
I did get one important thing out of my education at Exeter: I learned how to write fiction. We were given assignments to write short stories, at least 3 or 4 a year. By my senior year, I had figured a few things out. One was not to take so many classes. I even found time to write a short story for extra credit for Mr. Finch, one of the two excellent teachers I experienced. The story was about a man walking alone in the desert, dying of thirst. He hallucinates a bus stopping for him, and tries to get on, but the bus is a mirage, and he dies. The story was a good summary of my emotional landscape at the time.
Years later after my son Benjamin graduated from Lowell High in San Francisco, itself a prestigious school, albeit public, I asked him how many short stories he had been assigned to write.
“None,” he said.
I wasn’t particularly homesick at Exeter. I wasn’t aware of missing my parents, for whom I had little respect. I missed my friends, but compensated for it by writing them letters and mailing them with obscene references on the envelope: “Don’t give up the shit.” To the dismay of my friends’ parents.
When my youngest son, Slater, now 14, expressed interest in going to Exeter a few years back, I told him no. Even if the school had changed now that it was co-ed, I wasn’t willing to sacrifice my relationship with him. Because even the students who flourished at Exeter or any boarding school for that matter will lose much of their relationship with their parents. In the adolescent years, you need your parents more than ever, even as you believe the opposite. You need someone to stand up to the awful feelings that spew out of you, someone even to target them at so that you don’t turn them inward against yourself. That’s the role of the parent of an adolescent: give them something real to rebel against, something, or someone, who knows deep down that you don’t really mean all the mean things you need to say.
Even as it cost me my relationship with my parents, I liked the independence I had at boarding school. My sister, Lisi, who was in her late twenties, lived outside of Boston at the time, which was 50 miles south of Exeter. She was a curator at Sturbridge Village, a restored Colonial town that demonstrated how New Englanders lived 200 years before. She signed me out to go to her house on Thanksgiving my first year, and got me drunk on martinis. After that, she would sign me out whenever I asked, so that I would go wherever I wanted.
On my first trip to Boston on my own, I went to the famous Harvard Liquor Store on Harvard Square, where they reportedly served anyone, and nervously tried to buy vodka. “How old are you?” asked the elderly clerk.
“18,” I said. In reality, I was 15.
“You have to be 21,” the clerk said.
“Oh, I thought it was 18,” I mumbled on my way out. Disappointed, I made my way back to town, got a $10 room at the Copley Square Hotel, and wandered around downtown Boston. It wasn’t long before I came upon Sculley Square, the closest Boston had to a Skid Row. And what should appear before me like a revelation but the Old Howard Burlesque Theater. The sign said you had to be 18, but they didn’t check. I paid my $3.00 and settled into the dingy darkened theater that smelled of urine and the deodorant cakes they put in the urinal. There were perhaps 10 other denizens of the street in there with me. They had a terrible live orchestra and some seriously awful comedians. But the girls! The strippers! Dancing, prancing across the stage in their sparkling outfits. These moments made it all worth it. Off came the wardrobe parts, one by one. First the sparkly gloves, the sequined vest, the shimmering blouse, the dazzling skirt, down to sparkly bra and g-string. The bra snapped off and her nipples had pasties on them with dangling jewels she loved to swing around. And on my very first visit, in puritanical Boston in 1959, Miss Tempest Storm shimmied her g-string loose and revealed her magnificent bush of pubic hair, and I came in my pants. My romance with sleaze had begun.
The Old Howard was the antithesis of Exeter, a monument to failure, and I felt right at home.
In the spring of my Lower Middle year (that’s sophomore in English – places like Exeter always have to be different), I made another foray into Boston, this time armed with a newly minted fake ID. It was crude as hell, Naval ROTC, but it was laminated and had a picture of me, and it apparently took the liquor dealers sufficiently off the hook to make a sale. I scored 3 pints of Smirnoff, stocking up
for the Spring Dance.
I had invited a girl from Pine Lake, one of my gang who was spending the year at a Boston finishing school. We’d gotten drunk together and made out the previous summer, though the next day she made sure I got the message that she didn’t mean it. But I was sure she was as hungry for friendly companionship as I was, so I was certain she would come. I rented a tux and everything.
She decided not to come, and I decided, unconsciously, to see if I could get kicked out of school. I dressed myself up in the tux and drank one full pint of the vodka. I sang that song from a few years back all over the dorm: “A white sport coat and a pink carnation, I’m all dressed up for the dance.” (“Once you told me long ago, to the prom with me you’d go, now you’ve changed your mind it seems, another boy will have your dreams…”)
Mr. Dunbar, a straight-arrow math teacher and baseball coach, a guy who had upbraided me for my slovenly appearance on more than one occasion, made his dorm rounds as usual and came upon me puking in the bathroom. He said to one of the other students (my roommate Peter had of course gone to the dance with his girlfriend from Wellesley, MA), “Get this guy cleaned up and put him to bed.”
So there was a spark of humanity on the faculty after all. I didn’t get kicked out.
Why I stayed at the school is a question. While my father would have been disappointed if I had dropped out, he at one point in the summer before my Senior year, did give me that option. It was summer. You can forget how much you hate school in the summer. And, the promise of the prestige of an Exeter diploma kept me going. To say nothing of those wild weekends at the Old Howard Burlesque Theater in Boston.
Fortunately or unfortunately, drugs other than alcohol, cigarettes, and caffeine hadn’t hit Exeter yet in a big way. There was a story of a track star who attempted to buy peyote from a Texas mail order house. It was still quasi-legal, but they would only sell it to doctors or scientists, so he had to forge the name of the chair of the science department, whose name was John C. Hogg. The track star must have been a little nervous, because when he signed the name he wrote Hoggg. He got caught. For an ordinary mortal, this would have been cause for expulsion or even prosecution. But he had broken half the track records at Exeter (probably on benzedrine), so he was given restrictions, the mildest form of punishment. He had to be in his room at 8 o’clock every night for a month.
Some of the lessons of my Exeter experience were bitter. Prior to Exeter, I was overly shy and athletically spastic, but I knew I was smart. Exeter took that sense away from me and I hated it for that. My fantasies hadn’t developed a politics, but they were angry. On Saturday nights, the school showed movies in the gym. Not ordinary movies, not Ocean’s 11, or Visit to a Small Planet, or Sparticus, but artsy-fartsy movies like The Seventh Seal, Sundays and Cybelle, and Jules and Jim. I enjoyed what I could understand of the movies, but my favorite part was my fantasy of climbing up on the basketball hoops with a machine gun and mowing down every last one of the students. The name of that movie was If, which didn’t come out until 1968, about a group of British boarding school boys taking over their school with guns, which resonated with me absolutely.
Toward the end of the summer before my senior year, there appeared in the Milwaukee Journal, a letter entitled “The Pine Lake Snob Curtain.” It told of an experience the writer had of fishing on Pine Lake. Residents of the lake sailed, they didn’t fish, by and large. The fishermen were working class folk who brought their boats in on trailers and launched them at the required (and resented) public access point at the north end of the lake. The letter writer’s companion made a bad cast, and the hook went into his – the writer’s – eye. They docked their boat at the nearest pier and went up to several of the mansions, but no one would let them in even to make a call.
The last party of the year on Pine Lake on the Labor Day weekend was called Cup Night, at the Country Club, where they handed out trophies to the winning sailors. I wasn’t among the winners – I had given up that competitive struggle several years ago when we graduated from sluggish X class kid’s boats, -- with which I had won some races – to 20 foot C class scows, which were too big for me to handle properly. But I could party, and the Club didn’t hesitate to furnish us with champagne in exchange for our signatures on our parents’ accounts. So by 1 AM, I was fairly looped. I had my own jeep, which my father bought to haul boats, not explicitly for me, but I was the one who drove it. And that night, after the party, I intended to drive it to my friend Bill Wright’s house.
We lived at the end of a mile long private road which intersected near our house with another road through the Brumder estate, a collection of houses, perhaps 10 in all, of people related to the Brumders, an old Milwaukee family with fingers in most of Milwaukee’s main industries. But the Brumder Road had a gate constructed of chain link fencing, and the gate was sometimes locked, as it was this night. In my mind, this gate represented the Pine Lake Snob Curtain, and I wasn’t going to let it keep me from visiting my friend.
So, I switched the jeep to 4 wheel drive and drove right on through, bending the gate a full 15 degrees until it popped open. Exuberantly, I drove to my friend’s. It was thrilling of course to do something so terribly bad, of course. But there was a righteous political edge to this thrill. I was fighting the system for the working class fishermen.
The next morning, my mother woke me claiming the Chenequa police wanted to see me. I got up, still slightly high from the previous night’s celebrations.
“Did you drive through the Brumder Gate last night, Henry?” Chief Lutz asked point blank, an elderly cop with a big belly.
“Me? No, I didn’t.”
Like real policemen, they had me drive the jeep to the scene of the crime in order to re-enact it. My father accompanied me. The jeep had a red hydraulic lift on the front, and it fit the damage just perfectly, leaving tiny flecks of red paint on the galvanized wire diamonds.
“All right, I guess I did it,” I mumbled. Oddly, I didn’t feel bad, certainly not about doing it, but not about getting caught either.
My father spoke. “Well, Chief you do what you have to do. These kids have been experimenting with alcohol, and I’m sure that had something to do with it. But if you need to arrest him, you go ahead.”
“That’s okay, Dr. Hitz. We’ll leave it in your hands.”
If I hadn’t been white or from a family of means, I would have no doubt gone to jail, or at least juvenile hall. My father ineffectually grounded me for the last weekend of the year, and both he and my mother let me know with a barrage of darts from the eyes and little tsks from their lips just how disappointed they were at me, mostly for lying. But I could only marvel at how powerful the act had felt.
As I was leaving to return to school, I stopped by my grandmother’s cottage to say goodbye. She was 90 by then, but still living on her own. She hugged me. “I hear you got in some trouble,” she said. She slipped me five dollars. That woman had class.
I had to meet with the Brumder family lawyer and he got me to agree to make restitution. A month later from Exeter I sent the family patriarch a check for $200, with a note asking him to excuse “my usually but not always latent juvenile delinquent tendencies,” and he sent a message back through my father that all was forgiven.
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Jr. High
2.
By seventh grade, my father decided that I needed more rigor in my education, so we rented a house in town (Milwaukee), Doggie Mann’s house, what a great name. My sister Nicki, who was 3 years older, went away to an Episcopal girls’ school, and I went to Milwaukee Country Day.
The summer before, I remember seeing my Stone Bank Moose Lake friend Jeffrey Trapp one last time in late August. He wore jeans down on his hips and a thin belt, an Elvis Presley look. I wore madras Bermuda shorts. I said to him judgmentally: “Jeffrey, you look so boppish,” and he mocked me, “Jeffery, you look so boppish.” Thus did I leave the working class in my wake, didn’t see Jeffrey again for at least 25 years. When I did finally look him up, he had become a redneck hippie gun dealing heavy metal sculptor. I became his biggest collector.
At Country Day, I was a hayseed, and a victim of considerable hazing. Some highlights of that competitive atmosphere: Bobby Brennan, my nemesis, a pudgy boy himself desperate to stay in the high status group, threw a rock at me that hit me in the head on the way to the school library. Helplessly, I burst into tears. The wrinkled prune woman of a librarian blew up at me over the crying (without investigating the cause), and I didn’t cry in public again for 30 years.
I developed bad acne, and my name quickly degenerated from Hitz to Zits.
My nipples began swelling as I’m they sometimes do in pubescent boys, and Bobby Brennan in the locker room shouted, “Look, he’s got tits!” My name degenerated one more level to Tits, and I just wanted to die.
Then I hooked up with Bill Wright, the most popular boy in the class. He too stayed at Pine Lake on the weekends with his mother and drunken step father (alcoholism was endemic to Pine Lake), while staying with his Dad and step mother during the week. He was everything I wasn’t – blond curly-headed handsome – his step father liked to taunt him with the nickname “Adonis” – athletic, confident, a sharp dresser, a boy the girls all swooned over. For some reason, he liked me. Maybe because I excelled in the one area he didn’t, academics. Maybe because I was funny. We cemented our friendship on New Years’ Eve during 7th grade, when his alcoholic mother got us drunk on champagne until we both puked our guts out all over each other.
Alcohol was another arena where I learned to successfully compete: I could get sloppier drunk than anybody, and for some reason that added considerable points to my status. I also could easily score liquor from my father’s abundant stash in the basement.
7th Grade was when I discovered anti-Semitism as another key to the competitive advantage of popularity. We were studying Ancient Egypt, and a Jewish boy named Bill Cash knew a lot about it since he went to Hebrew school. So he kept raising his hand and shouting out the answers. Our teacher Mr. Roy’s face turned livid. You could see the bones in his skull as he seethed. “Cash!” he shounted. “Just because you’re Jewish doesn’t mean you know everything!” Cash shut up. I squirmed in my seat, ever grateful that I wasn’t Jewish. Mr. Roy went on to become the Headmaster of the school a few years later.
In highly German Milwaukee, I had of course heard anti-Semitism before. I was 10 when my Uncle John, my mother’s brother, a fat, alcoholic, homosexual insurance salesman who my father couldn’t stand, blurted his shocking joke: “Hitler was half right. He should have killed the other half.” My mother tsk-tsked him, pursing her lips and darkening her eyes in that quiet judgmental way usually reserved for the likes of me for failing to clean my room. To her credit, she thought any kind of prejudice was in extremely poor taste.
In 7th grade, the competition for girls began it’s obsessive regime. I was dogged in this field despite my “handicaps,” severe acne and deep-seated shyness. At dancing school I forced myself to go after the girl I wanted, Jane Ewens, a perky Catholic girl with short dark hair and freckles. What did I like about her? I liked how she looked. I didn’t know her even after several dances and dates, because we didn’t talk. Perhaps more importantly, I liked that the other boys thought she looked okay too. It was my good friend Kathy Hansen that hooked us up.
Kathy lived about five houses down from us on the lake, in Sauerkraut Bay. She too was Catholic, something I appreciated as a budding atheist. I gave up believing in God in 8th grade, a year after being confirmed in the Episcopal Church. Kathy was the first person I told. What I liked about Catholics was that they at least took their beliefs seriously – if you’re going to believe in something, do it wholeheartedly. And though I couldn’t have expressed it at the time, I liked the aura of tragedy that hovered around not just the central myth of the crucifixion, but the perpetual failure that Catholics experience in their inability to live up to the expectations of the church, the tragedy of original sin.
I liked that Kathy was a little heavy set and wore glasses, because that made her somehow accessible to someone as flawed as myself. Unlike with other girls, I was comfortable with her, with her brown curls and dancing blue eyes. We laughed together a lot.
She fixed me up with the first girl I made out with whose name I can no longer recall. She was cute, that girl, tiny, also short haired – I’m a sucker for boyish haircuts on girls. And we hugged and sucked each others mouths for hours at Tony Strouther’s party.
But I never called her back. Was she too easy, too accessible, not a high enough status to impress the other boys? She liked me! There must have been something wrong with her. The old Groucho Marx axiom: I wouldn’t want to be a member of a club that would have me for a member.
Tony Strouthers was first in our class freshman year. I was second. But then he killed himself 10 years later or so. So now I’m number one. I won!
A few summers later, I realized it was Kathy I loved, and I finally got up the nerve to tell her, sitting in my jeep in front of her house, nervously shifting the gears. “I love you, too, Henry. As a friend.” Did she call me Hank? I never liked that nickname.
The kiss of death that phrase, yet I wasn’t just an ordinary friend, I was her “huckleberry friend” from “Moon River,” the Johnny Mathis song popular at the time, a song I would tear up at for the next 10 years. At least she meant it about being friends.
She fixed me up with my first real girl friend the year of her debut party at the Chenequa Country Club, a blond hottie whose name again I do not recall, whom I liked because she was pretty and alleged to “put out” and the other boys envied me or at least respected the fact that she considered herself “going” with me.
For Kathy’s debut party itself, the summer after we had all graduated high school, she – this blond hottie – actually spent the night at my house, but I couldn’t get her to put out, though she might have if I’d asked or approached her, but I lacked nerve. We were sitting on her bed in the guest room that night. We’d both had plenty to drink, for debut parties were all about our age cohort’s debut as fledgling alcoholics, but the best I could do was whine, “It seems like your so grebeci to me.”
“What’s that?”
“Ice berg spelled backwards.” Kathy had taught me this phrase. My date laughed. I kissed her. She didn’t exactly come alive with passion, so I let it drop and said good night, retreating to my own room the worst of failures. Again.
It’s amazing to me how persistent the sexual competition is. Even at almost 65, happily married, with prostrate challenges diminishing my libido, whenever I pass a woman on the street, my mind automatically judges her and makes some comment to itself on her looks and whether she is sexually desirable or not (usually in the most vulgar terms). This is very annoying, though not so annoying that I put much effort into trying to stop it. I suspect I am not alone among human males in this regard. I suspect this tendency is close to universal, the reptile brain searching for a multiplicity of mates to replicate its DNA. A reptile brain conditioned by the society’s obsession with competition.
By seventh grade, my father decided that I needed more rigor in my education, so we rented a house in town (Milwaukee), Doggie Mann’s house, what a great name. My sister Nicki, who was 3 years older, went away to an Episcopal girls’ school, and I went to Milwaukee Country Day.
The summer before, I remember seeing my Stone Bank Moose Lake friend Jeffrey Trapp one last time in late August. He wore jeans down on his hips and a thin belt, an Elvis Presley look. I wore madras Bermuda shorts. I said to him judgmentally: “Jeffrey, you look so boppish,” and he mocked me, “Jeffery, you look so boppish.” Thus did I leave the working class in my wake, didn’t see Jeffrey again for at least 25 years. When I did finally look him up, he had become a redneck hippie gun dealing heavy metal sculptor. I became his biggest collector.
At Country Day, I was a hayseed, and a victim of considerable hazing. Some highlights of that competitive atmosphere: Bobby Brennan, my nemesis, a pudgy boy himself desperate to stay in the high status group, threw a rock at me that hit me in the head on the way to the school library. Helplessly, I burst into tears. The wrinkled prune woman of a librarian blew up at me over the crying (without investigating the cause), and I didn’t cry in public again for 30 years.
I developed bad acne, and my name quickly degenerated from Hitz to Zits.
My nipples began swelling as I’m they sometimes do in pubescent boys, and Bobby Brennan in the locker room shouted, “Look, he’s got tits!” My name degenerated one more level to Tits, and I just wanted to die.
Then I hooked up with Bill Wright, the most popular boy in the class. He too stayed at Pine Lake on the weekends with his mother and drunken step father (alcoholism was endemic to Pine Lake), while staying with his Dad and step mother during the week. He was everything I wasn’t – blond curly-headed handsome – his step father liked to taunt him with the nickname “Adonis” – athletic, confident, a sharp dresser, a boy the girls all swooned over. For some reason, he liked me. Maybe because I excelled in the one area he didn’t, academics. Maybe because I was funny. We cemented our friendship on New Years’ Eve during 7th grade, when his alcoholic mother got us drunk on champagne until we both puked our guts out all over each other.
Alcohol was another arena where I learned to successfully compete: I could get sloppier drunk than anybody, and for some reason that added considerable points to my status. I also could easily score liquor from my father’s abundant stash in the basement.
7th Grade was when I discovered anti-Semitism as another key to the competitive advantage of popularity. We were studying Ancient Egypt, and a Jewish boy named Bill Cash knew a lot about it since he went to Hebrew school. So he kept raising his hand and shouting out the answers. Our teacher Mr. Roy’s face turned livid. You could see the bones in his skull as he seethed. “Cash!” he shounted. “Just because you’re Jewish doesn’t mean you know everything!” Cash shut up. I squirmed in my seat, ever grateful that I wasn’t Jewish. Mr. Roy went on to become the Headmaster of the school a few years later.
In highly German Milwaukee, I had of course heard anti-Semitism before. I was 10 when my Uncle John, my mother’s brother, a fat, alcoholic, homosexual insurance salesman who my father couldn’t stand, blurted his shocking joke: “Hitler was half right. He should have killed the other half.” My mother tsk-tsked him, pursing her lips and darkening her eyes in that quiet judgmental way usually reserved for the likes of me for failing to clean my room. To her credit, she thought any kind of prejudice was in extremely poor taste.
In 7th grade, the competition for girls began it’s obsessive regime. I was dogged in this field despite my “handicaps,” severe acne and deep-seated shyness. At dancing school I forced myself to go after the girl I wanted, Jane Ewens, a perky Catholic girl with short dark hair and freckles. What did I like about her? I liked how she looked. I didn’t know her even after several dances and dates, because we didn’t talk. Perhaps more importantly, I liked that the other boys thought she looked okay too. It was my good friend Kathy Hansen that hooked us up.
Kathy lived about five houses down from us on the lake, in Sauerkraut Bay. She too was Catholic, something I appreciated as a budding atheist. I gave up believing in God in 8th grade, a year after being confirmed in the Episcopal Church. Kathy was the first person I told. What I liked about Catholics was that they at least took their beliefs seriously – if you’re going to believe in something, do it wholeheartedly. And though I couldn’t have expressed it at the time, I liked the aura of tragedy that hovered around not just the central myth of the crucifixion, but the perpetual failure that Catholics experience in their inability to live up to the expectations of the church, the tragedy of original sin.
I liked that Kathy was a little heavy set and wore glasses, because that made her somehow accessible to someone as flawed as myself. Unlike with other girls, I was comfortable with her, with her brown curls and dancing blue eyes. We laughed together a lot.
She fixed me up with the first girl I made out with whose name I can no longer recall. She was cute, that girl, tiny, also short haired – I’m a sucker for boyish haircuts on girls. And we hugged and sucked each others mouths for hours at Tony Strouther’s party.
But I never called her back. Was she too easy, too accessible, not a high enough status to impress the other boys? She liked me! There must have been something wrong with her. The old Groucho Marx axiom: I wouldn’t want to be a member of a club that would have me for a member.
Tony Strouthers was first in our class freshman year. I was second. But then he killed himself 10 years later or so. So now I’m number one. I won!
A few summers later, I realized it was Kathy I loved, and I finally got up the nerve to tell her, sitting in my jeep in front of her house, nervously shifting the gears. “I love you, too, Henry. As a friend.” Did she call me Hank? I never liked that nickname.
The kiss of death that phrase, yet I wasn’t just an ordinary friend, I was her “huckleberry friend” from “Moon River,” the Johnny Mathis song popular at the time, a song I would tear up at for the next 10 years. At least she meant it about being friends.
She fixed me up with my first real girl friend the year of her debut party at the Chenequa Country Club, a blond hottie whose name again I do not recall, whom I liked because she was pretty and alleged to “put out” and the other boys envied me or at least respected the fact that she considered herself “going” with me.
For Kathy’s debut party itself, the summer after we had all graduated high school, she – this blond hottie – actually spent the night at my house, but I couldn’t get her to put out, though she might have if I’d asked or approached her, but I lacked nerve. We were sitting on her bed in the guest room that night. We’d both had plenty to drink, for debut parties were all about our age cohort’s debut as fledgling alcoholics, but the best I could do was whine, “It seems like your so grebeci to me.”
“What’s that?”
“Ice berg spelled backwards.” Kathy had taught me this phrase. My date laughed. I kissed her. She didn’t exactly come alive with passion, so I let it drop and said good night, retreating to my own room the worst of failures. Again.
It’s amazing to me how persistent the sexual competition is. Even at almost 65, happily married, with prostrate challenges diminishing my libido, whenever I pass a woman on the street, my mind automatically judges her and makes some comment to itself on her looks and whether she is sexually desirable or not (usually in the most vulgar terms). This is very annoying, though not so annoying that I put much effort into trying to stop it. I suspect I am not alone among human males in this regard. I suspect this tendency is close to universal, the reptile brain searching for a multiplicity of mates to replicate its DNA. A reptile brain conditioned by the society’s obsession with competition.
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Schools of Thought
SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT
My Sixty Years in Education
A Constructivist Manifesto
1.
My earliest school memory is also my favorite memory. I was at nursery school, 5 years old – the kindergarten concept hadn’t reached rural Wisconsin yet. It was only October, the air was crisp like fresh apples, but somehow I had convinced my mother to let me wear these really neat black leather ski boots with stubby toes that had been my older sister’s. Just at the end of outside time, I was the last one outside behind the fire station that housed the nursery school, standing by a mound of dirt. I climbed that mountain. I crossed my arms and surveyed the whole yard, my domain.
“I’m going to be a robber!” I thought.
At 5 years old, I was so powerful – and knew it – that I could imagine doing anything. I never shook that outlaw self. It was a defining moment as well of my stormy relationship to schools over the next 60 years, as a student, as a teacher, as a parent, as an educational change activist. I loved nursery school – fingerpainting, playdough, blocks, what’s not to love. But apparently I wasn’t buying the indoctrination to be “good.”
That was the last time I loved school. I liked school okay for the first few years. My first grade teacher, Ms. Gunderson, was beautiful – tall, slender, with flouncy brunette curls – and I adored her.
Miss Miles in 3rd grade taught me about “constructivism” by allowing me to do a “project” about the addition they were building to the Stone Bank School, which had been a two room school when my sister started there 3 years before me. But parts of rural Milwaukee, like parts of rural USA, were quickly exurbanizing, and the school was adding six rooms. I talked to the architect, who was a family friend. He showed me the plans. I learned how to make concrete. I wrote about the names of all the machines and drew pictures of them for my report: the front loader, the back hoe, the cement mixer, the pile driver, the bull dozer.
Constructivism is another term for “hands-on” learning. The idea, which derives from Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget and Soviet educator Lev Vygotsky, is that children construct their own knowledge out of their experience. The philosophy is widely practiced in nursery schools, day-care centers, child development centers, Head Start programs and many kindergartens. It stands in contrast to the behaviorism of extrinsic rewards (and punishments) which dominates instruction in grades 1-12, and beyond.
Both a premise and a conclusion of this memoir is this simple proposition: in the US at least, after preschool, all schools suck, big time. Public, private, urban, suburban, no Marker what their reputation or Academic Performance Index rating. They suck because they were designed to serve an economic system based on competition. Competition is destructive to human beings, creating far more losers that winners, and even the winners lose in their isolation.
I sub-sub-titled this memoir a Constructivist Manifesto because what I am hoping to do is describe the experiences in my life that taught me what I know about schools and society, and thereby suggest ways we might go forward to develop schools and a society that transcend competition, that honor the fact that human beings have far more in common that they have differences, and that if we work together, we may really be able to arrest our seemingly inexorable slide toward self-destruction and the destruction of our beautiful planet.
After nursery school, grade school was generally boring, though I don’t recall minding so much. I enjoyed learning to read. I especially remember a story in my Dick and Jane Reader where baby sister Sally was setting the table and ended up one setting short because she forgot to count herself. That was the kind of mistake I could relate to.
Because the academics came relatively easy to me as a Doctor’s son in this amalgam of farm kids, children of grocers and workers at Waukesha Motors or Hartland Plastics, the local factories, competition didn’t affect me much at first. My father probably justified sending me there because he hoped the farm families would impart pastoral values to me, though the real reason was that he wanted to live in the country. He wasn’t a people person, to say the least. Gruff is the word that describes both his bedside manner as a physician and his parenting style. A well-regarded eye surgeon with snow white hair by the time he was 30, he also lacked eye-hand coordination – a trait I inherited – so that his entire being as an adult was channeled into keeping his hands steady as he maneuvered the scalpel near the optic nerve. There wasn’t much of him left over.
Competition began on the playground with the archetypal children’s game, “Nigger Pile.” The only version I remember was the one in which someone in a gang of kids raging through the playground yelled “Nigger pile on Henry!” and five or seven or some number of kids would swarm after me and pile on top of me, mimicking the social hierarchy and traumatizing me into a mild case of claustrophobia. I don’t remember yelling “Nigger pile on” whoever, nor do I recall being near the top of a pile on someone else, though most likely I participated in those versions as well.
Baseball killed me. We had three sport seasons at Stone Bank, baseball, baseball, and baseball. It was really softball, but since the ball wasn’t soft, it was the same difference to me. Thanks to the bad coordination I got from my father, I couldn’t play baseball for shit. I couldn’t throw (“You throw like a girl,” was a frequent taunt from my schoolmates), couldn’t catch, and couldn’t hit. I could run okay, but that was about it.
Still because I was seen as smart, and because at a working class school, competition wasn’t central, I was part of a gang of friends. My 4th and 5th grade teacher, Mr. Babinek, was a genius in that when he organized an interscholastic softball team to play North Lake and Merton, he made me the batboy, so I went to the games and wore the uniform and was an integral part of the team without having to embarrass myself (or the team) by actually playing. Even so, it was baseball that first made me suspicious of competition.
While I couldn’t have articulated this, the class differences in attitude to competition became evident to me early on. The house I grew up on was on Pine Lake, at the time a favorite summering place for the industrial, brewing, tanning, and banking titans of Milwaukee. My great grandfather, Frederick C. Winters, a corporate lawyer for Allis Challmers and the Milwaukee Road, and a General in the Civil War, acquired the 7 acre property on the lake in the 1880s, as a summer place. In the late 1920s, my grandfather and namesake, Henry B. Hitz, an eye-ear-nose-and throat doctor, built a largish house on the property overlooking the lake. Large by most people’s standards, only medium sized by Pine Lake standards.
To give you an idea, the area around Pine Lake was organized into the Village of Chenequa, which in my youth from 1950-70, had 400 residents, but a full time police and fire department, giving it possibly the highest ratio of police to residents of any community in the country.
It was a beautiful lake, not large, perhaps 3 miles by 2 miles, with deep blue water and not a single commercial establishment, all kinds of trees – pine, oak, maple, birch – vast well-manicured lawns, lush gardens, and homes, most of them grand.
Beginning with my grandfather, who died a few months before I was born in 1944, we were among the first families to spend winters as well as summers on the lake, and remained one of the few at least until the expressways were built in the 60s. So winter nights could be eerily quiet.
I still don’t know how our branch of the Winters family won the competition to get the best piece of the property, and it was never discussed, but because of this “victory”, our family had a little more money than our cousins who ended up with the smaller cottages next door. I know that some resentment simmers subterraineanly to this day. So it goes with competition.
In the fall, winter, and spring, despite the baseball challenges, I played exuberantly with my working class friends from Stone Bank. We rode our bikes to Oconomowoc 7 miles away, seeing how high we could get our speedometers to go as we raced down the one serious hill; we played “Civil War” with real antique guns given me by a family friend (my idea, they wanted to play cowboys); we had a club called the “Moon or Bust Club” with a clubhouse above our garage where we painted a skull and crossbones on the door in radium glow-in-the-dark paint; we developed naked pictures of my sister in my dark room, frustrated by a black streak covered the most interesting parts; we played with my electric trains, a double-transformer layout with a Union Pacific passenger train and a freight train with a log car that automatically dumped its logs; we hunted frogs and turtles in the swamps of Moose Lake, a neighboring lake where the working classes were welcome to live. My friend Jeffery’s mother was den mother to our Cub Scout troop, and we made lanyards and picture frames around the kitchen table in their Moose Lake bungalow.
The summers were different. I didn’t see my Stone Bank friends. The Milwaukee owning class swept over the lake and I learned to claw my way into the various cliques that arose among this privileged population.
Just as baseball was the only game in town in Stone Bank, sail boat racing was what we did in the summer. It was in sailing school that I first became acquainted with the art of hazing. My cousin, Billy Winters, a pudgy boy with a prominent cow-lick above his forehead, lived next door to us, in the Red Cottage my father had sold his father (and about which deal there was some trace of bad blood). They later built their own house, which we snobbishly belittled.
The earliest I remember Billy being scapegoated was at day camp, a precursor to sailing school, led by a teenager named Dick Gallun. My mother was picking me up at the end of the session. She asked Dick conversationally, “So, what’s the dope?”
“Oh, Billy’s the dope, everybody knows that,” Dick riposted, and my mother chuckled. The adults blatantly colluded with our hazing.
There were times I remember enjoying hanging out with Billy when it was just him and me playing laboratory or some such in the basement. We would make thermite, a mixture of ferrous oxide and aluminum powder that once lit, made a blinding flash and left behind a little hunk of iron. Or we would explore one of the many I had hide-outs all over the property. There was a boat house, an ice house, a cottage where my grandmother stayed in the summer, an outhouse, a toolshed, a barn converted into a garage with an upstairs, where we would look for pictures of naked natives in the old National Geographics.
But if anyone else was around, the game quickly degenerated into “picking on Billy.” We would taunt him with cruel rhymes:
Wee Willy Winters sat on a sprinkler and he began to cry,
Oh ma, oh ma, oh what a stinker am I.
We would shun him or ditch him, push him in the lake, splash him with water until he cried, belittle his inferior boats (he had a 7 ½ horsepower to our 15).
I understood full well, and felt only slightly guilty, that hazing Billy was my ticket to the inside of the prestigious clique. The incident that best illustrates this dynamic happened quite late, when I was 16 to Billy’s 15, after I had achieved a modicum of popularity. I was having a party for the 4th of July. It was the party of the season. My parents understood my need for popularity enough to sanction my purchase of 4 cases of beer at the Beer Depot in Nashotah, another nearby town. At least 50 people came from all over the lake and from Milwaukee. Of course I hadn’t invited Billy. But Billy came over anyway. I greeted him at the door. “Hi, Billy! How you doing, man?” I gushed with enthusiasm as I shook his hand. Then with an evil grin, I pressed my lit cigarette into the back of his hand and held it there. Once again, for the jillianth and perhaps last time, Billy ran home squealing, and my status was secure.
My Sixty Years in Education
A Constructivist Manifesto
1.
My earliest school memory is also my favorite memory. I was at nursery school, 5 years old – the kindergarten concept hadn’t reached rural Wisconsin yet. It was only October, the air was crisp like fresh apples, but somehow I had convinced my mother to let me wear these really neat black leather ski boots with stubby toes that had been my older sister’s. Just at the end of outside time, I was the last one outside behind the fire station that housed the nursery school, standing by a mound of dirt. I climbed that mountain. I crossed my arms and surveyed the whole yard, my domain.
“I’m going to be a robber!” I thought.
At 5 years old, I was so powerful – and knew it – that I could imagine doing anything. I never shook that outlaw self. It was a defining moment as well of my stormy relationship to schools over the next 60 years, as a student, as a teacher, as a parent, as an educational change activist. I loved nursery school – fingerpainting, playdough, blocks, what’s not to love. But apparently I wasn’t buying the indoctrination to be “good.”
That was the last time I loved school. I liked school okay for the first few years. My first grade teacher, Ms. Gunderson, was beautiful – tall, slender, with flouncy brunette curls – and I adored her.
Miss Miles in 3rd grade taught me about “constructivism” by allowing me to do a “project” about the addition they were building to the Stone Bank School, which had been a two room school when my sister started there 3 years before me. But parts of rural Milwaukee, like parts of rural USA, were quickly exurbanizing, and the school was adding six rooms. I talked to the architect, who was a family friend. He showed me the plans. I learned how to make concrete. I wrote about the names of all the machines and drew pictures of them for my report: the front loader, the back hoe, the cement mixer, the pile driver, the bull dozer.
Constructivism is another term for “hands-on” learning. The idea, which derives from Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget and Soviet educator Lev Vygotsky, is that children construct their own knowledge out of their experience. The philosophy is widely practiced in nursery schools, day-care centers, child development centers, Head Start programs and many kindergartens. It stands in contrast to the behaviorism of extrinsic rewards (and punishments) which dominates instruction in grades 1-12, and beyond.
Both a premise and a conclusion of this memoir is this simple proposition: in the US at least, after preschool, all schools suck, big time. Public, private, urban, suburban, no Marker what their reputation or Academic Performance Index rating. They suck because they were designed to serve an economic system based on competition. Competition is destructive to human beings, creating far more losers that winners, and even the winners lose in their isolation.
I sub-sub-titled this memoir a Constructivist Manifesto because what I am hoping to do is describe the experiences in my life that taught me what I know about schools and society, and thereby suggest ways we might go forward to develop schools and a society that transcend competition, that honor the fact that human beings have far more in common that they have differences, and that if we work together, we may really be able to arrest our seemingly inexorable slide toward self-destruction and the destruction of our beautiful planet.
After nursery school, grade school was generally boring, though I don’t recall minding so much. I enjoyed learning to read. I especially remember a story in my Dick and Jane Reader where baby sister Sally was setting the table and ended up one setting short because she forgot to count herself. That was the kind of mistake I could relate to.
Because the academics came relatively easy to me as a Doctor’s son in this amalgam of farm kids, children of grocers and workers at Waukesha Motors or Hartland Plastics, the local factories, competition didn’t affect me much at first. My father probably justified sending me there because he hoped the farm families would impart pastoral values to me, though the real reason was that he wanted to live in the country. He wasn’t a people person, to say the least. Gruff is the word that describes both his bedside manner as a physician and his parenting style. A well-regarded eye surgeon with snow white hair by the time he was 30, he also lacked eye-hand coordination – a trait I inherited – so that his entire being as an adult was channeled into keeping his hands steady as he maneuvered the scalpel near the optic nerve. There wasn’t much of him left over.
Competition began on the playground with the archetypal children’s game, “Nigger Pile.” The only version I remember was the one in which someone in a gang of kids raging through the playground yelled “Nigger pile on Henry!” and five or seven or some number of kids would swarm after me and pile on top of me, mimicking the social hierarchy and traumatizing me into a mild case of claustrophobia. I don’t remember yelling “Nigger pile on” whoever, nor do I recall being near the top of a pile on someone else, though most likely I participated in those versions as well.
Baseball killed me. We had three sport seasons at Stone Bank, baseball, baseball, and baseball. It was really softball, but since the ball wasn’t soft, it was the same difference to me. Thanks to the bad coordination I got from my father, I couldn’t play baseball for shit. I couldn’t throw (“You throw like a girl,” was a frequent taunt from my schoolmates), couldn’t catch, and couldn’t hit. I could run okay, but that was about it.
Still because I was seen as smart, and because at a working class school, competition wasn’t central, I was part of a gang of friends. My 4th and 5th grade teacher, Mr. Babinek, was a genius in that when he organized an interscholastic softball team to play North Lake and Merton, he made me the batboy, so I went to the games and wore the uniform and was an integral part of the team without having to embarrass myself (or the team) by actually playing. Even so, it was baseball that first made me suspicious of competition.
While I couldn’t have articulated this, the class differences in attitude to competition became evident to me early on. The house I grew up on was on Pine Lake, at the time a favorite summering place for the industrial, brewing, tanning, and banking titans of Milwaukee. My great grandfather, Frederick C. Winters, a corporate lawyer for Allis Challmers and the Milwaukee Road, and a General in the Civil War, acquired the 7 acre property on the lake in the 1880s, as a summer place. In the late 1920s, my grandfather and namesake, Henry B. Hitz, an eye-ear-nose-and throat doctor, built a largish house on the property overlooking the lake. Large by most people’s standards, only medium sized by Pine Lake standards.
To give you an idea, the area around Pine Lake was organized into the Village of Chenequa, which in my youth from 1950-70, had 400 residents, but a full time police and fire department, giving it possibly the highest ratio of police to residents of any community in the country.
It was a beautiful lake, not large, perhaps 3 miles by 2 miles, with deep blue water and not a single commercial establishment, all kinds of trees – pine, oak, maple, birch – vast well-manicured lawns, lush gardens, and homes, most of them grand.
Beginning with my grandfather, who died a few months before I was born in 1944, we were among the first families to spend winters as well as summers on the lake, and remained one of the few at least until the expressways were built in the 60s. So winter nights could be eerily quiet.
I still don’t know how our branch of the Winters family won the competition to get the best piece of the property, and it was never discussed, but because of this “victory”, our family had a little more money than our cousins who ended up with the smaller cottages next door. I know that some resentment simmers subterraineanly to this day. So it goes with competition.
In the fall, winter, and spring, despite the baseball challenges, I played exuberantly with my working class friends from Stone Bank. We rode our bikes to Oconomowoc 7 miles away, seeing how high we could get our speedometers to go as we raced down the one serious hill; we played “Civil War” with real antique guns given me by a family friend (my idea, they wanted to play cowboys); we had a club called the “Moon or Bust Club” with a clubhouse above our garage where we painted a skull and crossbones on the door in radium glow-in-the-dark paint; we developed naked pictures of my sister in my dark room, frustrated by a black streak covered the most interesting parts; we played with my electric trains, a double-transformer layout with a Union Pacific passenger train and a freight train with a log car that automatically dumped its logs; we hunted frogs and turtles in the swamps of Moose Lake, a neighboring lake where the working classes were welcome to live. My friend Jeffery’s mother was den mother to our Cub Scout troop, and we made lanyards and picture frames around the kitchen table in their Moose Lake bungalow.
The summers were different. I didn’t see my Stone Bank friends. The Milwaukee owning class swept over the lake and I learned to claw my way into the various cliques that arose among this privileged population.
Just as baseball was the only game in town in Stone Bank, sail boat racing was what we did in the summer. It was in sailing school that I first became acquainted with the art of hazing. My cousin, Billy Winters, a pudgy boy with a prominent cow-lick above his forehead, lived next door to us, in the Red Cottage my father had sold his father (and about which deal there was some trace of bad blood). They later built their own house, which we snobbishly belittled.
The earliest I remember Billy being scapegoated was at day camp, a precursor to sailing school, led by a teenager named Dick Gallun. My mother was picking me up at the end of the session. She asked Dick conversationally, “So, what’s the dope?”
“Oh, Billy’s the dope, everybody knows that,” Dick riposted, and my mother chuckled. The adults blatantly colluded with our hazing.
There were times I remember enjoying hanging out with Billy when it was just him and me playing laboratory or some such in the basement. We would make thermite, a mixture of ferrous oxide and aluminum powder that once lit, made a blinding flash and left behind a little hunk of iron. Or we would explore one of the many I had hide-outs all over the property. There was a boat house, an ice house, a cottage where my grandmother stayed in the summer, an outhouse, a toolshed, a barn converted into a garage with an upstairs, where we would look for pictures of naked natives in the old National Geographics.
But if anyone else was around, the game quickly degenerated into “picking on Billy.” We would taunt him with cruel rhymes:
Wee Willy Winters sat on a sprinkler and he began to cry,
Oh ma, oh ma, oh what a stinker am I.
We would shun him or ditch him, push him in the lake, splash him with water until he cried, belittle his inferior boats (he had a 7 ½ horsepower to our 15).
I understood full well, and felt only slightly guilty, that hazing Billy was my ticket to the inside of the prestigious clique. The incident that best illustrates this dynamic happened quite late, when I was 16 to Billy’s 15, after I had achieved a modicum of popularity. I was having a party for the 4th of July. It was the party of the season. My parents understood my need for popularity enough to sanction my purchase of 4 cases of beer at the Beer Depot in Nashotah, another nearby town. At least 50 people came from all over the lake and from Milwaukee. Of course I hadn’t invited Billy. But Billy came over anyway. I greeted him at the door. “Hi, Billy! How you doing, man?” I gushed with enthusiasm as I shook his hand. Then with an evil grin, I pressed my lit cigarette into the back of his hand and held it there. Once again, for the jillianth and perhaps last time, Billy ran home squealing, and my status was secure.
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