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 cooperation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cooperation. 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.
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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