OCTOBER 2
I have been at Providence-St. Mel for six weeks now, and what a change!
To move from the smooth, air-conditioned order of the Golden Apple Foundation office on Michigan Avenue to what was formerly a nun`s cell in an empty convent attached to a stately but decaying girls` high school that has been transformed into a black co-ed 5th-through-12th school. There is no air conditioning. My office is regularly 85 degrees or higher at 8 in the morning because, I am told, the building stores the heat through the summer and then slowly releases it until almost November.
The world of the Golden Apple Foundation was the downtown world of privilege. Things work, and people are generally there to provide support and service. In the inner city of East Garfield Park, everything is more difficult. Mail delivery is a day or two slower. If a computer breaks, no repairman will come into the neighborhood, so you spend half a day taking it to a repair shop and half a day picking it up. If you don`t bring lunch, the only place is a McDonald`s on Madison Street, where the action is. The drive isn`t for the faint of heart, and the mild haze of distrust pervades all.
On Michigan Avenue and in the Loop, the dynamic of the day is power, competence and leverage. Here on Central Park Boulevard, the cars cruise by without purpose or direction, proclaiming their presence with the staccato rumble of their bass speakers. The neighborhood is at once depressed and dangerous. It is sleepy and empty with just a hint of the crackle of danger, much like a still summer day just before a thunderstorm.
There is no money in this community to support an academic high school. My job is to find ways to raise the money we have to scrape up each year to keep the place open. I have to go where the money is, and the sources of support are outside the community served by the school. It is a schizophrenic job.
OCTOBER 4
At Francis Parker, where the teachers were paid salaries in the $40,000 range, the faculty was well-educated, knowledgeable, opinionated and territorial. They had staked out the territory of their disciplines, their classrooms, their students, their rights and their often petty judgments of their colleagues, students, parents and, most of all, the administration.
In the years I was there, it almost seemed that as we improved the lot of teachers, they became more narrow, defensive and petty. The situation certainly wasn`t helped by parents who from the sidelines chorused that with the salaries teachers were being paid, they should be the very best. One parent even suggested that we institute the same review process used for the partners in her law firm.
There is an old saying: Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. There should be a variation on the saying for affluence: Affluence trivializes, excessive affluence trivializes to the absurd. Life in the educational fast track was always a matter of walking on pins and needles. I never knew where the pressure hose of parental expectations would turn and whom it was going to focus on next.
Here, the direct pressure is gone, but the shadow of it is present in the echo of ”What is the standard and what are the expectations in the world of the rich and successful?” The passive resistance of ghetto children is a welcome change from the innocent arrogance of the wealthy and powerful. Interestingly, for a teacher, getting a student out of that mode and into some kind of working, interactive reality is the real job. For a teacher in a privileged school, the job requires a kind of intellectual and social jujitsu to engage a student in logic and competence rather than appearances.
In the inner city, a teacher has to command the field and demonstrate that whatever he or she teaches will somehow and somewhere work in a world that the student has no knowledge of or access to yet.
OCTOBER 5
I`ve noticed when I come to school early-between 6:30 and 7 a.m.-there is always a small pack of dogs romping in Garfield Park, across the street from the school. One of the dogs is either lame or three-legged.
Today I discovered where they live-just north of the school on Central Park Boulevard in an abandoned four-story apartment building. As I was opening the front door of the school, something caught my eye. It was one of the dogs jumping through a broken window on the ground floor of the apartment building. A moment later the head of another dog appeared in a second-floor window. The pack of dogs has taken over the building. It is interesting that they are disciplined and cautious. I`ve never seen them around the neighborhood during the day, only in the very early morning. They have obviously staked out their turf. They know when and where they are reasonably safe.
OCTOBER 9
At Providence-St.Mel, despite the success of the school, the basic attitude, particularly among the students, is a shy hesitancy that comes from doubt and a lack of self-confidence. The school operates like a confidence dynamo that has wires connected to the students.
Each day the dynamo pumps out high-voltage confidence. Some students can`t take it and short-circuit. Others operate well as long as they are connected to the dynamo, but as soon as they go home, they deflate. They come to school each day vague and hesitant, and by the middle of the morning, they have gotten their charge.
When the charge takes, the students are different. If you`ve been in the school for any length of time, you can spot the engaged, self-confident students by their bearing, smile and tone. The unengaged students are just as evident. Often their grades are just as good, but they are not confident that outside the school or without the support of the school, they are going to be able to sustain their success.
The most dramatic contrast is between students at Francis Parker and Providence-St. Mel. At Parker, all but a few very depressed students exuded confidence, whether they had anything to be confident about or not. They approached the day with a reckless bravado and fearlessness. They acted as if the world was their oyster and that whatever they needed to do, they could and would do, whether or not there was any evidence to support their belief.
The opposite is true at Providence-St. Mel, where even demonstrable success is doubted unless confirmed by multiple sources. Successes may satisfy, but only for an instant. The question always hovers that something is going to destroy it or that it may just simply evaporate and leave nothing.
OCTOBER 10
The noise in the halls of Providence-St. Mel is very different from that at Parker. During the school day, there is eerie quiet. The school almost seems empty, and in a way it is. The building was constructed for 1,200 students and 55 teachers. We have 540 students and 33 teachers, so in a sense, we rattle around, but very quietly.
The change comes when school lets out at 2:45. There is a sudden explosion of noise for about half an hour. The locker doors slam, and there is a pent-up roar of hundreds of conversations. The noise tends to crescendo. The halls of the school are wide and high, with terrazzo floors and plaster walls and ceilings. The two main stairwells are huge and completely open for the five floors of the building, making for sound that fills the school like water.
The most distinctive aspect of the noise is the screech and cackle of the girls. Their voices could etch glass, and they gather in small competitive groups and scream at each other and everyone else who passes by. Add to this the cheerleaders and pompon girls who gather in the halls to warm up and practice, and you have noise with the force of a 40-m.p.h. gale.
More goes on in the halls and around the lockers in that half-hour than the whole rest of the day. What is particularly interesting is what doesn`t go on. At Parker, from the 6th through the 10th grades, students were continually teasing and testing each other. There was a constant verbal push and shove among students. Often a too-sharp verbal jab would escalate into a more serious confrontation. When it got really serious, the school would have to step in and separate the combatants. In the 7th, 8th and 9th grades, it would be hard to compute the amount of time that the faculty spent mediating, heading off and breaking up these tangles.
At Providence-St. Mel, verbal testing is all but absent. My feeling is that it is just too dangerous in the inner city to test and tease someone in the way that students do at Parker; too much of a chance that someone will take a passing remark seriously. Once that happens, there is no way of knowing how violent and serious a vendetta will grow from a put-down or insult.
Then at about 3:30, all is quiet again. Paul Adams claims he can take the pulse of the school by listening to the timbre, volume and duration of the noise after school. It has the energy and vitality of a good hard-rock band, but then, so does the school.
OCTOBER 15
Saturday was the PSM/V103 Radiothon. It began at 8 a.m. and went until almost 1 a.m. on Sunday in the convent dining room. Nothing in my previous experience has prepared me for this. Several things stand out.
First was the scene at about 11 p.m. when about 20 parents, teachers and students were boogieing to the music while the deejay was soliciting pledges from the audience.
At one point, a chic-looking lady of the evening came in, pledged $200 and asked to have her services announced over the radio. The deejay seemed either to know her or how to handle her, and a potentially embarrassing moment was averted.
The whole of the radiothon was one near-disaster after another. It was like going down the Dan Ryan at 70 with no brakes and no steering. But at the end of the evening, we had just over $50,000 in pledges.
