Brief Intervals of Horrible Sanity: One Season in a Progressive School
By Elizabeth Gold
Tarcher/Penguin, 336 pages, $24.95
Inside Mrs. B’s Classroom: Courage, Hope, and Learning on Chicago’s South Side
By Leslie Baldacci
McGraw-Hill, 237 pages, $22.95
Stupidity and Tears: Teaching and Learning in Troubled Times
By Herbert Kohl
New Press, 174 pages, $22.95
One of these books is literature: readable for its own sake, truer to experience than to argument. The other two know what is what–that while American public education is a catastrophe, a war zone, in need of heroes against the hatred and meanness that pervade unprogressive politics, that goodness and generosity should and must win out.
My social reflexes lean with those two, but as a reader I prefer the many truths (art has many truths; politics only one) presented by the amusingly bumbling, winsome Elizabeth Gold in “Brief Intervals of Horrible Sanity: One Season in a Progressive School”:
“I feel old. . . .
“The girls are talking. She did that to me and I did that to her and then she had the NERVE to do that to me and what do you think I did? I had NO CHOICE but to do that to her and
“It’s not fair, the boys are saying, It’s not fair, it’s not fair
“They will love me, I tell myself. How could they not love me? Am I not just like them? Really, truly, like them? I also think it’s Not Fair. Hell, I know it’s not. Whatever it is, It’s Not Fair. It can’t be.”
In spring 2000, Gold–a poet, a part-time instructor of writing in the City University of New York system and in need of a real salary–accepted an emergency, mid-year job teaching English to Queens 9th-graders in a “progressive” high school. The principles of the school sound good because they’re supposed to sound good, and the teachers and principal express the best intentions:
“Every child has a voice. That’s what Leon [the principal] likes to say. Sometimes as I walk through the halls, head pounding, it seems every child has two voices, four voices.”
Gold walks into her classes confident that her personality and experience will inspire and infect eager children:
“It begins in 9B, the first class of my day, my homeroom class. It begins when Ricardo Silva, in the back of the room, waits for Tom [a veteran teacher] to go and then whips out a can of soda and smirks at me. He’s not supposed to drink soda in the classroom. No food, no drinks, no Walkman, no hats, no do-rags, I was told this very carefully, this was part of my job of keeping order, and though personally I could care less if he drinks soda or not, I have taken this job, and so it is important.”
Yes, teaching, like parenting, has many satisfactions and rewards, but preservation of your idea of yourself is not one of them. She has to confront Ricardo and participate in a humiliating argument with a 14-year-old:
“And now, of course, this boy has transformed me into the kind of adult I can’t stand. The kind of adult who cares about soda.”
Gold lasts to the end of the semester, buoyed only by a revelation born of misery:
“Oh God, I think, sinking my face into my hands, this is so stupid and horrible and boring someone should write a book about it.
“Oh.”
“Brief Intervals of Horrible Sanity” is full of truths, because what Gold details of the school lives and language of her students is unfortunately true of 9th-graders everywhere, and also, to this reader’s delight, the book is full of herself, because what is said and noticed could only be said and noticed by the plucky Gold herself at exactly this point in her life.
She half enjoys (and half hates) the unmanageable, impossible, multiple-repeater 17-year-old who controls one side of the classroom with a ringing, egomaniacal voice. Reaching out to help the girl and at the same time regain some control over the class, Gold offers to work with her, poet to poet, to do an end-around 9th grade:
“Cindy Fernandez wasn’t grateful when I offered to help her. She was put on the spot. It meant she would have to do something. It meant that she would one day graduate from ninth grade, and she doesn’t want to graduate. . . . She wants the glory of the stage, the drama of her own degradation.”
Meanwhile, back in Chicago, Leslie Baldacci was a journalist at the Chicago Sun-Times when, in her 40s, she decided to leap into the city’s public school system, an abyss about which she had long reported. One of the best accounts in her book, “Inside Mrs. B’s Classroom: Courage, Hope, and Learning on Chicago’s South Side,” is how difficult it was for her, a professional writer, a mother, worldly, experienced, knowledgeable, to survive the qualifying cuts into a program whose purpose was to infuse the system with professionals (and pay them $24,000 a year and put them through graduate courses for their credential).
A self-described dunce in math, Baldacci nonetheless scored higher on math than on writing skills (she learns a disturbing academic lesson from this: “It is better to stick to a basic formula than to write with passion, style or voice.”). At her unprogressive, principal-dominated, educationally disadvantaged school on the South Side, she is, in spite of being a striving quick learner, bedgrudgingly aided or, more often, ignored or bullied, by support staff and administration.
While Baldacci relates background, history and economic realities more efficiently than most non-journalists could, she also plays the journalistic game of disguising sensitive identities (so did a student actually say what Baldacci says this “Kayla” says?) and airbrushing unpleasant, personal, or peripheral elements–including her mysterious drumming husband and the domestic tensions with him created by her economic sacrifice for this new career.
Whereas Gold’s book stands on its own because nothing important to the writer is excluded, Baldacci tends to use personal details as props, brought up only for a moment to bolster an argument or, for instance, remind you of how famous she once was: “I had a couple of lesson plans, loosely structured like the radio talk show I hosted for two years.”
Although overwhelmed by her students the first year (hers is a two-year account), Baldacci is convincingly engaged by her students (7th-graders the first year, 2nd-graders the next). And while the journalist can never sound quite comfortable in a conversational voice, she’s nobody’s fool, and her professional experience as a political analyst often serves her well: “One irony of schools is that they’re supposed to be places that foster creativity and self-control but instead are paramilitary installations with rigid rules and imposed control.”
Quiet, patient Herbert Kohl is the reigning parent (to use a non-gender-specific term) of progressive, creative education. In his best work, which for more than 35 years has presented stellar examples of personal writings on teaching, we see students and instructors as individuals, engaged in more or less functional (or dysfunctional) relationships. “Stupidity and Tears: Teaching and Learning in Troubled Times,” his 40th book, is a collection of recent essays. Unfortunately, the only particularly engaged and interesting piece in it is “Burning Out and Flaring Up,” a reflective little memoir about a leave of absence he took from a Harlem school almost 30 years ago. “That year,” he writes, “I developed the habit of working on many writing projects at the same time; I’m sure the model for that way of working came from my father, who was a building contractor always simultaneously finishing a project, estimating new projects, in the middle of several jobs, and working with subcontractors before beginning a new job. . . . I realize now that I work obsessively, like my father–only my jobs are written, not built.”
Kohl created, and is now the academic director of, the Center for Teaching Excellence and Social Justice at the University of San Francisco, and while it is inspiring to read of his socially committed work, most of the pieces in this book are so flat or distant they read like platitudes and warmed-over anecdotes. We know what Kohl will say before he says it:
“I wish to see all children as having full, imaginative play lives that allow them to transcend, if only in small ways, the accidents of birth and culture. It helps me retain hope for children who are starving or brutalized; for youngsters who are born into families who have no power or apparent hope in the world.”
The book is full of social worries countered by wishes–but, as he must remember, live reporting from the action is better. As he tells his new graduate students, perhaps trying to pass on the baton, “There’s nothing wrong with being a troublemaker in a troubled world.”
In these three books, all useful, one original and superb, the most sensible, resounding and sobering statement on education comes from the comedian, Gold, in her conclusion:
“Schools don’t exist separately from our culture. They are our culture. They reflect what we value, disdain, honor, ignore. . . . And the American school . . . belongs to us, and tells our stories. Our secrets, if you will.”
