Do Private Schools Widen the Gap . . .

I have heard the argument often that private schools widen the gap between
the rich and the poor. It may apply to some of the private schools such as
Choate or Grotton (do I have the spelling right here ?), but it doesn't
apply to Exeter. Back when I attended Exeter, something like 60% of the
students received at least some financial aid. And I graduated in 1956.
Many students worked at various jobs for the school to help pay their way,
too.

Since then the situation has done nothing but improve. I can say right now
that if a student has the smarts, character and intellectual curiosity, he
can be admitted to and attend Exeter even if he and his family live in a
Safeway shopping cart.

Back then, one of my closest friends came from a farm in an area of northern
Vermont where the winters were bitterly cold. They had just about no money,
so little that he always had to stay in Exeter during everything but summer
vacation because he didn't have the cash to get back to his family and then
return to Exeter for the beginning of the Fall semester. To save fireplace
wood, they used to sleep sometimes in the barn, where the warmth of the cows
made the temperature more comfortable than that of their very small house.

And bow I will tell you some stories that seem to contradict what I have
just written. Please excuse whatever misspellings of names occur here.

In my math class, which had 12 students, there was one Rockefeller (Michael,
who later died off or in New Guinea), a kid with the last name of Tillich,
whose father was on the cover of Time Magazine that same year, and a kid
with the last name of Reisman, whose father was also on the cover of Time
Magazine that same year. One Monday when I arrived in physics class I
found our usual instructor, Mr. Hogg, sitting in the back of the room as we
filed in. Up front was this quiet, soft-spoken man. Mr. Hogg introduced
him and told us the stranger would be teaching us physics all that week.
His name was J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Exeter's student body wasn't restricted to kids from wealthy families.
Oppenheimer had a number of duties he had been hired to perform during his
two-week stay. One was to give two public lectures. Another was to sit in
the music library when he wasn't teaching and to talk to any student who
wanted to talk to him. What I remember most about those library sessions
was a discussion I overheard between the principal and Oppenheimer. The
biggest problem they had there, the principal explained, was to inculcate in
the students the idea that they were not some kind of special, elite group
better than anyone else, but to give them a sense of humility.

I had a little difficulty on this count for a while -- I look back and
realize that for a few years I really was a snob -- until I spent three
years in the U.S, Army as an enlisted man, and then spent many months
sitting in various traditional Samoan fale (houses) in villages, talking with wise
but uneducated old chiefs. As I look back over those years, I realize that
one of the wisest people I ever met was a Samoan man who could neither read
nor write, but who could read personalities with ease.

Anyway, these days there is little division at Exeter between students from
families with lots of money and students from families with almost none.
What counts is whether or not an applicant has the mental ability to survive
there. Exeter isn't deviating from the democratic ideal at all.

If there is a gap between rich and poor among Exonians, it comes years after
graduation, and is purely because a superb education helps many rise to the
top financially, no matter where they start. Maybe a really good education
is, in this sense, anti-democratic. But isn't a really good education what
teachers are trying to give their students ?

The Current Stylish Education Idea In Wash DC

For a number of years now we have heard politicians talk about the need to improve our educational system. As a teacher, I don't doubt the truth of this. But I think the people talking about this don't really understand the problem.

We hear endless comments that we must improve the training of teachers, as though teachers are the problem.

I don't think it is money or the lack of it. This may be true in some districts, but not in the district I teach in.

The main cause of many problems lies in the values and supervision of the students' parents. If the parents don't value education, and if they don't keep close track of what their children (our students) are doing, and if they abuse them, the students disrupt the classes so that a teacher has to spend an enormous percentage of the time on discipline instead of on course subject matter.

In my district, there would be a simple but impractical way to improve the education of a great percentage of students: remove the trouble-makers from the classroom. I admit that I don't know where we would put them. But if instead of just shuffling them from school to school within the district and placing them in different classes with students who really want to learn, they had no chance to disrupt classes, a lot more learning among the better behaved students would take place.

This, of course, is either a utopian or a dystopian idea, I'm not sure which. We cannot do this. We're stuck with the requirement that we must educate ALL students, regardless of how difficult this makes the process.

If we had something resembling the French system or (I think) the Japanese system, we would weed out the dead wood very quickly and only advance those who actually learned. The others would simply be cast out and left behind.

I wonder if in either France or Japan the high school teachers have discipline problems in their classes like the ones we have here.

Back to Work -- January 21, 2009

Today was my first day back to work in about a month and a half. I had a series of medical problems and two operations which kept me away from school for a while.

The assignment today was supposedly to give a class a test. However, when I arrived at the classroom, I learned that they had already taken the test and done most of the work they would have due in a few days.

I had some interesting conversations with a few of the students. A few worked on homework for other classes, but most listened to their iPods or fooled around with video games on their telephones.

The teacher keeps a series of books, one for each student, in which their quizzes and tests are filed. Several of the students showed me their books -- straight A's. I asked one student to show me his book because I suspected that he is a very bright kid who isn't reaching his potential.

He refused to tell me his name, finally told it to me, but was really insolent and nasty. He claimed his book was at home, which I knew wasn't true because all the books were on the shelf in the classroom. However, there wasn't one with his name on it.

Because he was so rude and disrespectful, I wrote him up. He wanted to take the slip himself to the office. "No thanks," I said. "I take them there myself."

When I checked later at the office and looked at his grades and contact information, I discovered that there is only a woman in his household listed as contact -- no father -- that his grade point average is a 1.0, and that he has been written up a number of times. He is in the 11th grade, and his record shows that he isn't going to graduate.

A rude, disrespectful kid is normally someone no teacher can help unless they have some way of creating an extraordinary rapport with him or her. A few kids I can do this with. Most I cannot.

My prediction is that in a few years this kid will end up in prison. I hope someone somewhere can reach him, but I am fairly sure it cannot be me.

It is very fashionable to blame teachers for the lack of progress students make. In this class, about 80% get A's or B's. The problem here is with this kid's home life and upbringing. No amount of federal legislation will ever correct that.

Comments to An African Student

I was teaching math in the last period of the day in late October. This was the last class of the last day I was teaching before I departed for three weeks in Cote d'Ivoire, West Africa. Most of the students had finished their classwork and were wasting time and fooling around. The talk among them turned to girl friends and boy friends. The class was divided between a large contingent of Chinese students, about half a dozen Hispanic girls, and several other foreign students, including one from Mali, West Africa.

The students were joking around about who would be whose boy friend and girl friend when one of the Spanish students commented that she could not possibly ever be the girl friend of the student from Mali.

Just as the bell ending the class rang, the young man from Mali said to me, "They make fun of me because I am so dark."

I must tell you that a few weeks before I had had this same students in one of the ESL classes I occasionally teach. All the students there were given a picture of a room in a house and had to explain in English what they saw in the picture. The general comments went something like, "I see a window. I see a door. I see a sink. I see a chair."

The student from Mali started out describing things by commenting that he saw "a chair in the Style of Louis Quatorze." He went on in his broken English describing things in a much more sophisticated way than the other students. His English wasn't any better, but his perceptions were miles ahead of theirs.

On that final day as the students were rushing out to go home, I called this young man over and started giving him a pep talk. Luckily I speak French. In our conversation, which was in French, I learned that he had attended school in France before coming to the United States. I explained a number of things.

First, I told him that he was intellectually way beyond the other students in the class. I reminded him of his description of the Louis Quarorze chair, and he was surprised that I remembered.

I reminded him, too, that he was here with his family from Mali, and that they had a culture. "Keep true to your culture," I told him. "You are something that many of the African-American students here would really want to be -- a true African." I told him that if he doubted me, he could go to one of the local flea markets, where he would find a number of African-Americans drumming together, pretending (and wishing) they were African.

He had, I mentioned, values and a culture, things many of the other students in the school don't have. He must stay true to who he is. He must not be infected by the cheap culture of many of the kids who have no role models to imitate, and who take their cues for living primarily from their peers.

And as for the very dark color of his skin, I reminded him that "La beaute se trouve dans les yeux de celui qui regard." "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." If anything, he should know who and what he is, and feel very proud of his African identity, which is precious.

I am not one for subtlety or political correctness, as you can tell from my talk with him. And I haste people looking down on other people because of skin color.

I've been called down by readers of this blog before, and I am sure I'll be called down many times again, especially for what I have said about what I have come to regard as the dismal culture of many of my African-American students. For all of them, thought, what I want is simply something better.

And don't we have a President now who demonstrates that they can have this if they so choose ?