The Middle
Sadly, the government shut down this past week.
Even more sadly, the government shut-down this week didn’t give me some days off.
Even most sadly, a student asked, “Since the government shut down, does that mean there are no laws? Does that mean if my house is on fire, no one will come?”
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We’ve been reading The Outsiders in my 7th grade English class. Since S.E. Hinton makes a number of allusions to musicians, and in order to give the students an idea of the times in which the book is set, we listened to some music in class. I’ve done this for a number of years now, and it’s always been a laidback day. The students don’t necessary like the music I play for them. I tell them it’s ok if they don’t like it. But in the past, except for this year and last, the students had fun with the music. One class sang along to Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall.” Other classes have danced to seemingly undanceable beats. I’ve always enjoyed it (beyond getting to listen to some cool music for an entire day) because it expanded what the students have been exposed to and it was fascinating to see that music resonate with those who’d never heard it before. One aspect of music that fascinates me is how you can trace different genres back through the generations via the inspiration earlier musicians gave to more modern ones. That tracing can become boringly academic, a pedantic showing-off of useless knowledge. But not when you see it. Not when you see the evidence in a child who knows only what’s popular now and only what he’s been exposed to by his parents (if his parents listen to anything other than what’s popular now, which is too often the case) but recognizes something in a song from before their parents’ time. Perhaps I’m being too sentimental or overly mystical or merely eloquent for eloquence’s sake. Or perhaps there’s just something within the music, something innate and powerful and beautiful that doesn’t fit into a genre, can’t be categorized to be sold or marketed or overplayed, and therefore can’t be destroyed, that resonates with all of us, out of mind and out of time.
But the last two years have been different. The students have been so disinterested that they talked through the songs, made disrespectful remarks, and overall ruined the experience. This got me to thinking, which lately I realize is the source of my problems. I think there is something to the fact that the students from the last two years couldn’t sit still and listen to the music. They didn’t have to like it. They didn’t have to even appreciate it. But on multiple levels, they should have sat quietly. One, because they were told to. Two, because their teacher required them only to listen to the music and give each song a rating. For almost the entire 80 minute period. Shouldn’t it fire off in in some poorly-formed corner of their mind that “Hey, that weird white guy up there is making us do less work than he usually does. Maybe this can continue”? But no. They take advantage. That raw human beast comes out and they do because no one can make them not do. There’s something to this. There’s something more to this than me sitting here questioning if I’m not asking too much of them. I’m not. But I am because they don’t have it in them to give, even if they should. But I can come to no definitive conclusion, no set of truths and hard facts that I can use to devise a plan for helping them or at the very least, counteracting their base behavior. Which probably means I’m not on the right path yet.
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And now for a commercial interruption:
While listening to the Beatles’ “Ticket to Ride,” one student says: “Ok, Mr. Carroll. April Fool’s is over. This isn’t the Beatles. This is some cowboy stuff.”
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Middle school is a bizarre era of life. My favorite professor from undergrad, who taught many English classes but also taught the classes related to teaching English, used to tell us that students don’t become humans until 10th grade. I believe this fully, with my whole heart. I’d probably die for this statement. Looking back at my own adolescence, I realize that I didn’t become a full human until sometime in my 11th grade year. It’s when I realized what was going on around me, that I should probably stop being a sloth and a slug and a leech and start doing and being something for myself and for others. It was a new birth, an awakening upon which when I opened my eyes, I saw the world for the first time, that a lot of that stuff my parents and teachers had been saying was for the most part true and that I had the potential to function as a member of the human race. Middle schoolers are years away from this. They are still crawling out of the primordial ooze that is elementary school. They are formless monsters inhabiting the awkward, gangly shells of 12 and 13 year old male and female humanoids. Their minds are in worse shape than their bodies.
I often try to remember what it was like to be in middle school and apply it to my interactions with my students. My experience, on the outside, was quite different from my current students, but we have similarities, just like all potential-humans do at this crucial time of life.
I was the type of student I now find annoying. I was arrogant to cover my weakness and fear. I followed the crowd, finding in the safety of the crowd the ability to disrupt the teaching and do what I wanted. I was more worried and concerned about my standing socially then about anything else. Once, my parents kept me home on a day near Christmas so that we could visit the Dickens Village and other Christmas attractions in Center City. I was so mad, so scared to miss a day at school, not because I’d miss the work, or that I’d fall behind, but because I was going to miss out on what happened that day. I kinda wish my parents knew that at the time and whipped my butt. Just for caring about something so juvenile and shallow. But that’s what I was: juvenile and shallow. And part of that was ok because I was a kid. Part of it wasn’t because I should have known better, I did know better; but I chose to care about things that others dictated as important.
A strange thing happens, though, after one becomes a human being. One starts to forget what it was like to be sub-human. Oh we remember events and occasions and emotions and impressions. But what it was, what we were, not what it was like or what we were is gone. Our memories about them are false because our memories are merely recorders. Perhaps TV will ruin my ability to convey this idea, or maybe it will enhance it. Think about the Rodney King beating (or some other major event that you witnessed on TV that charged your emotions). Though you may have felt some strong emotion(s) when you saw King being beaten, you did not feel the same as someone who experienced it or witnessed it firsthand. In capturing video and audio, a camera leaves out the feel. It blocks out the intuitiveness human faculties bring to a scene. The same is true of our adult, human self thinking back on our primordial-ooze self.
So there’s a sense in which I can’t, no matter my effort, insight, or empathy, relate to my students. I’ve moved on from where they are. I’ve cut all moorings attaching me to that time of life. It’s gone.
This leads to what I think is a teacher’s greatest sin, mine included. In teaching our classes, despite our lip-service to helping those that need it most, we teach to the good ones, the bright ones. We don’t craft our lessons to bring up those at the bottom. We craft them so that they resonate with those that are ahead of everyone else. And we do that because those kids have a glimpse of the human they’ll become one day soon. When you play
Bob Dylan for this type of student, she might tell you it sucks, it’s stupid, but she’ll react to it despite herself. She will dance a little or clap her hands or make a comment that shows she’s still stuck in the ooze but that things are happening below the surface. Things are melting and melding. And that’s what resonates with us, the adults. We see those still mired in blind childhood as beneath a certain level, a level that demarcates who can cut it, who gets it, who has potential. Because to really reach down into the muck and mire and grab a hand or a foot or even an ear and yank and pull and tug for endless ages until that child sees the light of hope and possibility is nearly impossible for all of us. That’s not to say we don’t try. We toil and anguish and cry and scream and flirt with insanity to give our students what many of us have received at some point in our lives: a solid education, and at the least, a person who cared or excelled at something we found fascinating. But in so doing, are we losing sight of who we are, what made us teachers in the first place? Instead of teaching the subject, are we tailoring the subject to meet the deficiencies of our students, and therefore stripping away what makes the subject learnable and cohesive, essentially trying to fill the holes in our students’ abilities with pre-fabricated blocks that were fashioned after a template with those deficiencies in mind? We fear creating an underclass, a large segment of the population who can’t compete. But we’re doing it anyway despite our best efforts to patch with data-derived instruction.
And so, the middle. An era of a student’s life that just as bizarre and full of wonder and fear and confusion for the student as it is for his teacher.
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The music activity produced some stunningly funny comments that were equally sad because my students just aren’t exposed to the world.
- Before playing the Beatles’ “All You Need is Love”:
Student: “This song better be poppin’.”
Me: “I kinda guarantee it’s not poppin’.”
- One student who has been providing many of the funny comments asked, “What did they listen to back in the day?”
“When back in the day?” I asked.
“Waaay back in the day.”
“Like when the dinosaurs were around?”
“No,” the student said, not offering up any more helpful info to determine just what in the world he was talking about and also leaving it wide open for veiled-insult questions.
“Like 2000 years ago?”
“No.”
“Like when your grandparents were young?”
“No.”
“Like when your parents were young?”
“No.”
Here I was truly stumped. I figured a stab in the dark to be my best option.
“Like when I was young?”
“Yeah!”
“So you mean the 80s?”
“Yeah! Wow, Mr. Carroll. You’re so old.”
- One more from this kid.
I told the class about the upcoming progress reports that would be mailed home.
“Make sure you buy a thick newspaper and shove it down the back of your pants. The whooping won’t be that bad,” I say to usually blank stares.
“I don’t get a whooping,” this student says. “I get body shots.”
In other unintended comedy news:
- We recently played a soccer game at Girard College. I read a book about Girard over the summer, and since some of the kids were asking about the place, I told them a few things. I told them that his body was interred in one of the buildings on campus. I also told them that he lived during the Revolutionary War times and into the 1800s.
Well there is a soccer player named Steven Gerrard who plays for Liverpool and England’s national team.
Before I figured out their misunderstanding, most of the kids I talked to thought that this soccer player had started Girard College.
They kept talking about England, and I kept saying, “Well he was born in France, but he moved to America before it was America,” but that didn’t clear anything up.
And my referencing the Revolutionary War and saying that he’d been dead for 180 years did nothing to give them the hint that the guy who started the school and the guy who plays soccer for England are not the same guy.
- One class was particularly fussy one day. They weren’t bad, just antsy and talky and all other manner of annoying behavior.
So I said to them, “It’s quite clear that many of us have a demon inside of us, and that he is controlling what you do. Tell your demon that I am giving him 30 seconds to get all his crazy antsy behavior out, and then it’s time to get to work.”
I was kidding but I think I might have hit onto something.
One girl banged on the side of her head with her fists while her mouth hung open in a silent scream.
Another boy asked if he could run around the room. Apparently a polite demon controls him. I said, “Go ahead.”
There was all many of other behaviors that cried desperately for an exorcism. Which since all else isn’t working, could maybe be the next attempt at getting kids to behave and listen in schools.
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This has stretched to quite a length. I have much more material, but I’ll save that for the next post. In the meantime, remember to listen to some waaay back in the day music, and every once in a while, let your demon out.
Bellicose Blatherings 
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