The Student in the Back

I was the student who sat in the back corner that the window light leaves in shadows. I was the student whose twelve year report card could be summarized as ‘works below ability," or, at best, "satisfactory." Sitting back there in my quietude, my academic solitude, I caused you no real trouble.... This is the opening of a piece I wrote for this magazine back in 1991. Now I wonder: could I have been that bad? Doubting my own story, I wrote to get my high school transcript. There it was, among other dark moments in my history: a D- in senior English in the class of the man I can honestly tell you inspired me to become an English teacher.

Most teachers struggle to understand the disinterested, disengaged student because as students themselves they were so different, so interested, so willing. How many readers are willing to recognize and honestly reflect on their own role in students’ success--and failure? Don’t misunderstand me: my failure was my own and I understand that. Yet too often teachers seem unwilling to accept that the kids who so often cause them despair and aggravation possess a genuine intelligence and real potential. Many teachers take such failure personally: as though the student wasn’t doing the work because of you, the teacher, who should be--but are not--an Escalante, a Mr. Holland. What a pile of opus. What’s that old joke we all laugh at: a good student is one who makes you feel like a good teacher?

This crisis of faith in disaffected or disengaged students became startlingly apparent to me several years ago while participating in a retreat with 75 other educators from around the country. Leaders from schools, states, and think tanks convened in Virginia to dream of education in the next century. The first question put to us was one we were asked to agree on unanimously: can all children learn and succeed? Sadly, we needed two hours to hammer down an honest yes from everyone.

This conversation about ability and worth is old. Plato spoke of gold, silver, and bronze people in his Republic. This vocabulary of difference appears with increasing frequency and passion in public schools these days. Where I teach, people speak of not wanting their kids around "those kids" who don’t excel. They feel their membership in an affluent community entitles them to this privilege; they expect a private school education in their local public schools. Where I live (San Francisco) people assume we will send our sons to private school. Local papers write big exposes on school teachers in the Bay Area (and elsewhere, presumably) who send their children to private schools because, they argue, their kids won’t get a good education if they attend the public schools with "those kids."

A conversation about tracking is a dialogue about ourselves, our society, our own classrooms. It is not an easy discussion if it is entered into honestly. Honesty would force many to confess that they would like to see the failing kids in their class just disappear; like the homeless we pass daily, these students visibly remind us that no matter how good we think our class is, how good a teacher we are, that we are not perfect, that we fail in ways we cannot control and do not want to admit.

Many contributors in this issue will argue about whether we should track or not; while this is an important question, it is also irrelevant when placed along side the more pressing question of what we will do for that student. What is our obligation to them? It is easy to dismiss their failure as a choice they made and to absolve ourselves of any responsibility. Perhaps it would help to think of this problem in cultural terms: in your culture literature matters and good writing is important, whereas in theirs it is not. You come from a different planet (i.e., a place where good grades and reading and writing all had high value for both personal and professional reasons) than your students (who have been recently renamed "screenagers" owing to the range and type of their cultural referents). Your job, difficult as it is, is to not only find a way to recognize what lies within each of your students but to mine it and reveal this wealth and promise to yourself and all other students in that class. Think about it from another point of view: if a kid from Tunisia walked into your classroom tomorrow you would do what you needed to learn about him and his culture to make him feel at home and able to succeed in your class. A kid who refuses to do your assignments because they are "boring" is no different; nor is the kid with ADD, and so on.

Thomas Aquinas once offered a clear distinction between a good and a bad teacher. The ineffective teacher says "This is where I am; do what you must to get here." The good teacher, he explained, goes to wherever the student is and says, "That is where you need to go; let me help you get there." We want to track too often for personal reasons that involve our own self-identity or in response to aggressive parents’ assaults; such rationales are unfortunate and lack the courage to do the right thing for the student and, in the long run, society.

It is September. A new year is opening its arms to us and the names of new and unknown students litter our desks like seeds. They need many things from us if they are to survive, to grow; and none will grow the same nor evenly. Not all will sprout this season, but all live in a common earth that needs our hands, our water, our light. You know what work is and how hard it can be; I hope we all find the strength to do that work well this year, and the next, and the next. I thank all my teachers for their efforts on my behalf; it took years to pay off, but it was worth it.