Among Schoolchildren:
Ponsot, Marie
REMARKABLE FOR WHAT IT OMITS AMONG SCHOOLCHILDREN Tracy Kidder Houghton Mifflin, $19.95, 340 pp. Marie Ponsot Here is a book of great charm on a subject of the widest interest, pub-lie...
...We see many small events and suspect many forces are at play, but the text shows (and declines to tell more) how things appear to be, fluid, felt, and unmind-ed...
...Its absence from Among Schoolchildren and from current talk about education suggests we owe teachers, as the base of their mandate, an honest job description...
...Kidder's perceptions of chalk-grit, teacher's gestures, noise, sweet small faces laughing or tear-wet, stream in a continuum on which touching anecdotes ride...
...Child after child in Chris Zajac's class of twenty (20...
...Kidder's suggestion that teachers alone in their classrooms bear a terrible burden is true-if we require that they control before they teach...
...A teacher's expertise in a field-geography, long division, etc.-gives her the right and the power to control it through analysis into its elements which she then can teach...
...And if he is, how, in the USA, in 1989, can a responsible author fail or refuse to take it into account...
...To undertake it is, I think, a teacher's fundamental professional task...
...Concerning such analytic understanding, Among Schoolchildren is remarkable for what it omits...
...She'll spend the rest of her professional life revising and renewing her control of how to teach those elements, calling on their ordered strength and ordering fascination to attract, engage, and control students' attention-and even, to some extent, their behavior...
...She spends a spring vacation on a tour of Puerto Rico, and returns to her childhood parish, now a Puerto Rican neighborhood, for Sunday Mass, as she struggles to erase her prejudicial stereotyping of Puerto Ricans...
...She's advising a student-teacher...
...It's a poignant experience...
...Now Robert, a fat boy with severely neurotic habits, becomes the worst kid...
...Marie Ponsot Here is a book of great charm on a subject of the widest interest, pub-lie education...
...He writes nonfiction prose, the genre which it's been the special genius of twentieth-century literature to deepen and widen...
...For both, it's liberating to do things right-things that can be counted on and added to...
...His story is haunting, quietly terrible, not unusual...
...A further note about Clarence: in this class, required by law to reflect the racial balance of the neighborhood, he's the only black child, I think...
...Though the hint, even from a Harvard man, is unacceptable, the universal education that democracy requires does need plain speaking and clear definition...
...Many educators would agree...
...Through no direct act of Zajac's, but with her compliance, the school psychologist decides to send Clarence away from the school to Alpha, the dreaded local institution with "special classes for troubled students...
...Not all Zajac's prophecies are fulfilled...
...for readers of this undocumented documentary...
...they try to define themselves as teachers...
...She is guided by a high moral awareness of the importance of being a good, reliable person and carrying out the duties of her state in life...
...Its plan is promising: an anecdotal story of life in a fifth-grade class, described by a daily observer who supplements his notes with interviews...
...comes alive to our thoughts...
...He lets us consider not issues (like what to teach when, or what's perception) but one man's view of one example, one year, one place...
...Another way to say this: she soon knows which students she can reach/ teach, and which she can't...
...Chris Zajac sends home notes...
...Modestly he offers no big ideas about pedagogy or education politics...
...When Chris Zajac-known to us in Kidder's version-expresses guilt or sympathy for students rather than ideas about teaching, Kidder is careful to avoid assessments, either for her or on his own...
...Their vivid first-person accounts describe the day-to-day work and the distress, joy, hope, and lethargy that go with it...
...Beyond these, we can ask that teachers be primarily engaged to teach-that is, to enable students to accumulate data and develop essential skills...
...Do classes need police...
...Our ill-funded schools have, at least, intact walls, winter warmth, five hours a day, blackboards-and teachers like Chris Zajac who give astonishing, undaunted work and good will to their profession...
...He draws no conclusions...
...What shall we ask of them...
...Narratives of teachers and learners have a grand long tradition, beginning with Plato's vision of Socrates...
...It is not teaching, but it is a socially responsible act that desperately needs doing...
...It takes all year, but she is overjoyed to find that, in a test using pattern-recognition instead of language, he scores as near-genius...
...We're lucky to have many in this country, mostly by teachers-from Anne Sullivan's work with Helen Keller to Philip Lopate's eye-opening Being with Children...
...welfare specialists...
...Indeed, most of the problems I've named make interpersonal control impossible...
...To embody the teachable elements of skills and data in work that can't be done wrong is no mean intellectual feat...
...It orders the time and attention of teacher and learner, and gives them an appropriate place to meet...
...And surely we can hire clerical aides to collect lunch- and milk-money, doctors' and dentists' notes, permission slips...
...He is not entirely a stranger to seeing a class from the lonelier side of the desk...
...A violent or even rowdy child is not understanding magnets or Abraham Lincoln...
...if we think so, we must provide them as best we can...
...spends hours off and on the job planning to heal the ill and outwit the nonconformist...
...Zajac is able to love each student equally is a real human accomplishment...
...To identify such things is a teacher's job...
...The concreteness of his anecdotal portrait has the readability and convincing detail of all narrative...
...Dailiness has a wonderful ability to engage us...
...His progress toward doom haunts the first half of the year's story and troubles Chris Zajac...
...He too is sent off to a special school, one for the language-disabled...
...His anger and mean acts have outweighed his intelligence and touching sweetness, and displaced or replaced his power to learn...
...He hints that the fault is in that most glorious American revolutionary ideal, universal education...
...It's hard, long, and fascinating...
...If he is, that's a bitter reminder of our schools' spectacular failures in teaching black students whose native powers are certainly the equal of others...
...But direct control by teachers of students (not infants or animals) is not the ideal use of control...
...They speculate...
...doctors...
...This focus on what's bad readily accommodates the view of teachers' work that Zajac articulates, in her only statement of a principle of her pedagogy...
...What makes a teacher a professional is a knowledge of the work so deep that she can envisage it as a whole, composed in the order of its essential parts...
...They evaluate...
...Yet they also propose their different, passionately held ideas about the nature of schooling, drawn from the experiences they record...
...Perhaps...
...And her worst and best expectations come true...
...Tracy Kidder tells what Chris Zajac's teaching looked like to him, September to June, recently, in Holyoke, Massachusetts...
...Tracy Kidder is an attentive, fluent, and successful writer (House, and the Pulitzer-Prize-winning, The Soul of a New Machine...
...If he is, that creates a serious problem of trust (is he, isn't he...
...Shame and blame over school failure are unjust and useless...
...Work is a legitimate connector...
...His happy format calls for no expertise on our part, or his, beyond that interest...
...Her initial expectations of Clarence are marked by foreboding...
...Then there'd be not pathos in the picture of Chris Zajac struggling alone behind closed doors, but the image of working independence appropriate to teachers and learners, infinite riches in a little room...
...Pedro, an asthmatic barely articulate in Spanish or English, tries earnestly but seems to her to be retarded...
...te riches in a little room...
...Doctors study the physical body, lawyers the body of the law, teachers the body of knowledge they teach...
...they explore means, results, plans for next semester...
...As feminists know, it's false merely to blame "the family" and "the school" for "problems...
...It's a tribute to Tracy Kidder's arrangement of materials that one of the first students he portrays is Clarence...
...stays after school...
...It's a control proper to teaching: control of the work...
...Recent discussions of American education begin with problems: the illiterate, the ill-parented, the drugged, the abused, the violent, the rowdy...
...And even in a good school like Holyoke, those who hate being controlled will respond-successfully-by controlling the teacher...
...though determined to be hopeful, ten days later she is convinced even his tears are manipulative...
...drug therapists...
...she refers him to the psychologist on the second day of school...
...evicts students to the hall, the psychologist, the principal's office...
...That Mrs...
...That she's not able to expect success of them equally is a misery we all know...
...Zajac persists, and by June it seems she will have Robert's mother forced by court order to get him psychiatric help...
...psychiatrists...
...His mother taught in a Syosset high school, and his bibliography suggests that he's as interested as most of us in reading about public education...
...Chris Zajac's identification of medical problems is one of the extra-curricular good deeds we must thank teachers for...
...Control can perhaps take a different form, one Kidder omits from Among Schoolchildren...
...Her opinion of their needs and possibilities is fairly fixed by the end of the first week...
...A scatter of paragraphs (at the level, say, of TV documentaries) gives little general accounts of related matters: discipline, immigration, the town of Holyoke, the life of Chris Zajac and of a student's father, for example...
...Since Kidder doesn't assert this-I deduce it from careful rereading-I'm not sure...
...The first thing, she says, is to get "in control" of the students...
Vol. 116 • November 1989 • No. 19
