group Therapy
BOROFF, DAVID
ON TELEVISION By David Boroff Group Therapy No doubt the best things on television are the documentaries. And the best of the lot recently was "Incident on Wilson Street." on Show of the...
...Angela joins the club, and when the program ends she is fussing with paints and posters...
...Not bad for an amateur...
...The other is the fact that Angela had physically attacked her regular teacher who is now reluctant to have the girl return to class because of her disruptive influence...
...This was a documentary about a special school program in Williamsburgh...
...The kids feel responsibility for each other...
...But this is a documentary with a happy ending...
...Gorelick really does—startling as it may seem—is group therapy...
...It is a community, to be sure, that is always at the edge of breakdown, but it works...
...Gorelick, quick to see an opening...
...One is how to get Angela to join a "club" in the All Day Neighborhood School, which convenes after school hours...
...Gorelick asked...
...her real concern is the way the children respond to the matter at hand and to each other...
...This bare summary in no way suggests the telling insights that the program provides...
...Even in this group of only half-acculturated rebels, Angela is an unhappy loner, and Mrs...
...For a few hours every day a teacher...
...Maybe she did it to get attention," a child suggests about Angela's attack on the teacher...
...For love," the bright boy answered, covering his eyes shyly...
...asked Mrs...
...There are two immediate concerns...
...Her subject matter is anything...
...Incident on Wilson Street" demonstrates that there isn't a thing wrong with the wits of the culturally deprived...
...Mrs...
...Old Board of Education wheelhorses, they did not use any more jargon than they had to and seemed really concerned about Angela...
...It was on these few hours that the documentary concentrated...
...And what shrewdness the children themselves exhibit...
...Pegi Gorelick, picks up a group of children from a number of fifthgrade classes in a neighborhood school and provides them with experiences and opportunities that their teachers are too harassed to give them in their regular classes...
...Earlier the discussion had gotten around to marriage, which one bright little boy described as "dangerous . . . very dangerous...
...But don't grownups make mistakes...
...Serper shows the other face of the school system...
...The teachers are almost as interesting as the children...
...No help there...
...A pretty, harriedlooking girl, her puffed-up hairdo slightly disarrayed after a tough day, she looks as if she had gone to the hairdresser in anticipation of being on camera...
...Essentially, what they do is sit around and talk...
...The focus of the group was Angela, a bright, vivid but disturbed Negro girl afflicted with a cleft palate...
...And the contrast between Pegi Gorelick and Sheryl Serper, the young woman Angela had clawed at, is instructive...
...It is sometimes disquieting to hear children far removed from the ambiance of William Alanson White offer all the standard psychological explanations...
...Finally, there is modest success...
...They have more knowledge...
...Then the talk veered to divorce and to Elizabeth Taylor's fatal predisposition toward it...
...on Show of the Week (Sunday, NBC...
...The cameraman was fond of loving, caressing close-ups...
...The bright boy deplored it...
...Pegi Gorelick looks like a psych major at Berkeley who drifted into teaching, Sheryl Serper the inevitable ed...
...Gorelick and the children spend a good deal of time discussing what to do about her...
...Gorelick has a quality of intense concentration...
...Gorelick prods, pleads, cajoles ("We want you to be a part of us...
...Also, her regular teacher takes her back...
...The principal and assistant principal make a clinical diagnosis...
...major in one of the municipal colleges—but the best of the breed...
...The children deliberate...
...Amid all their wild and whirling talk and their restless fidgeting, the children actually comprise a community...
...they worry about Angela...
...Mrs...
...Her father comes in and delivers a long harrangue ("I don't want no one in the class to molest with Angela...
...Why do people marry...
...Change the idiom, age and faces, and they might be any group of adult seminarians in their "group" after work, discharging their aggressions, proclaiming their unfulfilled need for love...
...Even the principal and assistant principal look good in an honest, unstage-managed way...
...They're not supposed to," the bright boy answered...
...a culturally deprived area in Brooklyn...
...The narrator described the program as "enrichment,"' but what a hopelessly inadequate and misleading term that is—another pedagogic euphemism...
...For what Mrs...
...Hair pulled severely back, dressed simply, a Villager, her face finely-molded...
...Angela listens, her fingers pressed against her ears, a halfdefiant, half-deprecatory grin on her face...
Vol. 47 • May 1964 • No. 11
