Self-Confidence in the Classroom

...I never tried " Everything, school included, seemed possible And Stella Pistorio proclaimed her deep sense of having made a new start by declaring "This was my first year in school " At the risk of soundmg mawkish and homiletic, I would say these children were freed to believe in themselves because their teacher believed in them Since I came to care about the students, I placed a high value on such lesponses Yet I still felt that moie was possible for them They were for the most part bright, appealing youngsters with no obvious impediments to learning Why did facility come so hard9 A major factor seemed to be the vast gulf that existed between the majority of their homes and the school—an obscure, unacknowledged and theie-fore unresolved competition between teacher and parents that had its roots less in mutual antagonism than mutual ignorance It was hard to persuade paients that the teacher really cared deeply about the well-being of then children, that she had taken the trouble to know them well The teacher, in turn, easily slipped into the assumption that the paients were indifferent to the progress of then children Only a handful of parents attended such strained and unspontaneous functions as Open School Week The rest came at moments of crisis or not at all Accordingly, the teacher generally knew very little about the families In some cases, what she heard from colleagues and guidance counselors was wrong or misleading A child could be chastised tor not doing his homework, but without an understanding of the conditions undei which it had to be done the chance of overcoming his failure seemed slight A handful of parents, of course, really were indifferent oi irresponsible Still, they could not be left out ot the equations that governed the performance of their children in school, on the contrary, it was even more urgent foi them to be reached At PS 198, where the overwhelming majority of teachers clocked out at 3 p.m sharp, Miss Boroughs was an object of amused, even condescending wonder because she sometimes took her students on trips or to her apartment on holidays and weekends Yet she knew few of their homes, which is the way school administrators—fearful of incidents and misunderstandings arising from so-called "unprofessional" contacts—prefer to have it Parents are always summoned, never visited Often these contacts can be sufficient, even superfluous But even more often, it seems to me, it is necessary to go beyond them Immediately it will be objected that teachers are not trained to be social workers The question, however, is really not one of training but of the limitations they either impose on themselves or passively accept On the rare occasions when teachers actually gather together to discuss ways of improving the quality of schooling, proposals normally focus on more and better training for teachers Thus teachers take and retake education courses and accumulate so-called alertness credits" like chips at a casino They thereby guarantee the enrollments of the teaching colleges and insure themselves of regular increases in pay, since New York City gears a teacher's salary to the number of credits compiled over the years Supervisors and specialists within the system supplement their incomes by giving these courses No one asks whether these symbiotic relationships help nourish children If teachers could collect chips by working with their own students on an individual basis after school, the city's teaching colleges would be set back, but the performance of both teachers and students might improve Somehow "the system" must legitimize the best instincts of its best teachers by making it clear that their deepest commitment ought to be to the children m their charge, not to an abstract standard of "professionalism' that can be used as a shield when times get rough Good instincts are not enough in themselves, but they are indispensable It schools could concern themselves with the needs and learning of individual students, then they might ask, or at least tolerate, intelligent questions about what it is that children need to learn In the present climate, I think, this is altogether too visionary The difficulty is not that the questions have yet to be posed intelligently or eloquently, it is that they have not gotten into most schools THE DILEMMA of public education was epitomized for me by a single member of Class 4-4, a 12-year-old named Shaun Sheppard who was nominally a fifth-grader but was going through the fourth grade for a second time because Miss Boroughs had asked for a chance to rescue him from a pattern ot hopeless estrangement in school Her fundamental conviction was that he was capable of anything, if only he could gain confidence in his own abilities As a practical matter, that had to happen quickly, she thought, for if Shaun was sent on to junior high school before he was ready to handle the work, he would defend himself against the stigma of failure by not even trying In being held back, Shaun had received special treatment normally denied the many other students who were much worse off than he, he had been told, in effect, that his learning mattered more than the loutine administrative arrangements of the school And this happened only because a single teacher was so attracted by his obvious intelligence, sturdmess and charm that she practically begged an indulgence for him Shaun made good progress during the year, but not enough to skip ahead to a sixth-grade class capable of doing sixth-grade work If he was placed on the basis of "achievement," he would go into what is officially known as a "difficult" class where he would find little stimulus and little would be expected of him To keep that from happening, Miss Boroughs again lobbied and pleaded for an exception to be made in his case Ultimately, it was agieed that he would not be assigned in the usual way but would be placed in the class of another teacher who had expressed a special interest in him Some time later, I heard that this agreement had proved to be too much for the school's bureaucracy to digest Shaun's records were sent to precisely the kmd of sixth-grade class from which he was supposed to be saved On the first day of school, he presented himself to the teacher who was said to have a special interest in him, only to be told that she could not take him in because she did not have his records For a couple of days, Shaun roamed the corridors—scowling and defeated, more hostile than he had been in two years No one seemed to know where he belonged Finally—for the third year in a row—Miss Boroughs reached out and pulled him into her class without waiting for official sanction As it happened, she had abruptly been given a sixth-grade class, so everything can be said to have worked out foi the best—not by design, rathei almost in spite of it An especially dedicated teacher can do this once or twice a year, she cannot do it 30 times And normally she can do it tor just one year in a child's schooling, from then on, the machinery will continue to work impersonally The argument is very simple and has been heard for a long time Children cannot all be expected to learn at a prescribed rate, yet they might all still go on learning if the educational system could keep from dropping deadlines in their paths When will the schools learn to stop telling their students that "It's too late...

...SelfConfidence in the Classroom BY JOSEPH LELYVELD FOR THREE weeks last year I went exploring the wilderness of the New York City school system m search of a single teacher and class whose daily experiences would be interestmg enough to sustain a series of newspaper articles and representative enough to perhaps be illuminating The idea, I should emphasize, was only that the experiences be representative, not the teacher or students themselves I did not really think there was a typical class or teacher, and I was less than certain that I would want to spend a year with them even if they could be found When you are going through the fourth grade for the second time and have some choice about it, you pick your spot As it turned out, it was hard for me to spend even an hour in most of the classes I visited—sometimes because the teachers were shaken, understandably, by the untoward presence of a reporter whose intentions seemed dubious at best, more often because I felt myself bemg overcome by the general stupor Since one aim of the series was to examine the school system at something approaching its optimum, I was hoping to find a teacher who was clearly better than average without being a paragon Obviously, neither I nor my paper wanted to make a single individual emblematic of all that ails the schools, which is what could have happened had I settled on an unsympathetic or mcompetent person I also wanted to avoid classes that reflected extreme social and economic contrasts, for I knew this was not typical of the schools any more and I did not want to begin by ranking youngsters on some socioeconomic scale At the same tame, it was immediately evident that such rankings usually result—coincidentally or otherwise—from the practice of grouping students by their presumed skills A class of "intellectually gifted" children was generally white and middle-class in background, the "bottom" class in a grade, with its customary admixture of so-called "disruptive' pupils, tended to be composed of blacks and Puerto Ri-cans from broken families I wanted to avoid either extreme and find a group of kids whose success or failure were not guaranteed m advance —average kids who were too young to have been written off by the system and who still enjoyed, in theory at least, every opportunity the schools had to offer Class 4-4 at Public School 198 looked promismg from the little I could glimpse by peering through the window in the classroom door The school's principal remarked that the teacher was exceptionally effective and singleminded, then hustled me down the corridor without suggesting that we stop to visit as we had in other classrooms His haste quickened my interest When I finally met Dorothy Boroughs, she did something none of the other teachers had She instantaneously reacted to my project in terms of her students, instead of worrying about bemg exposed m the public prints or fearing what her colleagues might say in the teachers' cafeteria It would be good for the children, she reasoned, to be able to depend on the attention of an adult who was not a teacher Without exactly knowing it, I had been seeking that kind of confident response all along I have described my reportonal stratagems here because I thmk they were essential to the kmd of experience I had I enjoyed Class 4-4, and if by confining myself to it I limited the conclusions that could be drawn from my observations, they had the value of being irrefutably real I was not out to sound any theme or set of themes about the schools Yet looking back, it seems to me that what I learned was not that good teachmg goes on but that it goes on by dint of personal commitment—despite an educational supeistructure so insulated from the world and obsessed with its own pohtics and programs (all "innovative," of course) that it does not know how to focus on the live kids in its charge There were 42 live kids in Class 4-4 during the school year, but never more than 28 at any given time The school's principal cited the constant flux of its enrollment to explain the glaring fact that most of the children had serious "reading problems " The poor readers, he would say, were those who came and went, those who stayed, learned This, however, was just wishful thinking In reality, the vast majority of those who had been in the school since kindergarten knew by the time they reached the fourth grade that they were flawed and inadequate as stu-dent's Few expected to excel Some of the pupils and their parents had been told what their problems were, and they mostly accepted these diagnoses as hard and objective For example, Stella Pistono and Andy Carnl had always been "disruptive" in school, which was why, their parents were informed, they had done so poorly, the cause of their disruptiveness was assumed to lie in their homes By contrast, Carlos Andujar and David Badillo had always been inconspicuous, even docile The assumption was that they were working to the limits ot their abilities, even if they were already a year or two "behind" in leading At least, their parents were assured, they were "never a problem " THOUGH Miss Boroughs was a poised and experienced teacher, I was struck from the beginnmg by apparent weaknesses in her methods She was perfectly capable ol ranting at the children She found it hard to go very far toward "opening up" her classroom m the suddenly modish fashion ot the British infant schools She left little time outside class for planning and preparation, relying instead on improvisation and impulse Among her colleagues she was a "loner " Only gradually did I come to lealize that these faults did not offset her obvious strengths but, m the straitened setting of the school, actually tended to complement them If Melvm Laird had not cornered the phrase, they might be called "protective reactions ' She believed in her youngsters and their ability to leain She was charmed by their spontaneous wit and angered by their docility It she ranted, it was because she thought she could see them giving up on themselves If she hesitated to extend a freedom to explore that she supported in theory, it was because she feared it would only dimmish their already slender chance ot adapting to the essentially authoritarian conditions of the schools If she relied on impulse and went her own way, it was because she had come to expect very little from her superiors in the way of useful criticism or resources In short, her experience had led her to despair of the system in which she was a cog, and that despan had helped shape her as a teacher There were good teachers and bad teachers, she believed, but too many were cynical teachers who had learned to preserve a sense of balance by not expecting too much of either their colleagues or then students The result, as any outsidei in the schools soon becomes aware, was that they spoke to adults as if they weie children and to childien as if they were adults At the nsk of her own balance and at the price of being thought an eccentric, Miss Boroughs spoke in one voice and defended herself from cynicism by demanding a great deal of her children, as well as taking then part against other adults in the school when it seemed necessary Often she would speak of her class as an "island" in the school, the image sounded desperate, but it was, after all, one of survival Taking the part of her pupils meant, in its simplest terms, honoring their perceptions by not negating them When Ambal Rosado got in trouble in the library, for instance, Miss Boroughs made him write out his version ot what had happened Normally a shy and inhibited child, he suddenly erupted in indignation and fuiy Miss G , he wrote, was "a good card keeper but not a good librarian " She didn't care whether children found books or not, only that they kept them in order Furthermore, she was always screaming, which made it hard to read Strongly suspecting that Ambal was right and approving his basic value judgment (that books are for reading), Miss Boroughs accepted his version and let the matter drop It was a small example but crucial as a test case, for teachers are regularly called on to uphold a legend of adult infallibility m an "us" against "them" world John Dewev's reputation may wane and wax in educational journals, the "crisis" of the schools may be redefined every September, but inside most classrooms the ancient problem of "control"—who can go to the bathroom when, with what pass and for how long—remains a paramount issue And teacheis are expected to hold the line Yet what is a teacher to say when she discovers that a child she taught the previous year is bogged down repeating work he has already accomplished because his new teacher has failed to ascertain what he knows...

...One way or another, she burns bridges Teachers should be able to discuss their difficulties coolly and professionally, to lend each other strength and insight But the isolation of the classroom, the precanousness of social relations withm a school, and the rarity of any real sense of achievement are such that this seldom happens Mutual criticism on whatever basis is avoided, that of outsiders is usually denounced The talk is of standing together or falling separately "Professionalism" becomes a matter of preoccupation with issues like wages, working conditions and, more abstractly, "respect Consequently, problems of the classroom become secondary In the midst of perpetual institutional strife, an individual teacher comes to feel that her "hang-ups" with the difficulties ot individual children do not count for much She is on her own If she perseveres in seeing that a child is placed in the right class or given some special assistance, there may or may not be a real response If she gives up, no one will evei ask why Because she would not give up, Miss Boroughs often sounded a bit cranky Almost every day she would reflect, with a sense of urgency, that time was running out on her students, that their futures weie in her hands Behind her anxiety were certain harsh, empirical facts Of the black and Puerto Rican children in New York's schools, fewer than one m five emerge on schedule with a high school degree that signifies the successful completion of the normal course of study A pupil who is advanced from the fourth grade to the fifth without being able to do the expected reading has practically slipped over the edge of the flat academic world he inhabits It is one thing to say that schools do not have to be like this, that a child can learn next year what he did not pick up this time around, that failure need not be made into an absolute But that does not change the reality of our schools, which remain what they have always been—hospitals that "tend to the healthy and reject the sick," as the Schoolboys of Barbiana called them in their eloquent manifesto, Letter to a Teacher IF EDUCATION means more than test-taking, one would not expect its results to be precisely measurable By conventional standards, 10 of the 20 students who spent the whole year in Class 4-4 made strong advances in leading and math, a year or more by their scores All but four, I would estimate, gained in self-esteem, emerging with greater confidence in their ability to learn Though that may seem an intangible index, it is one on which most of them had been steadily slipping from the time they entered school Take the case of Andy Carril, who had built a reputation for himself as a misfit Asked if he could ice skate, he now replied, "How do I know...

...To whom is the teacher to be loyal...

...What is she to do when another teacher, a supposed specialist, comes into her class and presents a lesson that leaves her students baffled and frustrated...