Grammar and Gardenias

...Perspectives GRAMMAR AND GARDENIAS BY JAMES HARKNESS During the early 1960s I attended high school in a small town in north-central Mississippi The building wasn't of the red brick, one-room species prominent in academic mythology, though its flat, saffron compounds were spartan enough But a generation before today s resurgence of interest in "basic education," our courses were dauntingly fundamental If you chose the college preparatory track—and almost everybody did, whether or not college was realistically in the cards—you could look forward to four years of English, four years of history and civics, and at least three years each of science and math Math was algebra, plane and solid geometry, and trigonometry, while science was biology, chemistry and physics English meant equally heavy doses of literature and grammar, including diagramming several thousand progressively more convoluted sentences This continued right up to graduation, and it now occurs to me that the tedium contributed to my budding sense of identity?I am he who can spot an indirect object " The school day began at 7 45 in the morning, ended at 3 30, allowed a one-hour study hall plus a half-hour lunch Sports and other extracurricular activities went on after class hours (work for the school paper or yearbook, however, could be done during study hall) Most nights I took home a couple of hours' homework lots of math problems, term papers, and those endless, labyrinthine sentences for dissection A day or so after you handed in an assignment, it was returned—graded, with comments We had dreaded "pop" quizzes and regular weekly tests We had exams and report cards every six weeks, with semester tests twice yearly If you failed a subject you received no credit for it, and you had to amass 18 credits—one per subject per year—to graduate Although the mandatory phys-ed courses did not count toward the total, they hadtobepassed We were graded on a straight 100 point system 94 per cent was the minimum necessary for an A A four-year average of 91 would have placed you 11th from the top in a class of300 seniors, which gives some idea of how rigorously the standards were applied If you talked back to a teacher you risked a three-day suspension the first time, a semester's expulsion the second Had anybody threatened a teacher physically, I suppose the principal would have simply taken the offender out and executed him on the spot, with the wholehearted approval of the parents, students, and community at large That never happened, of course Even among the boisterous local rednecks, violence toward teachers was not so much prohibited as unthinkable We came to school from Labor Day through Memorial Day The heating in winter was satisfactory, and there was no air conditioning for the hot months The most languid days I've ever spent passed during those high school Aprils and Mays, with the long horizontal windows cranked wide open and the smells of mown grass and gardemas gravid in the balmy wind The scent of gardenias could grow cloying if you breathed it too long—I can imagine no better incentive to learn than knowing that flunking a course meant summer school, when the sun sat on the tar roof like a circus fat lady and made consciousness itself an act of brute will, never mind heeding your lessons We had teachers who were softies and teachers who were horrors I remember one Mr Bennett, who had a habit of abruptly letting fly with a twoJames Hajrkness, a new contributor to the NL, is in the central administration of the State University of New York inch missile of yellow chalk when he spotted you whispering to the girl with the beehive hairdo sitting at the desk across the aisle The majority were older women some thin, some lumpy, some dowdy, some severely well groomed, all professionally sexless to our callow adolescent eyes It was always an event (for the boys, anyway) when the pretty Ole Miss coeds arrived in the spring to do their student teaching Young and old alike, our mentors were forbidden to drink Cokes or smoke in our presence Jokes floated around constantly about what teacher almost succumbed to a nicotine fit before bolting suddenly for the lounge Varsity coaches traditionally doubled up as instructors in shop and civics (this probably accounts for my reluctance to this day to stain bookcases or solicit members for neighborhood associations) There were also four or five austere faculty fossils who had been around since God was a child, intimidating even members of the school board?most of whom they had terrorized as youngsters 20 years earlier To one or another of these ossified mandarins the annual yearbook was usually dedicated, a ritual gesture whose banality never quite robbed it of respect Because for all our easy cynicism in mocking them, virtually every one of our teachers was formidably competent Not a few were scholastically impassioned The closest I ever came to making a teacher weep in public was when, reciting in Mrs Lavers' first period English section, 1 nastily changed James Russell Lowell's famous verses, "And the voice that was softer than silence said, Lo.it is I Be not afraid," to, the voice that was softer than silence said, I'd rather be dead than shit in this head " For the privilege of squelching such idiotic capering, Mrs Lavers and her colleagues accepted, on the average, less than $100 a week—subsistence wages even in the '60s, the lowest secondary school compensation in the nation at the time The state further required those without masters degrees to continue working toward them, and withdrew ccititication horn anyone who failed to keep to the specified timetable for progress Until I went away to college, I never heard the expression, "Those who can, do, those who can't, teach " If I had, 1 would have thought it nonsense At college , the singularity of my high school slowly began to dawn on me Already an anachronism in the '60s, its theories and practice were closer in spirit to my parents' and grandparents' lifetimes than to mine My roomies on campus whooped incredulously at my tales of academic pressures and personal regimentation—then sidled around for help with freshman math and composition, course that I had bypassed easily through advanced placement examinations For my part, I was flabbergasted by the lackadaisical, almost anarchic high school careers of my new friends and classmates Their transcripts featured credits in such esotenca as group psychology and appreciation of television Many claimed to have cut more classes than they had attended Few, if any, had so much as heard of diagramming sentences Through college and grad school I was increasingly grateful for the superior preparation in academics my high school had provided On certain other scales, though, my grounding has come to seem less exemplary I could have skipped most of the monthly assemblies, where the whole school would squirm on hard folding chairs and be regaled with lurid exposes of the Communists' 20-year plan for world conquest (For visual aid huge wall maps showed menacing red arrows swooping down onto Poland, Hungary, the Mideast, and Western Europe On one map secondary arrows converged toward Afghanistan, which gives me a moment's pause ) And since this was two decades ago in the Deep South, on-Iv white faces cluster in the portraits of the class ol '65 M contact with black kids took place exclusively outside school, when our two groups mingled gingerly at a collapsing and town playground, outpacing ofieialdom bv integrating our free-form games of touch football Did my high school do an uncommonly fine job of fostering the habits of mind vital for a life richer in both material and intangible possibilities...

...Again, I think the answer has to be yes The troubling thing is that I am unable to see exactly howlcould have acquired the benefits without having endured the discipline As the National Commission on Excellence in Education has just reaffirmed, all learning requires a solid grasp of the foundation skills reading, writing, mathematics, and (moving up a step) the liberal arts and sciences These in turn demand patient, painstaking instruction using fundamental pedagogic tools, especially rote memorization and repetitive drills Yet the old techniques elicit little enthusiasm Unlike later "methodologies," they are viewed as having a musty, prescientific air, a quaintness whose attraction has long faded They appear to be "unresponsive" to the widely diverse backgrounds of students in our mass education system, and to embody an inflexibility that strikes many sincere educators as illiberal if not stultifying Nor can it be denied that the old ways entail a vast amount of sheer drudgery on the part of students and, not incidentally, teachers The only thing duller than parsing 20 complex sentences is grading 30 sets of them Hence, even within the current back-to-basics movement there remains an unspoken wish to teach, say, writing, without dwelling too tiresomely on the minutiae of grammar, syntax and parts of speech Unfortunately, that is a fantasy You cannot usefully admonish a student to write with active verbs, tor example, if he cannot distinguish them t rom passive ones, nor any verb from a noun, nor a gerund from a gardenia So I am far from sanguine about the impact of the National Commission s recommendations It is doubtful that a renewed emphasis on basic learning will result in helping schools "make progress b\ going backward, as Vicimont Royster put it recently in the American Scholar Moreover, as with most nostalgic idealizations, yearning after education's lost Eden leaves out some crucial matters For one thing, it leaves out that those whom basic education let down have been—more or less by definition—least equipped to publicize its failures For another, it leaves out that in the period the "core" curriculum was most common, student bodies were generally less "diversified" and "pluralistic " We know basic education methods were effective for many able, well-behaved white kids who largely shared the assumptions and values of their teachers We don't have the same hard evidence when students come from broken homes, when the worth of "book learning' is up with the Modern Language Association7) Another very important aspect of the problem is that teachers soon discover society has delegated to them the critical job of guiding its cherished offspring, yet feels little compulsion to reward them commensurately In 1981 -82 the average salary for teachers nationwide was $19,142, against $26,308 for accountants, $32,843 for chemists, and $34,746 for engineers (At the entry level, teachers now average $12,769?less than half what is offered novice engineers ) More than one teacher in 10 still finds it necessary to moonlight?occupying evenings and weekends that might otherwise be devoted to better lesson planning, grading, advising, parent counseling, and the numerous questionable to them and to their parents, when their lives are fundamentally in conflict with the majority culture, when deprivation and disenfranchise-ment exact a painful toll before they ever walk in the school door Finally, nostalgia ignores the change in K-12 teachers, which may be the crux of the situation Newer educators, for a variety of good and bad reasons, clearly have less taste than their predecessors for spending their days listening to students recite the battles of the Revolutionary War, or their evenings checking proofs of Euclid's theorems Many would rather head for the nearest conference center to attend a seminar on the uses and implications of computer-assisted modules in the learning experience (And who's going to hang around down on the farm after they've signed other tasks whose neglect school boards are fonder and fonder of bemoaning Perhaps no workers in any field now bring the dedication to their occupations that was once taken for granted All of us are turning away from the regimens—personal and economic as well as scholastic—associated in years past with basic learning in the primary and secondary grades In isolated classrooms here and there, I imagine a few Mr Bennetts and Mrs Laverses still vex their charges with demands that have come to be looked upon as passe toil Every so often we are reminded of their rather inspiring struggles when 60 Minutes films a quarter hour's celebration of Chicago's Mary A. Collins or Harper's publishes an off handed encomium to Murray Cohn, principal of Louis Bran-deis High School on Manhattan's Upper West Side But after the camera crews pack their clutter and the journalists go home to recopy their notes, the Cohns and Collinses remain behind, a small academic rear guard quirky, unregenerate, gradually being picked off by peer pressure, shifting certification strictures, collective bargaining, and mandatory retirement Since such rare teachers are hardly unaware of everything going on around them, one suspects they would be the first to say they represent a vestige of the past, not a wave of the future Neither today's students nor today's teachers are going to warm again to the educational methods of an earlier, more settled, less fragmented era What's right about the back-to-basics movement is its concern with the foundation skills of thought, what's wrong is its stress on "back " The idea should be to somehow go ahead to basics—to devise new means toward the same ends, a fresher style for perennial content Much as the admission grates, computers may in fact be part of the answer Whatever, until teachers and national commissions alike stop looking backward for their vision of effective education, all the slogans in the world will remain exactly that—noble, quixotic, ultimately irrelevant to the job at hand In an era that prefers gardenias markedly over grammar, that has no more affinity for the exertions of classical pedagogy than for the conformity of a universal curriculum, maybe we simply can't get there from here But if we are to have the chance, there first has to be much reflection on the why as well as the what of modern schooling We must grasp something ever more elusive to the American sensibility the difference between authoritarianism and authority, and between responsiveness and responsibility A beginning would be to recognize that the dilemma of basic education is a peculiarly Southern one, at least one defined and claimed by a Southern writer However charming the remembrance of things past, you can't go home again...

...I have to believe it did And was my high school an uncommonly rigid one, its strictness bordering on repression...