The Last Word
O'Malley, Becky
THE LAST WORD Becky O'MAlley Don't Just Sit There____ It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much doing nothing. —Gertrude Stein We took our youngest out of the...
...White who said, "Never ask a writer what he's doing staring at the wall...
...Its title, in keeping with the educational establishment's weakness for wordy euphemism, is, "A Model for Student Behavior in Science Class...
...Both parents had just started working at demanding jobs...
...And her father is a computer scientist, a member of a notorious class of promiscuous thinkers...
...Do you want to stay after school today...
...By the time we got the word, we'd already paid the enrollment deposit for next year at the private school, so we left her there...
...I didn't read the rules before I signed them...
...With two older daughters at Berkeley High, we thought our kvetching had reached its limit...
...This year, though, she's beginning junior high in our neighborhood school...
...But the model calls attention to one sin that even the Church Fathers didn't think of: Code section II, number 2, forbids "sitting quietly but doing no work...
...We found Eliza an ungraded "alternative" school, the kind that used to be called progressive in John Dewey's day...
...In fact, I cheated...
...Almost all of the first week of school was devoted to making sure that both students and parents had a firm grip on the rules...
...another should have left but didn't...
...But rules are rules, even if they're disguised in such regrettable language as, "the following student behaviors are identified as minor offenses...
...How soon, I wonder, will my daughter be called on the carpet for "sitting quietly and doing no work...
...Lots of them...
...And besides, they cost a lot of money...
...The school she was supposed to attend was being rebuilt for earthquake safety, so within those three years she had one class in an auditorium, one in the glorified trailers euphemized as "portables," and one, as a kind of step-child, in the older kids' school across town...
...After all, we said, the older girls went all the way through Berkeley schools, and they seem to be cheerful and well-educated now that they've graduated...
...That's when the work gets done...
...He claims to be able to remember, in great detail, what every branch on the tree outside the window of his fourth-grade classroom looked like...
...Malcolm X lost her application twice...
...Nevertheless, if the school in its infinite wisdom is into rules, I thought, I wouldn't worry about it...
...Maybe they need them to keep the kids from authoritarian homes in line...
...After the list of minor offenses, the writer notes that "the above behaviors are minor offenses that require the student to return after school and work for one class period...
...I figured it would be better to retain my upbeat attitude as long as possible for Eliza's sake, and I don't much like rules...
...The fourth year, when Eliza was going into sixth grade, we tried to get her back into the local public elementary school, renamed Malcolm X at the appropriate historical juncture...
...If there's anything in heredity, she's in trouble...
...this time they only mixed up the first enrollment application...
...Too bad, Albert Einstein Jr., if you claim to be thinking about some silly theory or other...
...As our teen-agers would say, we can hang with almost anything...
...Hey there, Ikie Newton, stop goldbricking under that apple tree and get to work...
...Not in Berkeley, anyway...
...I think it was E.B...
...a teacher characterized by experienced Malcolm X parents as marginal...
...One left mid-year because of a nervous breakdown...
...Times change, and after three kids no single educational theory stands as revealed truth...
...On the third try, she was assigned to Becky O'Malley is a lawyer and free-lance writer in Berkeley...
...All three of us have cultivated an optimistic attitude: It-will be better to have a larger peer group from which to choose friends...
...But unfortunately the science department provided two copies of its rules, one to return to school and one to keep on the refrigerator door for reference, and recently I inadvertently read the one copy...
...walking to school every day is good exercise...
...Science these days is big business—no time to waste on unproductive daydreams...
...Somehow, that stretched to three years...
...It sounds like the Baltimore Catechism's minute distinctions between venial and mortal sins that I memorized in my Catholic girlhood...
...That's a detention offense at junior high these days...
...But since the older girls' tour through junior high, the educational styles appear to have shifted somewhat...
...If you can't prove, by pushing that pencil and filling in those blanks, that you're working, it's detention for you, lad...
...The first day seemed okay...
...So we'd always meant to put the youngest back in public school "next year...
...A nice school—unprepossessing, low-key—but it only goes up to the sixth grade...
...When we moved here in 1973 the slogan of the public school system was, "They don't grow alike...
...For older kids, the nonpublic schools all seem to be either pretentious, religious, devoted to some peculiar sectarian education theory, or firmly stuck in 1967...
...With repeated occurances [sic], minor offenses can become major...
...You can bet the schools today won't produce daydreamers like us...
...What's this, little Marie Curie, you're wondering what happens to those extra atoms...
...Gertrude Stein We took our youngest out of the Berkeley public schools after she'd had seven teachers in her first three years in the "system...
...In forever-trendy Berkeley, the new fad appears to be rules...
...You may ask, as we frequently asked ourselves, why people who had civil-rights-marched their way resolutely through the 1960s, and who had moved to Berkeley partly because of its reputation for well-integrated schools, ended up with their third daughter in a mostly white middle-class private school...
...Suppressing my urge to take a red pencil to the spelling and punctuation errors on every page, I signed my name on the lines provided so that my child could prove to her teachers that her parents had read and understood the rules...
...Our daughter brought home a five-page, single-spaced Riot Act one day...
...So we copped out on number three...
...That appealed to my 1960s political consciousness, though to tell the truth I never really understood what it me^nt...
...That was long ago, however, at the University of Iowa laboratory school, a cesspool of progressive education...
...Not to mention the guilt...
...If you turned your back on them for a minute, they'd be swinging from the chandeliers...
...why should they learn alike...
...Eat your heart out, Jonathan Kozol, Herb Cole, and all the rest—in Berkeley, 1982, it's as if you never lived...
...we simply didn't have time for the eternal vigilance that is the tuition fee for a decent education in the Berkeley schools these days...
...only big public schools have real orchestras and swimming pools...
...I noticed when they were little that when kids from families fond of rules came over, it was Katy-Bar-the-Door...
...I've brought my kids up to have good sense and to make their own decisions about appropriate behavior as much as possible...
Vol. 47 • January 1983 • No. 1
