CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER ONE
Discipline
Why wouldn’t a teacher become defensive when people compare today’s educational system with the schools of the past and see today’s as a terribly flawed and floundering system? Many parents have two sets of stories they tell their children, and they seem not to notice the discrepancy—the "we could never have gotten by with that kind of thing" story and the "wild-and-crazy guy" version, telling of their own exploits. I’d like to share with my readers, as I used to tell my students, a few of each. Those readers who are former students should recognize many things. Study halls have long been a gauge for telling how successful the discipline is in a school. When I was a high school student in 1952, Riley High School in South Bend, Indiana, had hired an older lady to run the study hall. The poor woman had no cheerful, inspiring class to be the bright spot in her day–only those very impersonal study halls. By the end of the day when I had study hall, she was often mystified by the day’s experiences. By sometimes asking her questions, students might soon have discovered that she was at least knowledgeable about math, English and biology. That didn’t matter much. She was tested daily on the matter of control. A favorite attack pattern of this group was to be absolutely quiet as she took attendance at the front of the double room and to wait for her to begin to move. (Diagram that sentence!) As she walked to her desk at the back, nearly two-hundred teenage feet (honestly, not mine) echoed her steps. When she stopped, they stopped. If she hurried, they hurried. The second-floor room shook as from a series of thunder bolts. Finally, after losing her temper and screeching a bit, she began to weep openly. That also was not effective.
After much abuse from members of the football team, assigned first semester to last hour study hall because they sometimes left early to travel to away games, she had seated them in every other seat along the windows with admiring female fans in the other seats. (Doesn’t every teacher at some time try to maintain order by putting quiet folks between loud ones or girls between the boys?) One bitterly cold winter day when she stepped into the room from doing that hall duty which many principals believe is necessary for all teachers to do, all ten windows in the room stood wide open. The temperature in that room was dropping rapidly; there was no time to lose. She realized she would have to close them herself when there was no response to her commands and no positive response to her pleading. Many feet echoed her steps to the back window, where she strained, turned her head toward the front, gave a powerful downward thrust and closed the window with an angry bang. Loud cheers! A volley of mocking steps accompanied her move to the second window! Her style was identical for all ten windows.
Without her realizing it, as she turned her head to strain and reach for the fifth window, an athletic figure gracefully slid out of the seat at the back and again threw open the first window. The next four ball players repeated this action with admirably perfect timing. As one window closed, its sliding and colliding masked the noise of another window opening as if it were a piston, powered by the action of the piston she controlled. As she closed the last window, four windows opened. When she turned to see the nine open windows, the brazen halfback in the front seat threw open the tenth one before her unbelieving eyes, and she realized that the gales of laughter that had accompanied the window-closings were not just because her slip was showing. The icy air streamed in as she screamed, "Get out! You boys get out of here! Down to Mr. Dake’s office! GET OUT! GETOUT!! GET OUT!!!"
And those heroic athletes rose as one man, closed the windows, took deep formal bows and filed out of the room—except for one little fellow. He could not resist stopping here and there to pick up the pennies that were now rolling down the aisles in increasing numbers to bang against the baseboard at the front of the room. Unable to restrain herself any longer, she took up the fragile wooden pointer which had hung at the blackboard for many years, and, as if to add to her confusion, broke the fragile dowel as it was applied to his back, And he, feigning serious injury, limped from the room amid howls from his amused classmates. I don’t know a great deal about study halls back then. That was the last day I was ever in one.
I asked for and received daily passes to the library from first one and then another of my teachers, worked diligently on research work so that no one would send me back to that unkind place. As soon as work on a play began, I got a series of week-long passes to work on scenery and props. I remained very sensitive to unkindness and always wanted my students to know that my classroom was a safe haven where there would be no anger and the teacher would be happy to see them every day.
Well, that was a fine goal, anyway.
ADDENDUM
The sociology paper I labored over diligently each day for three weeks was my master work. I swelled with pride of accomplishment as I handed it to the teacher the day before it was due. He turned a few pages, flipped to the back page, glanced up and asked, “Where did you find so much material?” as he put an A+ on the title page, assuming I would consider myself well paid for my efforts. He didn’t read one word—he had never intended to read what his students wrote. Thus was I introduced to the lazy teacher who has no concept that sometimes students write papers for the specific audience of their instructor’s mind. I was to experience this disappointment many times in college as well. I made it a practice, not only to correct papers, journals—whatever my students wrote—but also to write something back to show that I had thought about content. I believe that action distinguishes anyone who attempts it. Occasionally, in a journal, my comments were longer than the student’s. Once I got Stacey Cone’s mother’s version added to her daughter’s side of a story that was critical of her. Her comments were also much longer than her daughter’s. The humor in it indicated that she had read the entry at her daughter’s insistence, as if to say, “See, I told my teacher on you. He understands teenagers.”
I began teaching in 1958 at Southport High School in the Indianapolis area. I kept an uneasy peace in a very large study hall. In my second year at Carthage, Indiana, I inherited another. Southport had been in a growth spurt that meant continually shifting the 9th grade to the junior high and back again as the corporation provided new, underbuilt, inadequate buildings which required that another project begin immediately—we had almost bi-weekly fire drills that were timed by the fire department, and although I stood on the landing calling, “Move! Move! Move!” we were informed that hundreds of students were lost in every mock fire.
Carthage,on the other hand, was a very small paper-mill town, and the school housed about 200 students in grades 7-12. Grades 7 and 8 were double the size of grade 9, due to huge dropout rates among the mill families, and each year of high school witnessed the elimination of a few more students until there were only about 21 graduating senior. In 1959 about half the teachers (not many of them in the elementary, so an even higher percentage in the high school) were new; most of them were a different breed—quite unusual. I heard that in firing the staff, rumored to be anyone that had not voted for him in the election, the trustee had said, “Teachers are a-dime-a-dozen.” And that is the kind of teacher he got, mostly.
The junior varsity basketball coach, it was soon well known, kept liquor bottles in the tank of a downstairs restroom. He was thrown out of the away game at Morton Memorial, the school at Indiana Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Children’s home, that year after running red-faced onto the floor, excoriating his boys: “Look at that scoreboard. How could you let that happen?” This, when his team was far, far ahead. It was just too obvious that he was intoxicated. The wonder was that the referee who threw him out, who was also a state policeman, didn’t arrest him on some charge or other.
The new young math teacher was bright and knew his subject but was so addicted to tobacco that he could be seen holding his yellowed fingers to his nostrils to inhale what residue was there because he just could not survive a fifty-five minute period without a fix. He left every class about ten minutes early to smoke in the boiler room, but these were small classes and the students welcomed the chance to “help each other.” I recall that Linda Harrold sat at the back of the room and worked from a calculus textbook. Later, at Purdue as a home ec major, she tested so high in math that she had to take engineering courses to complete her math requirements.
Another of these teachers taught art, among other things. My wife Margaret taught first grade in the first-floor classroom just above his art room. One September day she heard a great commotion during the time her class had gone to art. She followed the noise to that lower-floor room. She looked in through the door glass to see her pupils playing follow-the-leader and stomping about on top of tables placed in a U pattern. The helpless, balding, middle-aged teacher sounded like a broken record, "Boys and girls! Boys and girls…"
Margaret paused only a moment before opening the door and stepping into the room. She clapped her hands twice in quick succession, whereupon the children dropped instantly into their seats in stunned silence. (She was young and beautiful, and these children kissed her at the door as the left at the end of the day.) As if he had just witnessed an incredible magician at work, he asked her, "What did you do?"
The next day—I assure you this is true—as I passed the high school study hall across from the library I was to serve, I saw a grown man standing in socks and sandals at the front of a very noisy group, saying nothing, but with an eagerly expectant look on his simple face, clapping his hands twice, looking around as if to say, "There, did you see that?" and repeating the ordeal over and over. I walked on, unaware of any significance.
Later in the period, I stepped out into the hall to investigate a series of explosive noises. As I discovered a teacher present, I returned to the library to continue checking the shelf list. The next morning I was called to the office and informed that my schedule had been expanded to include a study hall. The principal told me this incredible tale:
When the students had refused to quiet down, this teacher had devised a remarkable scheme. Anyone who talked would have to take his books and stand against the grimy yellow wall. As no one stopped talking, he soon had everyone standing, laughing and talking along three walls of the room. (The fourth wall was a little stage.) When the last student took his place there, the troubled teacher said, "Now are you satisfied? Anyone who talks will have to sit down." And soon they were back in their desks, attached to wooden floor rails in five long rows. Now he was forced to make a decision. Removing from the desk drawer an enormous paddle with three drilled holes (which I myself was later to use on two occasions), he announce dramatically, "Anyone who talks is gonna get this." Soon he had a boy in the hall. (Stage whisper) "Now, I don’t want to hurt you, but I gotta scare those guys in there so‘s they’ll be quiet; so when I hit these books, you yell loud as you can." Of course, the resulting noise only slightly resembled a paddle touching flesh. The boy’s over-projected howling produced gales of laughter from the amused kids who thought they had never had it so good.
The next day two memorable things happened. My wife overheard one of her first-graders say as the art teacher shuffled past, "There goes that guy who spanks books." I, of course, had learned from the principal what the child was talking about, and that I had been put in the unenviable position of replacing the ineffectual study-hall teacher. That mild man, by being incredibly inept, had earned himself a second free period while the young, already overloaded teacher-librarian had been moved across the hall to deal daily with the hornets’ nest this man had stirred up. I could get my library into shape by working extra hours after school.
