SOME MEMORIES OF REMEDIAL ENGLISH
The same year that I started at Greenfield-Central, 1979-80, I had dropped in at Eastern Hancock during the summer, as one of the Southwestern teachers told me he had run into the band director from Eastern on the golf course, and they had spoken of me. There was the implication that I could return to Eastern anytime. What the new (to me) superintendent of five years told me was that my position didn’t exist any more. I had worked rather tirelessly on the introduction of “phase-elective” English curriculum, and the weight of that program fell heavily on my shoulders. I taught poetry (6 week courses), folklore, drama, speech, Roberts’ Rules of Order, and all English 9 classes. We found that students relinquished study halls to take several English department offerings. The superintendent said, “So you’re Jack Rhoades. I’m glad to meet you. Do you realize that in five year of curriculum meetings with parents and teachers, there has never been a meeting where your name did not come up.” I was hoping that meant they spoke well of me!
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I once grew tired of hearing two teachers in the teachers’ lounge complain about their “remedial” English classes. These classes were peopled with students with special problems and difficulties, but they were limited to fifteen students in size. They carried a stigma. When I offered to teach them, I was honest. I felt like these students deserved to have a teacher who could love them. I also felt that anyone with my load of night work should have a few classes that would require little overtime grading.
I was successful with these kids whose names appeared on the absence list under detention so often that I knew some of them made it a point to be tossed out of some class nearly every day. I tried to learn where all these students were coming from. I decided, after a long setting-in period of time, to have an informal day when we went to the “Cougar Meeting Room” so we would be in a room with tables and windows to look out while we talked and in which we could have refreshments. One student said to me, “Mr. Rhoades, why are you doing this? Don’t you know teachers hate us?” The sad part is that I did know it—first hand.
When some members of that class did reach graduation, Eli Lily, our Partner in Education, had a special day for the leaders. They wanted the leaders of every group of any description. One of these boys was there. Mr. Albano relayed the message that when the boy was asked what he attributed his success in school to when so many of his friends had “fallen through the cracks,” he said, “Teachers like Mr. Rhoades.“ Now, I know that no system of rewards that any educational body might set up would include a teacher whose students rapidly forgot most of the subject matter he presented unless he somehow tied it to practicalities such as getting along with others, respecting yourself, and living with manners; who taught primarily by getting along with all of them, showing respect for their differences, and being mannerly with them.
I had asked that class that day, because some of them had abilities they wouldn’t use, “What grade were you in when you started to cheat on things.” I didn’t use any kind of test or quiz that they could cheat on because they did it so skillfully and outrageously, and I found it demeaning for them and me and felt it tested me more on my ability to catch them than it tested any of them on anything.
If caught red-handed, they had learned, they said, to become loud and angry. “Are you calling me a cheater?” they would shout. They made it bad enough that few teachers bothered to catch them more than once. They told me that the cheating had started in first grade. “Why?” I asked. “I know you could do the work.”
“Why not?” was their retort. They had played their teachers like a musical instrument and had come to enjoy the tune.
I had them sit in groups of three or four during a period of time when we concentrated on writing every day. I think students are only willing to share things with a teacher if they think he/she likes them, but they are not hesitant to share with each other in a group of their cronies. The goal was for each of them to identify five mistakes that they made most often and stop making them. They had to read and sign each other’s work, and I allowed them to go to the “machines” for refreshments. I had gotten permission through guidance where they said, “If you are getting anything out of these kids, you are the only teacher who is. Go for it.” Mr. Cline hated the intrusion in the cafeteria where he held a study hall that period and went to the office to try to put a stop to it. Dean of Students, Don Jackson said, “I just wish you could be a mouse and sit in the room when they talk about you.” They were in his office whenever they got kicked out of class, and he referred to them as “his rummies.” They loved that guy in a special way. He once had said of my classes, “You’re doing something right. I never see them (meaning they didn’t want to miss my classes, I think).”
After two or three years, the department chair felt they were not getting the essentials under my tutelage, so they were taken from me and given to her. After one year there were no more classes of remedial English.
