A Brightly Marked Path

 If you choose to follow your own path in life, expect to be lost a good part of the time.

Becoming a teacher was not the path that was marked out for me. 

There were other brightly-marked paths. Engineering, for example: my dad, two of my uncles, two of my cousins were engineers and it seemed an obvious choice to me. My friend Bob became an engineer. We were Bar Mitzvah together. We were lab partners in high school for three years in chemistry, physics, and organic chemistry. His dad, like mine, was an engineer. They knew each other from college. But I didn't choose that path.

When I was 17 I was completely without direction. I talked a lot about not going to college, which was anathema in my family, community, social strata, etc. I thought I could stay in the warehouse where I was employed during holidays and eventually drive a truck. I remember my mom weeping and shouting about this ambition. One day my dad saw an old Chevy pickup for sale and suggested my brother and I buy it, fix it up, and travel around in it together. If you have never seen the Sierra Club book On the Loose it will give you an idea of the romantic note this struck for me. If you know that book, well, you already know. But don't take it out and look at it again. I, at least, am always disappointed. In any case, Mom went into a paroxysm of tears and accusations. Dad said not a word.

So I found myself seeing a vocational counselor. I didn't yet know the origin of the word "vocation" in the idea of a calling, as in being called to prophesy. But I was impressed by the magic of multiple-choice interest index assessments, especially sticking a pin in the paper instead of bubbling in a scantron. I imagined being struck by the power of what would be revealed for me. Instead, the counselor revealed triumphantly that I could be a... Doctor! I matched successful and happy doctors with a desire to care for others and I had aptitude in math and science. To me, this was a giant let down. I had less-than-no interest in this, I suspect because it was a cliché, such a cliché. Every smart Jewish boy who was good at science could make everyone proud and be a draw for the girls (and their ambitious moms) by going to med school. When I was in my forties I realized that I could have been a good doc, but at 17 it was the last thing on my mind.

Another road that had lights shining on it was the one that led to becoming an attorney. If you were a smart Jewish boy who wasn't  good at science, the obvious choice was law school. When I try to count the numbers of friends and classmates who became lawyers - high school and college, Jewish and not - I don't know where to start. It seems easier to count those who did not. And the appeal was obvious. When I was in high school we sued the school superintendent over our First Amendment right to create and distribute our own independent publications. Our pro bono attorney was the mom of a student at the school, but she was also a clinical professor at Rutgers Law School. She made us do our own legal research and draft our own briefs. I really loved that work. My absolutely favorite part was at the hearing which came three years after we initiated the case, when I was already a freshman in college. Our lawyer was questioning the superintendent and he launched into his customary bloviation instead of answering her questions. The hearing examiner, who was the Chancellor for the State of New Jersey, just cut him off and told him to confine himself to responding to what he was asked. A triumph! But not enough to make me turn myself into another cliché.

So why school? Most people who become teachers love school and want to be like a teacher they had. I'm from that minority who go into education to fix their own experience. I'll go into some detail about this, because I really did like learning and books. I had a couple of teachers in elementary school who encouraged exploration, a couple. In second grade I would closely watch other kids who were engaged in what was called "seat work." As soon as the first ones finished I would jump up as if I, too, had done anything at all, and work with the prisms, hand lenses, weather instruments, tuning forks, etc. that enriched that classroom. In sixth grade I hand copied scenes from the scripts of Broadway plays and enlisted classmates to act them out. I have no memory at all of what I was supposed to be doing instead, but that teacher didn't seem to care. 

But that was two teachers. Most years the teachers were all about compliance. I was locked in supply closets to stop me from talking to my neighbors. My desk was overturned repeatedly because it wasn't neat. Once I was even put in a garbage can for that same offense. In third grade the teacher sent me to sit in a sixth grade class while the big kids laughed at me. I chose to pay attention to them reading aloud from their science book about the parts of the ear and the parts of the eye. I had no idea what I was even being punished for. It was only many years later, as an adult and a teacher myself, that I learned that this was meant to be enrichment! As if listening to someone reading aloud from a text book was actual science education. I have told elsewhere the story of the fifth-grade teacher who gave us fifty nights of homework he called "study guides" on each state. I eventually discovered that these sheets were completed by copying directly from the World Book Encyclopedia, an expensive reference work my family did not own and a fact he never divulged.

A moment's digression on the subject of punishment for unknown offenses: In junior high school that experience was just endless. It seemed that because I was known for talking too much I was given detention every time anyone in the class spoke out of turn. In ninth grade I never left on time because I had detention every day. Once I fell from the rings in gym class and broke my arm. I got detention for that, too. 

The worst incident has stayed with me and I have told the story over and over. The assistant principal called me in and ordered me to clean all the halls in the school every day for a week after classes were let out. I asked what I had done to deserve this, so he blew up and shouted that he would tell me at the end of the week. When I met the custodian who was (angrily) supervising my work I discovered that he was providing me with a rolling garbage can, but not with a broom. They expected me to do this work with my fingers. 

And I did. Everyday for a week I carefully picked up every scrap in the long halls of both stories of the building which served about a thousand kids. At the end of the week I went to ask that assistant principal to, please, tell me what offense I had committed. He blew up again, opened his desk drawer, pulled out a fat sheaf of papers, and slammed them down on his desk, yelling, "Next time be more careful about where you throw your garbage!" But they weren't mine. They belonged to another boy with a similar name. And I said so. He ignored that. I stood waiting for... an apology? an acknowledgment of any kind? But he studiously ignored me for a long few minutes. And then he shouted at me to get out of his office. 

I thought about this experience a lot when I became an assistant principal thirty-five years later. But the "learning" in that school was no better. In every subject, the expectation was just to repeat what the teachers told us. Sometimes we were even held accountable for things they hadn't yet said. Our ninth-grade biology teacher, for example, spent precious class time every week berating us for being "behind." She would inventory all the units we had "covered"* and those we hadn't yet gotten to. And she kept telling us that the most important unit was genetics, which would be the last one. We never got to that unit on genetics before the year ended. But our final exam consisted of one hundred multiple-choice questions and fifty of them were about genetics. Fortunately, for me I had already cultivated enough contempt for our teachers that I spent two nights studying the section of the textbook on genetics. I killed that exam.

Things didn't change much in high school. If we were asked for "Four Causes of the Civil War" we could lose points twice for including one that the teacher hadn't mentioned: once for leaving one of hers out, once for adding one of our own. Our final exam in Qualitative Analysis consisted of a practical, identifying an unknown. My partner and I carefully did those tests. When we got a different answer than we were supposed to, our grade was lowered, because there was no way that teacher could acknowledge that she had been less careful and that the sample had oxidized.

The emphasis on conformity had only gotten worse, too. One day I came in carrying two guitars - electric and acoustic - along with a large amplifier, in addition to my books. One of the assistant principals (the nice one!) stopped me in the hall to ask what I was forgetting. I had no idea. I thought maybe he thought I should have greeted him: "Good morning, Mr. Winter?" I asked. No, that wasn't it. He wanted me to put everything down so that I could take off my hat, because, you know, no hats in the building. 

Another day I got called in to the office of one of the other APs who said - I swear - "I've got you now!" And what did he have me for? An overdue library book, which was, in fact, not overdue; which was, in fact, on the library shelf where it belonged. 

Their need for conformity crossed the line into paranoia because this was the sixties. Friends were removed from the crew doing morning announcements for saying the word "cheese" on the PA. Our confident administrators thought this was the signal for a student uprising. The editors of the school paper were fired for publishing a photo of the wrapped presents for a Christmas toy drive. The toys were stored - and the photo taken - in a locked girls' room. (Yes, most of the bathrooms were kept locked to deal with the cigarette problem, and yes, we had to guess which one was open on any given day.)  Anyway, if you knew to look you could discern a white spot on the wall behind the smiling volunteers holding up packages, and if you knew what you were looking for you might realize that it was a tampon dispenser. So the editors who allowed this pornography obviously had to go. I brought this up in student council, so I was removed from the journalism class and had to spend the rest of the year sitting in the guidance suite during that period.

But the height of their paranoia went on display in the spring of my senior year. The incident came to be called a walkout and the class of '70 remembers ourselves as "The Class that Walked Out." Here's what I remember: A week earlier the elected student leaders invited some of us to join them in organizing a morning meeting to discuss the administration's negative response to a long list of requests we had made on subjects ranging from dress code to leaving the building for lunch. (We were allowed to leave for lunch when we were in elementary school. Why should we be held captive now that we were in high school?) The immediate trigger for the officers of the student government was less serious than many others, their suggestion that final exams not be weighed so heavily. But it was the first time the principal actually said "No" instead of asking for more time to study the question. It was also the first time he called us "ants" and said that our opinions were irrelevant. 

So the next morning we called everyone to attention in the cafeteria where students gathered before classes on days when the weather was less than perfect. We updated the people who were there on the situation and expressed our disappointment and anger. 

The administration's response (because how could they possibly not respond to this breach of decorum!?) was to change the day's schedule in order to have three assemblies, one for each grade, where they could tell the students THE TRUTH and counter THE LIES we had told. That plan changed immediately after the first assembly because the sophomores responded to the administration's TRUTH with catcalls and shouted contradictions. Not only were there no assemblies for juniors and seniors, but now THE TRUTH was that none had ever been planned! 

That was a Friday. By Monday the faculty had all been briefed on lockdowns and lock ins and the code words that would trigger them, as well as on the need to provide intelligence on student plans (of which we had none) to the administration. They also implemented a "rumor clinic" where students could go to find out THE TRUTH. Of course, everybody who went in to check out something they heard told us that the immediate response - to everything - was, "Who told you that?" Because it was another ploy to find out our "plans."

That Thursday an eleventh-grade boy stood up in front of the cafeteria before class with a paper and said that he wanted to share some thoughts. Immediately every cafeteria door flew open and the male teachers ran in. (Who knows how long they had been waiting to put on this bully-boy display?) Some of them grabbed that junior boy and hustled him out, but most of them just started pushing everybody outside into the parking lot. Everything else that happened afterwards is significant, too, but it is a story for another time. I will just report that the AP who "got me" for an overdue library book set his sights that morning on catching me, chasing me around the cafeteria and yelling until I hopped a table and escaped upstairs to my homeroom.

Am I conveying the story of a boy who loved school? Who loved his teachers and wanted to grow up to be like them?

My college definitely did not encourage a career in teaching, either. Some schools have a whole education department, or at least a program. We did not. By a series of missteps and coincidences during my freshman year I ended up taking an advanced-level course in the Sociology of Urban Education. I hadn't done the (multiple!) prerequisites because I was a first year student. The readings themselves were interesting, but I really loved the requirement that we spend a few hours a week at a public elementary school in the West 80's. I mean I loved it because it was real work, off-campus, with people who I would otherwise not have met. And it got me thinking, because I still had no career goal. Why had my education been so sterile? What if I worked as a teacher when I graduated college, at least until I figured out what my actual calling was?

I said above that my college actively discouraged this thinking. I went to the dean and asked if I could take a summer course at a college that did prepare teachers. He laughed, said that I would receive no credit for attending such a school, but promised that he would arrange for me to do student teaching during my senior year. It is not a spoiler at this late date to reveal that when that time came he insisted that he did not make such a promise, could not have made such a promise, and did not remember ever having had a conversation of any kind with me. 

I think these are enough shitty memories for one morning. I'll come back to this another day.

*That notion of "coverage" is one of the stupidest things educators talk about, as if you have actually taught anything because you said it or assigned reading about it. I think its best to understand them as meaning "cover" in the sense of "obscure" as in covering something with a blanket, or covering up a crime.