Reading a Difficult Book

            With the exception of a few classes, I was a mediocre student in high school, unengaged, drifting along, spending huge amounts of energy trying to find my balance on the runaway train ride that is adolescence.  In my senior year, I had the sheer, dumb luck of landing in the English class of a new teacher, Jack McFarland, a Columbia University graduate student who had come back home to Los Angeles and found a job in our small Catholic high school.  He taught us what he knew: the Mid-Twentieth Century Columbia Western Civilization course, starting with The Iliad and The Aeneid and, after nine months, concluding with Graham Greene and the Existentialists.  The year before, our Junior English teacher had us half-heartedly reading Animal Farm and another short novel and writing a few brief papers.  Mr. McFarland hurled me and my classmates into the very deep end of the academic pool, and we flailed and sputtered and learned way more than we thought possible.

            I tell this story in Lives on the Boundary.  For a complex set of reasons, Mr. McFarland caught my attention in a way no other teacher had, and I worked like crazy for him.  He was the person who recommended I go to college and, despite my sorry grades up to the point of his class, got me into one.  He changed my life.

            Even though I’ve written about this experience, I have recently been thinking about it again…a lot…feel driven to understand it as deeply as I can.  Over my many years in education, I’ve encountered a number of other students who have had experiences similar in form to mine: they were drifting along and then had a teacher, or entered a program, or had life smack them in a way that flipped a switch for them.  School began to matter.

            One thing I’ve been doing to further examine that year in Mr. McFarland’s class is to reread all the books he assigned—and, believe it or not, I still have some of the original paperbacks.  When I don’t, I try to find the edition we read through used booksellers or eBay; I want to hold it in my hand and see the typeface and illustrations I saw then.  I also have the many papers I wrote for Mr. McFarland and my class notes as well.  Finally, I am still in touch with Jack McFarland, and we are rereading some of the books together.  I’m doing everything I can do to achieve the impossible: to put myself back in time to better understand that life-changing year.

            The vexing question that came up early in my rereading extravaganza is simply how it was that I was able to make my way through the books.  Reading some of them now is no walk in the park, so at 17 with such a limited background, how did I do it?  I must have wanted desperately to make this class with Mr. McFarland work.

            The little reflection below is an attempt to recreate the experience of reading Virgil’s Aeneid.  I hope you enjoy it.

***

            I am lying across the bed on which my father died, a game show on the t.v. in the next room, concentrating with all I’ve got on The Aeneid, Virgil’s epic poem celebrating Aeneas’ long, torturous journey that will lead to the founding of Rome.  I read propped up on my elbows, a pencil in my right hand, shifting now and then to mark with wobbly underlines events that I think might be on Mr. McFarland’s quizzes.  I’m hoping I’m right.  We just finished The Iliad—which Virgil drew from—and the quizzes shocked us into reading more carefully, not the gliding half-steps we were used to.  I don’t have any particular technique to help me, so I mentally grunt, bear down a little harder, and use this pencil, something I didn’t do with The Iliad.  My copy of that book is spotless.

            The quizzes.  I mark some of the places where gods interfere in the lives of the characters—a constant in The Iliad and here in The Aeneid.  There’s frightful omens: A swarm of bees shape themselves into a buzzing sheet hanging from a tree while nearby a young maiden’s hair bursts into flames.  And I mark high drama.  Queen Dido, her heart broken by Aeneas, impales herself on his sword atop her moonlit funeral pyre. 

            I can zero in on stuff like this.  But a good deal of The Aeneid is less accessible to me.  As with The Iliad, I am awash in names I have trouble sorting out, let alone pronouncing: Anchises, Cloanthus, Philoctetes.  Long passages don’t hold my attention—Aeneas’ endless trials and tribulations and the winding geography of his journey.  I had read the standard poetic fare of the mid-century American curriculum: Longfellow and Poe and Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain.”  But The Aeneid is nearly ten thousand lines long, translated into a high-brow English verse by C. Day Lewis, Britain’s Poet Laureate (and, it would turn out, the father of the actor Daniel Day Lewis):

            The wind blows fair, and we leave palm-fringed Selinus behind

            To skirt Lilybaeum’s waters, tricky with reefs submerged.

            After which, we put in at port Drepanum, a landfall

            Of little joy; for here, after so many storms weathered,

            I lost, alas, my father, him who had lightened my cares

            And troubles—lost Anchises.

I push myself off the bed, my shoulders stiff, and move to the small metal desk my mother bought for me at Sears.  It is wedged between this bed where I now sleep and my mother’s, a single box spring and mattress close to the bathroom, so she can get up before sunrise to make it to the breakfast shift at a chain restaurant across town.

            Sitting upright gives me second wind.  I cradle my chin in my left hand, allowing freer movement to the pencil in my right.  My father was frail in his house, slowly succumbing to arterial disease before there were medications and treatments that could have saved him.  A year before, he slipped into a coma and died.  On the bed, at my desk, Aeneas is iron-willed through a journey of storms, and battles, and a descent into the tormented shadowland of hell.  He is fierce in combat, driving his sword deep into his enemy’s heart.  He is loyal and devoted, carrying his beaten, grieving father on his shoulders out of the burning ruins of Troy.

            I count the pages I’ve read so far and the number left to go.  If I really concentrate, I can finish them by the time my mother has to go to bed.

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Lives on the Boundary Turns 25: Further Thoughts on Writing about Inequality*

            September, 2014 was the 25^th anniversary of the publication of a book of mine titled Lives on the Boundary: The Struggles of Achievement of America’s Educationally Underprepared. Some of the readers of this blog are familiar with it. Lives on the Boundary is by far the most personal of my books, for the first third or so is the story of my own childhood hardship and less-than-stellar time in school. In my last year of high school, I was fortunate beyond belief to land in the class of a young English teacher named Jack McFarland. He turned my life around and directed me toward college.

            In the balance of the book, I go on to tell the stories of academically underprepared students I would later teach, from elementary school children, to incoming college freshmen, to returning Vietnam veterans and other adults in preparatory or remedial education programs. So Lives on the Boundary is a coming of age book, a teacher’s tale, and a collection of stories of students who are not doing well in school but, in a number of cases, do become academically successful. The stories have a purpose beyond their particular events and characters: to question educational practices that don’t serve underprepared students well, and, more broadly, to explore the complex relation between education and social class in our country. Many of the students I write about, myself included, come from poor and working-class backgrounds. Nothing predicts achievement in American schools as strongly as parental income.

            The book has had a very fortunate publication history, and sections of it have been widely anthologized, especially a chapter titled “I Just Wanna Be Average,” which portrays my high school woes and my fortuitous encounter with Mr. McFarland in Senior English. In some ways, the success of the book is puzzling. It was summarily turned down by 12 publishers in a row, for it is, after all, an account of one person’s educational journey, hardly the stuff of a best-seller. (In today’s market, it most likely would not get published at all.) Other potential liabilities: The vocabulary and syntax are not simple—I’m a big fan of the embedded clause. The book is peppered with references to cultural events and artifacts of my youth and early adulthood and to the books and ideas being introduced to me. Finally, though it is driven by stories, those stories are woven into an argument about social class and educational inequality. As a read, it is not a day at the beach.

            Yet, from its publication in 1989 to the present, I have been getting letters and, now, emails about it—or about “I Just Wanna Be Average”—from a wide range of readers: immigrant university students from North Africa and the Middle East, older folks who send reflections of their own hard times in school, people from well-to-do families who were placed in special education courses. A good deal of the correspondence comes from first-generation college students, students who, not without conflict, are trying to find their way in higher education. A number of these first-generation students are in remedial English classes, demonstrating a point I make in Lives on the Boundary: If a reading has meaning to students, they will rise to the occasion, regardless of the text’s difficulty.

            My world and experience was, in many ways, quite different from an Egyptian Muslim woman in her early twenties or an African American or Latino guy in a Chicago community college, but something apparently clicks, and for a long while I’ve been thinking about what the source of that click might be. Some things are obvious: the feelings of academic displacement and inadequacy, the struggle to make sense of school. But I’ve come to think there’s something else as well, and I tried to articulate it for a new afterword I wrote for the book in 2005.

Based on what readers tell me, I think that Lives on the Boundary makes particular and palpable the feeling of struggling in school, or not getting it, of feeling out of place, but conveys that welter of feeling within an overall narrative of possibility. This possibility is actualized through one’s own perseverance and wit, but also through certain kinds of instruction, through meaningful relationships with adults, and though a particular set of beliefs about learning and teaching. The book conveys the sense that a difficult life in school is not unique to you, not odd or freakish, that there are reasons for such a life, that though difficult, the difficulty is not necessarily of your making. You are a legitimate member of this place, and your struggles and successes are important. Your efforts and your mind are taken seriously. There are, apparently, few accounts of education in popular or academic culture that convey this message to the students who most need to hear it.

These observations lead me to a related topic, and that is the way working-class people’s academic lives are portrayed in our media. Some portrayals are fraught with stereotypes and deficiency-laden assumptions about intelligence and motivation. But even some of the best portrayals exhibit a problem of a different kind.

Right before Christmas, 2012, there was a powerful story in the New York Times by welfare reporter Jason DeParle, “For Poor, Leap to College Often Ends in a Hard Fall.” The story is built around three young women who excelled at a low-performing high school in Texas and then went off to college with big dreams. All three have had a very rough time of it, and four years after high school, only one is close to getting a degree. DeParle is a nuanced writer, and everything he uses the women’s stories to illustrate is accurate: from widening economic inequality, to institutional barriers, to the individual women’s lack of institutional savvy.

 But reading the story, I was struck by how many of these kinds of accounts we read about poor people and school, stories of insurmountable obstacles and dashed dreams. There is occasionally another kind of story, the polar opposite: the kid from the South Bronx or South Central Los Angeles who is studying something like robotics at Harvard. These are powerful narratives with a long history in our society.

 There are other narratives involving poor people and school; unfortunately, they are perceived by some editors as less dramatic, but they are hugely important. They are stories of people who do make it, maybe not with great fanfare, but they succeed. Not infrequently, they have benefitted from dedicated teachers and mentors, or special programs, or more timely and targeted financial aid and services. There are also stories of people who don’t complete a certificate or degree, but who accomplished something valuable, like the young man I got to know who turned his life away from drugs and the streets during the first year of a welding program and after a lot of thought and consultation joined the Navy to stabilize his life and finish his education.

 If all we read are stories of failure, we can come to think that little is possible for students who start out behind the eight ball, that it doesn’t matter what the institution does. We have to have stories like DeParle’s, absolutely, for they slam home the devastation of inequality. And also give us the story of a young person’s exceptional achievements—the rise from mean streets to a robotics lab. I’ve told both kinds of stories. But give us as well the full range, the less dramatic, but tremendously important testaments to our broad and varied intelligence as a people and to the difference a responsive institution can make as people go to college or return to it, seeking a better life. All of us need to read these stories, but especially the students who are living them.

* See blog post from June 12, 2014

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Writing about Inequality

            This post is a reflection on the writing I’ve done over the years concerning economic and social inequality in our country. A slightly shorter version appeared in the May 16, 2014 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Chronicle Review.

***

For close to thirty-five years I’ve been writing about a cluster of issues that involve social class, education, and work: literacy, intelligence, academic underpreparation, and the purpose of schooling. Looking back on it all, it seems that I’ve been using writing for a long time to try to understand and portray the ways opportunity and inequality play out in American life. One of the challenges I’ve faced is rendering the kind of complexity I have found in the lives of the people I’ve interviewed. They bear witness to the damage wrought by inequality but also to the resilience and intelligence of those affected by it. Let me offer an example from close to home.

Several years before my mother died, I interviewed her about the waitressing she had done for much of her working life. She was pretty sick by then, but she liked to reminisce about her work and had keen recall of the details of restaurant service. We would clear off the kitchen table, and she would demonstrate taking orders and delivering them, talking about the way she would organize the flow of work and the memory tricks she’d use to remember who got the steak and who got the chicken sandwich. She could still balance plates along her right arm while holding tight to two cups and saucers. As well as I knew my mother, my interviews with her would reveal a more complex set of feelings and beliefs about work than I had imagined.

            Waitressing was physically punishing but provided my mother, a woman with a 6^th grade education, a way to exercise some control over her life—she knew, she said, that she could always find work. A customer might be rude and insulting, but she defined such behavior as ignorance and mocked it with her co-workers. My mother grew up destitute and isolated in the domestic labor of her household, and waitressing enabled her to “be among the public,” a source of pride and enjoyment for her. That social exchange helped create an educational setting: “There isn’t a day that goes by…that you don’t learn something.” For all its constraints and demands, the restaurant provided the occasion for my mother to display a well-developed set of physical, social, and cognitive skills. It was her arena of competence.

            The interviews with my mother became the most personal part of The Mind at Work, a study documenting the significant cognitive content of physical work. The dynamics of social class and occupational status as well as our enchantment with high technology blinker our perception of the mental acuity involved in blue-collar and service occupations, waitressing to welding. I wrote what I called cognitive biographies of people like my mother, for so often our depiction of the inner lives of working-class people, and certainly of the poor, might give us fortitude or courage or, conversely, conflict and despair, but not a fuller picture of their intelligence and everyday creativity.

As I tried to capture this fuller picture, I drew on a range of disciplines—cognitive science to labor history to sociology and economics—consulting experts in each of these fields. Each discipline provided a different line of sight on inequality, brought into focus a particular aspect of it. I remember listening years ago to a lecture by an economist on the devastation of neighborhoods in South Central Los Angeles, an area I knew well, having grown up there and written about it. The economist was right on many levels: local industries were long gone, unemployment was high, street crime and gang violence plagued the area. But as he spoke, I kept thinking of the side streets where houses had mowed lawns and flowerbeds, where people had turned an empty lot into a community garden, where small churches distributed food and clothing. None of this negated the economist’s analysis, but could have enhanced it, an ethnographic portrayal that suggests a pulse of rejuvenation amid the terrible problems his analysis revealed.

            One of the likely differences between me and the economist is that we have different goals. He was presenting a quantitative summary of key trends for an audience of other scholars or of policymakers. In quite a different way, my work, I hope, also reaches some in those audiences. But I have another audience in mind as well: those affected by inequality. Two high school girls from South Central are watching a feature about their neighborhood on the evening news. The camera pans an empty street as the newscaster says this is like a Third-World country. The girls are more than aware of the poverty and danger in their neighborhood; they were just talking about it before the newscast. But they’re taken aback by the reporter’s characterization. “This isn’t the Third-World,” one says. “This is where we live.” My goal is to write in a way that combines the economist’s analysis with a more anthropological investigation of those side streets, a combination that might assure those girls that they and their community are more than the sum of economic indicators or a stigmatized catch-phrase, yet also get them to consider the broader forces impinging on their lives.

            To achieve this end, along with the use of multiple disciplines, I attempt to blend genres, to weave together analysis with narrative, descriptive detail with exposition. This experimentation began while writing Lives on the Boundary, a book about academic underpreparation in American schools and colleges and, therefore, about education and social class. I present, for example, vignettes of students struggling to make sense of a lecture in psychology or philosophy or to write a paper explicating a poem, and, as with the cognitive biographies I mentioned earlier, I try to convey not only these students’ backgrounds and the feelings triggered by their academic struggles but also their thought processes, the reasoning behind an error, or previously learned reading or writing strategies that don’t work now, or insight that gets lost in confusing syntax.

            These vignettes are set within a discussion of the history and sociology of underpreparation in higher education. I think that embedding such vignettes into an examination of the conditions that lead to them gives a conceptually more substantial account of underpreparation than would vignette or disciplinary analysis alone. Also, from the feedback I’ve gotten, it seems that this blend of genres resonates with students who themselves struggled in school. The pairing of vignette and analysis helps make the analysis come alive, humanizes it. Equally important, a story or descriptive portrait doesn’t stand alone, but connects to explanatory ideas. The people being portrayed aren’t lone actors, aren’t odd or unusual—there are reasons for their circumstances.

            Inequality has caught the public's attention, and it is the writer's job to hold that attention when so much else competes for it. How do we find the words to capture the brutal magnitude of the problem and the political and social forces that created it? At the same time, how can we portray the minds and hearts of the residents of a beleaguered neighborhood, of young people struggling in school, of workers on the factory or restaurant floor, of those on the street with no work at all? There are many ways to analyze and write about inequality. I try to look for the trend and the life lived within the trend. 

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The Personal is Cognitive: The Human Side of Learning

A few weeks back, I asked readers what positive things about their schooling stand out in memory. I’ve also been asking friends and acquaintances. It’s interesting how often a particular teacher is mentioned, even a particular moment with a particular teacher.

I just read a study on dropping out, in which the researchers interviewed mostly Latino ninth graders in five California high schools. http://www.lmri.ucsb.edu/dropouts/pubs_reports.htm
The interviews selected both students who were at risk for dropping out and those who were not and asked them what they saw as “the factors … motivating them toward or alienating them from finishing high school.” Most of the students in both categories reported being engaged with school – which, in itself, counters one stereotype about Latino adolescents. They listed a desire for relevant coursework, for interventions when they’re in trouble, for school resources, for school safety, for networks of friends. And one factor that loomed large was caring relationships with adults, with teachers, counselors, coaches.

A lot of educators have written eloquently about the importance of care in schooling; Debbie Meier and Nel Noddings are two who come quickly to mind. I’d like to underscore an aspect of care, of meaningful relationships with adults, that, I think, warrants attention: The intimate relation between these relationships and learning, good ol’ hard-nosed cognitive outcomes.

I have a personal take on this issue, for it was one teacher, my senior high-school English teacher, Jack McFarland, who turned my life around. He had a no-nonsense demeanor, and he had the most demanding curriculum I faced in four years of high school. But we students knew he gave a damn, that he worked us because he believed in use, and he demanded more of himself – in terms of hours spent closely reading our papers – than he did of us. After awhile, hungry for adult connection, I wanted to connect with him.

In Lives on the Boundary, I reflect on this interweaving of human relation and learning. Six or seven years after Mr. McFarland’s class, I found myself working with children, trying to make my own sense of teaching:

Teaching, I was coming to understand, was a kind of romance. You didn’t just work with words or a chronicle of dates or facts about the suspension of protein in milk. You wooed kids with these things, invited a relationship of sorts, the terms of connection being the narrative, the historical event, the balance of casein and water. Maybe nothing was “intrinsically interesting.” Knowledge gained its meaning, at least initially, through a touch on the shoulder, through a conversation of the kind Jack McFarland … used to have with his students. My first enthusiasm about writing came because I wanted a teacher to like me.

Years later, I read John Dewey and came across this passage in Democracy and Education:

The more the educator knows of music, [he writes, using one area of study as an example] the more he can perceive the possibilities of the inchoate musical impulses of a child … [T]he various studies represent working resources, available capital … [yet] the teacher should be occupied not with subject matter in itself but in its interaction with the pupils’ present needs and capacities. (pp. 182-183)

I bring all this up because we have a tendency in our culture to separate head from heart, particularly where education policy is concerned. Our reigning discourse – as many have noted on this blog – is a language of economic competitiveness and test scores. No hint of care lingo there. Unfortunately, the oppositional language to this mainstream discourse sometimes lapses into a wariness about intellectual discipline and a romanticizing of young people’s experience.

I think of the extraordinary teachers I observed when traveling around the country for Possible Lives. I think of the care and concern they had for their students – a kind of love, really – and the way that care had such a powerful intellectual dimension to it, from Stephanie Terry’s sophisticated science lessons in her first-grade Baltimore classroom to Steve Gilbert’s analytic push of his Chicago twelfth graders into As I Lay Dying.

It’s this inextricable blend of heart and head that defines the best teaching, the touch on the shoulder that encourages another human being to take on intellectual risk.