Soldiers in the Classroom

Back in the early days of this blog, I posted a short essay on teaching veterans. This is an updated version, drawn from the new edition of Why School?: Reclaiming Education for All of Us. I post it for Veterans Day, 2014.

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What the classroom full of veterans wanted most was, as one of them put it, “to help our families understand what we went through.” The course was in communication, and it was part of an educational program for veterans of the Vietnam war. The teacher— my colleague in the federally funded program—had asked them what they most wanted to learn, and that was their primary answer: to explain to those closest to them the hell they endured.

Our newest generation of veterans is returning to a warmer welcome than those who served in Vietnam, but the kind of war these veterans fought is similar, and their needs are as great. By one count, over 50,000 have been wounded, some severely, and over 350,000 have been diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or Traumatic Brain Injury. These and other vets could experience terrible distress as they try to find their way with family and community, the economy and education.

What kind of support is our society providing for them? As a young man, I taught English in that program for Vietnam veterans, so I got a sense of life after service is over, after physical wounds are healed, after the ceremonies—if there were any—and handshakes have receded into memory. Then soldiers have their lives to pick up or to create anew.

Advocates brought to public attention the inadequate funding and delivery of health care for recent vets; less public—until the deliberations surrounding the new G.I. Bill—were the limited resources for education and the many problems young veterans face as they try to reenter school. The rising cost of living combined with rising costs of tuition, textbooks, and supplies dash many hopes, but even those who can make it financially typically face significant academic and social problems.

The program that contained the communications class could serve as a model for how to help the men and women returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Fortunately, a number of colleges are responding to this new generation of veterans with a range of support services: financial aid assistance, counseling, orientation programs, and social clubs. These are valuable resources. But my sense is that returning soldiers would be better served through a program that includes significant coursework as well as services. One such effort is the laudable SERV program at Cleveland State. But there are few others. The programs I’d like to see could run through some part of the first year or function as a preparatory or bridge program that precedes but is linked to further matriculation.

The key idea is to treat a complex educational issue in a comprehensive and integrated way. To respond adequately to academic needs, the program has to address psychological, social, and economic needs as well. And, hand in glove, some social and psychological problems—inability to concentrate, feelings of intellectual inadequacy—don’t fully manifest themselves unless one is in a classroom, immersed in English or math or poli sci.

The Veterans Special Education Program was a twelve-week crash course in college preparation. The veterans called it academic boot camp. The curriculum included representative freshman-year courses in English, psychology, communications, and mathematics, so students got a sense of what lay before them—a reality check—and were able to begin college with some credits, a leg up. The courses also addressed fundamental cognitive and social skills: critical writing and reading, mathematics, human relations, and communication.

The courses were supported with tutoring. A number of the veterans had poor academic backgrounds, so some needed a good deal of assistance with their writing, with reading academic material, or with all the strategies for doing well in school: managing time, note taking, studying for exams. But the tutoring also made the academic work more humane, no small thing, for many of the students carried with them a history of insecurity and anger about matters academic.

They were being asked to write essays analyzing poetry or comparing sociological or psychological theories and to read more carefully and critically than they had before. The challenge stirred strong feeling. Some of the students shut down and withdrew, and others erupted. One marine scout I was working with got so frustrated that, in a blur of rage and laughter, he bit off the corner of his paper before handing it to me.

It wasn’t enough for us to do our work within the confines of the classroom. The staff would follow up when a student missed a few days, making phone calls, driving over to an apartment or hotel room, finding someone in awful shape. We had a rich network of referrals for psychological counseling—the nearby VA hospitals but also local agencies and civic organizations. And for those who needed it, we had referrals for financial counseling as well. Finally, the program included assisting the students in selecting and applying to appropriate colleges and universities. With help from our counselor, the fellow who sank his teeth into that essay got into UCLA, majoring in sociology and East Asian studies.

All this created a sense of community, something the veterans often noted. For all their social and political differences, they shared the war, and now they were preparing for reentry into the world they left behind. The staff put on social events, but the real community, I believe, was formed through a course of study that was intensive, generous with assistance, and geared toward the next phase of the veterans’ lives.

We have been awash with “support our troops” and “thank you for your service” rhetoric, and politicians use it as a patriotic trump card. One grand irony in all this is the shameful level of health care some veterans have been getting and the resistance a number of conservatives and the Pentagon itself displayed in the face of legislation for the new G.I. Bill.

Rather than patriotic talk, I’d like to hear about programs that are comprehensive and address the multiple needs our troops have when they return home. Programs that provide knowledge and build skill. Programs that are thick with human contact. Programs that meet veterans where they are and provide structure and guidance that assist them toward a clear goal. Programs that build a community while leading these young men and women back to their own communities.

Educational programs for special populations tend toward single-shot solutions: a few basic skills courses, or tutoring, or counseling. But the best programs work on multiple levels, integrate a number of interventions. Such programs emerge from an understanding of the multiple barriers faced by their participants, but also from an affirmation of the potential of those participants. This is a huge point. The richness of the program matches the perception of the capacity of the people who populate it.

This is how really to support our troops. And it is how we should think about an education that, of necessity, has to go beyond the classroom.

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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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