54.
Wadleigh, The Death School: The Underground HIstory of American Education by
John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
CHAPTER
FOUR I Quit, I Think The master's face goes white,
then red. His mouth tightens and opens and spit flies everywhere. . . . What will I do, boys? Flog the boy, sir. Till? Till the blood spurts, sir. — Frank
McCourt, Angela's Ashes. Writing of Ireland's schools as they were in the 1940s.
One day after spending nearly my entire life inside a school
building as student and teacher, I
quit. But not before I saw some things you ought to know. McCourt is
right, spit flies everywhere in
the classroom and school, children mock us because of it. The smell of saliva. I had forgotten until
I returned as a teacher. Put the cosmic aspect aside and come back again into school with me. See it from the
inside with grownup eyes.
On my first day back to school I was hired to substitute in a
horrible place, Wadleigh Junior
High School, nicknamed "the death school" by regulars at the West End
Tavern near Columbia. Jean
Stapleton (Archie Bunker's wife, Edith) had gone there as a young girl; so had Anais Nin, celebrated
diarist and writer of erotica. Some palace revolution long before I got there had altered the nature of this
school from an earnest, respectable
Victorian lock-up to something indescribable. During my teaching debut
at Wadleigh, I was attacked by a
student determined to bash my brains out with a chair.
Wadleigh was located
three blocks from that notorious 1 10th Street corner in Harlem made famous by a bestseller of the day,
New York Confidential, which called it "the most dangerous intersection in America." I mention danger as
the backdrop of my teaching debut
because two kinds of peril were in the air that season: one, phony as my
teaching license, was the
"Cuban Missile Crisis"; the other, only too genuine, was a
predicament without any possible
solution, a deadly brew compounded from twelve hundred black teenagers penned inside a gloomy brick
pile for six hours a day, with a white guard staff misnamed "faculty" manning the light towers and
machine-gun posts. This faculty was
charged with dribbling out something called "curriculum" to
inmates, a gruel so thin Wadleigh
might rather have been a home for the feeble-minded than a place of
education.
My own motive in being there was a
personal quest. I was playing hooky from my real job as a Madison Avenue ad writer flogging cigarettes and
shaving cream, a fraternity boy's
dream job. Not a single day without Beefeater Martinis, then the preferred
ad man's tipple,
not a morning without headache, not a single professional achievement worth the bother. I was hardly a
moralist in those days, but I wasn't a moron either. Thoughts of a future composed of writing fifty words or so a
week, drunk every day, hunting
sensation every night, had begun to make me nervous. Sitting around the
West End one weekend I decided to
see what schoolteaching was like.
Harlem then was an ineffable place where
the hip white in-crowd played in those last few moments before the fires and riots of the 1960s broke out.
Black and white still pretended it
was the same high-style Harlem of WWII years, but a new awareness was
dawning among teenagers. Perhaps
Mama had been sold a bill of goods about the brighter tomorrow progressive America was arranging for black folks,
but the kids knew better.
"The natives are
restless." That expression I heard a half-dozen times in the single day
I spent at Wadleigh, the Death
School. Candor was the style of the moment among white teachers (who comprised 1 00 percent of
the faculty) and with administrators in particular. On some level, black kids had caught on to the fact that
their school was a liar's world, a
jobs project for seedy white folk. The only blacks visible outside Harlem and its
outrigger ghettos were maids, laborers,
and a token handful stuffed into make -work government occupations, in
theater, the arts, or civil
service.
The notable exception
consisted of a small West Indian business and professional elite which behaved itself remarkably like
upper-class whites, exhibiting a healthy dose of racial prejudice, itself built on skin color and gradations,
lighter being better. British
manners made a difference in Harlem just as they did elsewhere. The
great ad campaigns of the day were
overwhelmingly British. Men in black eye patches wearing Hathaway shirts whose grandfathers fought at
Mafeking, "curiously delicious" Schweppes "Commander Whitehead" ads, ads for Rolls cars
where the loudest noise you heard was
the ticking of the electric clock. The British hand in American
mid-twentieth-century life was
noticeably heavy. Twelve hundred Wadleigh black kids had no trouble figuring
out what recolonization by the
English meant for them.
I had no clue of
this, of course, the day I walked into a school building for the first
time in nine years, a building so
dark, sour, and shabby it was impossible to accept that anyone seriously thought kids were better held
there than running the streets.
Consider the orders
issued me and under which I traveled to meet eighth graders on the second floor:
Good morning, Mr. Gatto. You have
typing. Here is your program. Remember, THEY MUST NOT TYPE! Under no circumstances are they allowed to
type. I will come around
unannounced to see that you comply. DO NOT BELIEVE ANYTHING THEY TELL YOU about an exception. THERE ARE
NO EXCEPTIONS.
Picture the scene: an
assistant principal, a man already a living legend throughout the school district, a man with a voice of
command like Ozymandias, dispatching young Gatto (who only yesterday wrote the immortal line "Legs
are in the limelight this year"
for a hosiery ad) into the dark tunnels of the Death School with these
words:
Not a letter, not a
numeral, not a punctuation mark from those keys or you will never be hired here again. Go now.
When I asked what I
should do instead with the class of seventy- five, he replied, "Fall back on your resources. Remember, you
have no typing license!"
Off I went up the
dark stairs, down the dark corridor. Opening the door I discovered my dark class in place, an insane din coming
from seventy-five old black Underwoods,
Royals, Smith Coronas: CLACKA! CLACKA! CLACKA! CLICK! CLICK! CLACK! DING! SLAM! CLACK! Seven hundred and
fifty black fingers dancing around under
the typewriter covers. One-hundred and fifty hammering hands clacking
louder by far than I could bellow:
STOP.... TYPING! NO TYPING ALLOWED! DON'T TYPE! STOP! STOP! STOP I SAY! PUT THOSE COVERS ON THE MACHINES!
The last words were
intended for the most flagrant of the young stenographers who had abandoned any pretense of compliance.
By unmasking their instruments they were
declaring war. In self-defense, I escalated my shouting into threats and
insults, the standard tactical
remedy of teachers in the face of impending chaos, kicked a few chairs, banged an aluminum water pitcher out of
shape, and was having some success curtailing rogue typers when an ominous chant of OOOOOHHHHHH! OOOOOOOOOOHHHHHH! warned me some other
game was now afoot.
Sure enough, a skinny
little fellow had arisen in the back of the room and was bearing down on me, chair held high over his
head. He had heard enough of my deranged screed, just as Middlesex farmers had enough of British lip and
raised their chairs at Concord and
Lexington. I too raised a chair and was backing my smaller opponent down when
all of a sudden I caught a vision
of both of us as a movie camera might. It caused me to grin and when I did the whole class laughed
and tensions subsided.
"Isn't this a
typing period?" I said, "WHY DON'T YOU START TYPING?" Day One
of my thirty-year teaching career
concluded quietly with a few more classes to which I said at once, "No goofing off! Let's
TYPE!" And they did. All the machines survived unscathed.
I had never thought much about kids up to
that moment, even fancied I didn't like them, but these bouts of substitute teaching raised the
possibility I was reacting adversely not to youth but to invisible societal directives ordering young
people to act childish whether
they want to or not. Such behavior provides the best excuse for mature
oversight. Was it possible I did
like kids, just not the script written for them?
There were other
mysteries. What kind of science justified such sharp distinctions among classes when even by the house logic of
schooling it was obvious that large numbers of students were misplaced? Why didn't this bother teachers?
Why the apparent indifference to
important matters like these? And why was the mental ration doled out so
sparingly? Whenever I stepped up
my own pace and began cracking the mental whip, all manner of kids responded better than when I
followed the prescribed dopey curriculum. Yet if that were so, why this skimpy diet instead?
The biggest mystery
lurked in the difference between the lusty goodwill of first, second, and to some extent third graders — even
in Harlem — the bright, quick intelligence and goodwill always so abundant in those grades, and the wild
change fourth grade brought in
terms of sullenness, dishonesty, and downright mean spirit.
I knew something in
the school experience was affecting these kids, but what? It had to be hidden in those first-, second- and
third-grade years which appear so idyllic even in Harlem. What surfaced by fourth grade was the effect of a
lingering disease running rampant
in the very Utopian interlude when they were laughing, singing, playing,
and running round in the earlier
grades. And kids who had been to kindergarten seemed worse than the others.
But schoolwork came
as a great relief to me in spite of everything, after studying Marlboro cigarette campaigns and
Colgate commercials. In those days I was chomping at the bit to have work that involved real responsibility; this
imperative made me decide to throw
ambition to the winds at least for the moment and teach. Plenty of time to get
rich later on, I thought.
In New York City in the 1960s, becoming
a teacher was easier than you could imagine or believe (it still is). It was a time of rich cash harvests
for local colleges giving two-week
teacher courses for provisional certification; nearly everyone passed
and permanent license requirements
could be met on the job. At the end of summer I had a license to go to school and get paid for it. Whether
I could actually teach was never an issue with anyone. Kids assigned to me had no choice in the matter.
That following autumn I found
regular work at William J. O'Shea Junior High whose broken concrete
playground sat in plain view of
the world-famous Museum of Natural History, diagonally across Columbus Avenue to the northeast. It was a
playground my kids and I were later to use to make the school rich by designing and arranging
for a weekend flea market to be held on this site. But that came long afterwards.
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