About ten minutes
into this emergency PTA meeting, the Principal’s attempt
to placate the parents had, instead, stoked their wrath. Now,
twenty minutes later, he sat there with a shit-eating grin
on his red face, leaving us to our own devices: “Maybe,
she should take a lighter course load.” “How can
A.P. French not have a lot of reading?”
I’m afraid
I was on the fence about this one. As a first-year English
teacher in my mid-twenties, I was sympathetic to the students’
non-academic needs. (What about their social life?) Personally,
I subscribe to the old mens sana in corpore sano idea.
As an undergrad, I played varsity squash at a small liberal
arts college. Then, during my two years in grad school, I
sang in a capella chorus and stood on street corners (with
pretty women) buttonholing passersby to sign petitions.
Another reason
I could see the parents’ POV was how much things had
changed since my time at an independent secondary school on
Philadelphia’s Main Line. Seven years later, students
seemed to take so many classes they had no time to start their
homework during the school day. Only the lucky or lazy ones
even had a lunch period, and every teacher acted as if his/her
subject were the one on which the fate of humanity hung (not
‘hanged’). A couple of Redwoods must have been
chopped down to make each copy of the Ecology textbook. Even
the P.E. teachers bragged about the reading assignments they
inflicted, in units such as Personal Hygiene, Gender and Sexuality,
and Fitness Science. At the faculty lunch table, one wag joked
that he didn’t “neglect their reading muscles.”
The ultimate cause
of this rigor (mortis), as I saw it, was capitalism. To compete
for the big bucks, every independent school in the city had
to be the best. And, if they were merely the twelfth or twentieth
best, they would stop at nothing to get their students into
prestige colleges. You must have seen the news stories about
celebrity parents who were in the slammer for bribing college
admissions officers, and about padded resumes that listed
this imaginary team or that imaginary cause. The truth is,
the border between puffery and larceny was becoming ever more
porous, and no one was talking about building a wall.
Of course, as
I listened to the parents’ homework complaints, esprit
de corps also pulled me in the other direction. I mean,
my poor, tired colleagues, forced to sit there taking this
shit at 7.30 p.m. on a Thursday night. Besides, the French
teacher was right: most academic disciplines are based upon
reading. As many field trips to plays, poetry readings, and
literary shrines, as many videos and guest writers as I could
squeeze into my courses, in each case providing a pretext
for a night without formal homework (just write something
in your journals), there were still a hundred-plus days in
the school year when my students came trudging into class
red-eyed from preparing for the day’s quiz on ‘the
reading.’
After all, the
English Department mantra, “Respect the Text,”
implies that students should read the text. Since respecting
the text implies respecting the context, ‘excerpt’
is a dirty word for us. And you can’t teach Junior English
without subjecting them to the rigors of “HMT,”
Hawthorne, Melville and Twain.
So you could say
I was monkey in the middle. But, just when the teachers’
cause seemed lost, when the parents looked like getting what
they had come for -- a mandatory limit of three hours reading,
total, per night, and one night per course without any homework
-- the Lone Ranger rode into sight, guns blazing.
The ranger in
question was a History teacher (I almost said professor) named
Phil Bard. Not only his name, but his freckled face inspired
the usual sophomoric witticisms (not just by sophomores).
One of the more outrageous wags had dubbed him Mr. Spot, a
clever sobriquet combining the freckles with a play on Mr.
Spock, the iconic wise man. (And was there a sub-textual reference
to pimples?) What’s more, Phil’s hairless dome
(other than a tonsure) marked him as a member of what some
of the younger teachers called The SPC (The Shiny Pate Club).
The Principal was President.
As all that suggests,
Phil Bard was a popular teacher. As far as I could judge,
he knew his subject well and was an exciting classroom performer.
His politics were radical, but not extremely so. Although
I suppose he could be called a social democrat, at the faculty
table once or twice, he had disparaged poor Bernie Sanders
as quixotic. (I agree.) Finally, I discounted as unproven
rumours about Phil having dated older students. In a school
like ours, those rumours are legion; there may be some about
me.
Anyway, that night,
Phil did his cool-hand Luke bit. When a yuppie couple, the
Bling-Entitlebaums (fictitious name), proposed that we take
a vote on the motion of mandatory homework limits, Bard raised
his hand in a way that looked tentative. Since every other
teacher was trying to dig a hole and hide in it, no other
hands were raised.
“Philip,”
said the visibly uneasy Principal. My sense was that, since
his eye was always on the bottom line, which made him an ass-
kisser of parents and an uncertain ally of the faculty, the
Principal was worried that this meeting could end up satisfying
no one. Even the resolution to limit homework might prove
unpopular among the 95% of the parent body not in attendance
tonight.
“If I may,”
Bard said, “before we vote on the proposal, I’d
like to ask the Bling-Entitlebaums one or two questions.”
Turning to the couple, a particularly well-heeled pair of
serious donors in their mid-to-late forties, he added, “May
I?”
Since they were
accustomed to deference from the Administration and from their
children’s teachers, the B-E’s looked a bit surprised,
but not really alarmed -- yet. Of course, they may just have
been trying to ignore Phil’s reputation as an iconoclast.
“Well, then,
folks, if I may . . .” he repeated, sounding as if he
were verbally rubbing his hands together. Mr. B-E offered
a shrug that meant, ‘if you must.”
“Well, good
people, just a few questions. First, I assume that yours is
a household with two earners?” He hurried to justify
this rude rhetoricae quaestio. “I so assume because
I don’t see how any family with less – fewer --
than two incomes could afford to send their children to a
school like this.” (The combined cost, assuming that
both B-E kids were paying full tuition, was somewhere north
of eighty thousand.)
“Of course,”
Ms. B-E briskly replied. “Jay and I are attorneys.”
“Ah, yes,”
Phil said with relish, as if she had fallen into an obvious
trap. “And I think that also means you’re both
very well-educated? Harvard? Yale? Stanford?”
Mr. B-E angrily
seized the baton. “Yes, that’s right,” he
said. “But why . . .?” I was probably not the
only one who noticed that this riposte did not immodestly
name their prestigious alma maters.
“Ah, yes,
‘why?’ ” Phil sprang the trap. “So.
To get into prestigious institutions like those must mean
you earned excellent grades? Which, in turn, must mean you
both were very diligent about completing the demanding assignments
in your own secondary -- school classes, not to mention those
that our prestigious post-secondary institutions are known
to inflict upon their students.”
That was the gist
of Phil’s case, which out-lawyered the lawyers. I’ll
limit my summary of the rest to one or two zingers, which
came near the end.
“So. Let’s
say, then, for the sake of argument, that I agree with you
that ___ and ___ [names of B-E daughter and son] can’t
stand the grind of four-to-five hours of homework every night.
What should they do?”
“You tell
us,” barked Jay B-E, implying that he would have liked
to add, “smart-ass.”
“Well, if
they don’t do the work, they’ll probably wind
up with B’s and, God forbid, a few C’s, on their
report cards. There will still be plenty of good colleges
-- pretty good ones -- they can get into. Of course, with
degrees from those places, their earning potential . . .”
His shrug implied a steep drop from the lofty parental level.
“Are you
suggesting . . .” Ms. B-E started to say. “Or
you could just tell them to take easier classes -- is a senior,
right? Of course, she is, she’s in my AP American History
class! How many other APs is she taking? And I bet that, as
a junior, which we all know is the most important transcript-building
year -- is no slouch, either.”
How did Phil’s
spiel make his colleagues feel? I must wax metaphorical. Speaking
for myself, it was as if I were a fan watching from a seat
directly behind home plate as his team won the World Series
for the very first time in a long, sad history. And there
may even have been a few parents in the crowd.
When the gales
of laughter had subsided, the Principal was able to re-occupy
his favourite position, man of the hour. He readily affected
one of those apparent compromises for which he is known: no
more than forty-five minutes’ reading per subject per
weeknight, and two hours total for the weekend -- that kind
of compromise.
Of course, as
every teacher, and all but the dimmest parents, must have
realized, the ‘compromise was meaningless. Forty-five
minutes at whose reading speed? Academic subjects, or all?
Would the rules apply equally to the student who took five
classes and the one who took nine? In other words, the Principal’s
Solomonic solution was a palliative. But, by now, it was after
eight, and most people were ready to go home.
Once the parents,
the Principal, and the majority of teachers had gathered their
belongings and hurried out into the night, the few remaining
teachers -- myself, included -- gathered ‘round to offer
Phil our plaudits and support.
