3—Nothing Up My Sleeve

The magic I experienced as a high-school English teacher was not immediate. It came to me only after I realized that when my students complained that a writing assignment was stupid or boring, this was merely a cover for their fear of failure. To help them gain confidence, I would invite the class to assign me a seemingly impossible topic. Then with their assistance, I would model the organizational process on the board. I always began by shaking out my cuffs while stepping nimbly from side to side. “See here, my friends,” I would say, “there’s nothing up either sleeve...writing an essay is not magic...it just takes practice, reflection, and planning.” Then we’d work together until an outline took shape almost like, well, magic and understanding lit up their eyes.

In the early eighties, school-district administrators gave me a big award for my method of teaching writing as a problem-solving strategy. School officials then paid me to present workshops on my method to teachers throughout my district and state. Several years later, my students used what I’d taught them to end all the gang activity in our inner-city school, thus proving that it really is possible to change the system. What I’d failed to understand was that the people in charge didn’t want the system to change. The system worked quite well for them. All this became apparent when the principal squelched the student effort and did so in a way that made it appear that I’d abandoned the effort. 

In 1993, the National Council of Teachers of English published Home of the Wildcats, a book that I wrote to show how the education system stifles the creativity of teachers and students. Following a favorable review in the local paper, school officials suddenly discovered a technicality in a leave I’d taken and  POOF!  my twenty-three-year career was gone....

 

The form letter telling me I was “no longer competitive” arrived the day I returned from giving a keynote address at the Nevada Reading Week Conference. Initially, I accepted the irrationality and injustice as the education I needed to write another book to show how what happened to my students and me was a metaphor for all the reasons we can’t solve the problems in our schools. However, no matter how I told my story, I sounded like just one more teacher who got screwed by the system. School officials had turned me into the worst thing that could happen to a writer and teacher of the world’s great literature—I’d been reduced to a cliché.

In the months that followed, I grew increasingly inert. Health professionals called the condition depression. Except there was no one there to be depressed. The person I’d been was gone.

Oh, I materialized occasionally as an expert on education reform in my role as guest speaker for the Nevada Humanities Committee’s On the Road series. Audiences agreed that the problems in our education system were a national disgrace. But over punch and cookies, people would simply shrug and say, ”What can you do? The problems are just too complicated to solve.” Except the point was that my students had proven otherwise. 

•••

What a beautiful but fraudulent myth it was that turned the good in my good works to dust. America—the land where if you work hard and play by the rules, you can grow up to be anything you want. I’d wanted to be someone who made the world a better place for children and poets. I’d worked hard and played by the rules—until, that is, I saw that the rules were unfriendly to children and poets.

Perhaps the failure of imagination in American public education was inevitable. Like the fall of empires. And the arrival of the big yellow machines.

Next: “The Arrival of the Big Yellow Machines” 

Note to the Reader: You can read the entire story of my relationship with the American education system in my memoir Prisoner of Second Grade. And while you're at it, check out my Web site for a brief history of education reform in America and the reasons why we can't seem to solve the problems in our schools.