Schoolville: Chapter 17
“European American men like to speak this way, and they like others to speak this way. These high-status speech patterns carry value and carry men to the top. This linear-speak is valued by the power structures in North America, but this is not true in much of the world. Many cultural groups find that it provides a limited context, and they prefer to speak in a more enriched contextual frame. Much of the world (including some North American Women) prefer to tell stories to make a point. They prefer to provide many perspectives and variables because they believe listeners (or readers) will generate meaning based on their own lived experiences.”
- Joan Wink. Feminist educator explaining why women were more welcoming of diverse students, and presumably were better teachers.
Chapter Seventeen
The bell wasn’t finished ringing when Dimitrius closed the door. The door hit the frame and class officially started. Leslie was taking roll. I sat in front of the class sipping coffee, and glancing at my lesson plan. About one minute after the door hit the frame, I glanced around.
The deal my students and I had hammered out was simple. If they would read, and not give me any crap about it, they could bring whatever they wanted to read, but it had to be something they really would read. The first day after implementing that procedure, Travis had brought a Playboy magazine. I couldn’t blame him. Both an interest in sex and testing the limits of authority were in his genetic coding. The magazine was the perfect test for him to give me. I hadn’t taken it up, but I had asked him politely to put it away and then I had written him a pass to go check a book out of the library.
“Please be back in twenty minutes Travis.”
He had smiled at me; testing me. I hadn’t snarled at him once. Actually, I had to struggle to suppress laughing at the whole thing. It was something that I wish I’d tried when I was a student. I had thought about it, but had never had the balls. The truth was that if Travis hadn’t respected me, he would have disrupted the class with something showing disrespect to me personally, such as challenging the classroom procedures. He had chosen this way instead. He hadn’t defied me, he was just checkin’ out the limits. B.D. had been enchanted by Travis’ little test. He really enjoyed the students like Travis. They were his kind of humanoid.
Horton had something else to say entirely. “Oh, boys are so crude! Aren’t you going to look at it too?”
“Nawwww…” B.D. quipped back before I could say a word. “Have you seen his wife?”
“Well,” I quietly replied, “I did marry her for a reason, and it sure wasn’t for a fishing buddy.”
“But you don’t fish.” Horton defensively stated.
“My point exactly.” I replied dryly, rolling my eyes at B.D.
That incident had occurred several weeks ago. Since then, Travis had brought a different book every day, in an apparently sincere search for something that interested him, other than women.
That day the previous month, as I had watched Travis leave his magazine in the trash and go to the library to get a book, several of the girls had noticed I was laughing and shaking my head. René had started up with an angry voice. “Aren’t you going to punish him for that, Mr. Kyle?”
“Why?” I replied.
“Well…because, he was looking at a girlie magazine!” She had a hard look about her eyes and a hard set to her lips. But, her relaxed body language suggested that she wasn’t really angry.
“Is it a crime to look at women?”
René, who was wearing a very tight sweater that revealed every curve of her seventeen-year-old body, without an ounce of fat on it, looked down at her leather miniskirt. “Hmmm…” Then she looked up at me. She was smiling at me with a rather sly look in her eyes.
“Any other teacher would have sent Travis to the office for it though. Why don’t you? Are you a dirty old man or something?”
“Well, I told him to bring something that he was interested in reading about, and he did. Perhaps he isn’t the only one who comes to school for reasons other than education.”
Theresa interrupted vehemently and abruptly. “HUH! I ain’t no cracker like him.”
Smiling, I firmly asked her, “Please revise out the racial comments.”
“Well…” She looked dubiously around, “I ain’t like him.”
“What do you mean? Are you saying that you’re not interested in the opposite sex?”
“Yeah, I am. But what he does is against the rules.”
“Since when is being interested in the opposite sex ever within the rules?” I looked over at her. I couldn’t help it. “Besides, I’d have to say that Travis isn’t so different from you. If I’m not mistaken, that skirt is waaayyy out of dress code. And like Travis, I suppose that I should write you up and send you to the office, but I’m not.”
Rachel raised her hand. “Why not, Mr. Kyle?”
“Only in America is it a crime for a man to look at a woman, and notice that she is a woman. If it’s in Travis’ genetic programming to look at a woman, it is also in Theresa’s genetic programming to want to be noticed. And not just Theresa’s either! As I look around, it appears to me that probably half of you girls are out of dress code this morning. Come to mention it Rachel, is that blouse legal?” Rachel was wearing a blouse that plunged down so far that her cleavage was clearly showing. As she brightened into a fine shade of red, everyone else had a good laugh about her predicament. Most of the boys were nodding their heads, as were all of the girls. They knew that Rachel was testing the limits of the dress code with a micrometer, just like most of the kids in school.
“Now, treating a girl with a little respect would be nice too…just saying…”. I shrugged.
That episode had occurred a month ago. This particular morning, they were reading silently without being told to read. They actually appeared to enjoy reading. As I looked up, several kids smiled at me and went back to their reading. Since it was a ritual that we started English class off each day with twenty minutes of sustained silent reading, the kids used it as a time to sip their cokes and awaken to their day. By all appearances, they deeply appreciated the mental stimulation. I looked over and notice that Travis was reading an older novel, much worn and dog-eared. Looking closer, I nearly choked on my coffee. He was reading “The Sensuous Woman.”
Quickly consulting my moral barometer, I had to admit that I wasn’t particularly shocked by it. It may have been against the school rules; but then again, apparently so was using one’s brain. I hadn’t really anticipated this move on Travis’s part, so I didn’t say anything to him. I needed to think about the best way to handle it.
Travis was deep into some sort of sexual mystery, and I was mulling over how to respond to Travis’s selection of a book, when the egg timer that had been set for twenty minutes went off with several beeps.
“Time’s up, Mr. Kyle.” The student who was in charge of running the time began to set the egg timer for the next portion of class called primetime. Prime time was my time. That was the twenty to thirty minutes each day that I actually got up to teach. I found that the students would listen if they knew that I would only be teaching for a finite amount of time. Today I had listed primetime on the board for twenty minutes. I was going to discuss diction in writing.
Actually, diction is an AP skill. The Advanced Placement students were the only ones who were assumed to be able to understand the advanced concepts involved with such abstract notions as diction, which is a nice word for intentional word-choice, connotation, and denotation, and so forth. They never quite came out and said it, but at Wilson High, it was generally believed that regular English students weren’t quite smart enough to grasp these notions. I stood at the front of the class and decided to bite the bullet. I knew that the minute that I said the word for the first time, the inevitable jokes and ribald humor would start. They would continue for a few minutes, and then I could teach.
“DICTION.” I said loudly, smiling. Then the bedlam began. It continued for several moments, while I stood at the front of the class and smiled, leaning on my overhead projector stand. Then I turned around and wrote it on the board. In a few minutes, quiet began to ripple around the room in place of the mirth.
“Let’s say this word together.” Looking quickly at Travis, I said even faster, “RememberTravisthewordisdickSHUN!” The natives decided to be friendly. They repeated back. “DICTION.”
I’m not supposed to be teaching you this, so fergodsakes don’t tell anyone! Ok?” I had a theory that if I really wanted them to listen closely, I could say that whatever I was teaching was forbidden knowledge, like the Kama Sutra, and get their undivided attention.
“Could I please have two volunteers to pass these out?” I picked up a stack of handouts that illustrated the differences between the levels of diction, as well as concrete and abstract diction. As these were being passed out, I turned my back to the class and outlined on the grainy blackboard, what prime time would cover. I knew that less than half of the kids would copy down what I wrote.
Turning again to face the class, I scanned it to see if any mischief had occurred while my back was turned. It never seemed to occur. They were busy reading the hand out that had three paragraphs written on it. Each paragraph illustrated one of the three levels of diction from the A.P. manual.
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I pointed to a list of words on the board. “Ok, it’s contest time! Twenty points to the team that looks up these five words first, colloquialism, slang, jargon, connotation, and denotation.”
Knowing that boredom would inevitably lead some students into trouble, I had learned to preempt them. “DIMITRIUS, would you please look up denotation?”
DIMITRIUS looked back. “Say whut?”
I smiled. Turning to the board, I underlined the word: DENOTATION. “This is the word, would you mind looking up the definition in the dictionary please? Turning to a boy who was beginning to droop, I asked him. “Ernesto, would you please look up this word and see if you can explain it to me in a few minutes?” Turning back to the board, I underlined CONNOTATION.
As I anticipated, the egg timer went off at a very interesting part of the lesson. “Rachel would you please note where I’m leaving off, we’ll finish this next class. I had stolen this idea from Scheherazade in “A Thousand and One Nights”. I was trying to keep them looking forward to the next class. It seemed to work for a few students.
As Rachel made a few notes, Leslie got out the Nerf basketball and stood up to shoot hoops. It was the next thing on the agenda. As she did, I stepped completely out of the way and allowed them to run the class. Roberto stepped to the front of the class and called out in his accented voice, “Chodown! Five, four, three, two, one: Chodown.” It was exactly as he had seen me do it for the last month. The class was so quiet you could hear a pin drop. Having recently moved from Mexico, Roberto would never say a word in class. By putting him in charge of hoops, not only did he get to shoot right after Leslie, but he also got to speak aloud in class. He would’ve died if I had ever called on him to answer a question in class, but for some reason he really loved to run hoops.
“Ok! Line up to choot!” The line quickly formed as Roberto took three shots. The next item on the daily agenda was ten minutes of hoops, which nearly always degenerated into social time. Its real purpose was to wake everyone up, and it worked very well. It also allowed those who needed to take a “biology break” to quietly slip out and do their business, which was another forbidden practice that I was supposed to regulate as strictly as firearms sales.
My first period students had not taken much obvious advantage of my generosity, by skipping out, or causing trouble in the thousand inventive ways that teens can think of, so they had the privilege of taking a pee without me interfering. Eighth period, on the other hand, had lost that privilege by abusing it. I had several students who would be gone for half an hour or more.
I dearly loved that first period class. They really were not very different from most of my other classes. The only bad class that I had was my infamous eighth period. Every teacher has one period that stands out as being less cooperative or less mature. For some reason, every year, we all seem to have that one class. That year, mine was eighth period, my last period on the “B” day. They had several extremely immature kids, both boys and girls, who were constantly stirring the pot. My first period was just the opposite. I probably had just as many defiant kids in this class, but they never directed it at me. I did love to see them come into my room. They were always a pleasure to teach.
Wilson High set their schedule of classes on a “modified block” schedule, which meant that I had them for 90 minutes every other day. First period through fourth period were on the “A” day. Fifth period through eighth period were on the “B” day.
The egg timer beeped again and the kids, most of who were chatting with each other and swapping jokes, settled back down into their cramped little desks. Surprisingly, they rarely complained about them anymore.
“It’s amazing what a month will do, isn’t it?” Horton asked in her “teacher” voice.
“They damn well better not ask me to snag my panty hose on one of those wooden crates!” B.D. facetiously quipped.
The timekeeper looked at me. “Mr. Kyle, it’s time for in-class discussion.”
Looking over at the board, I saw that I had fifteen minutes allotted for connecting the class today with what they saw in the big wide world. This segment was called “making connections”, and then we had fifteen minutes left in which I would give them their homework assignment, and give them just enough time to complete it in class. Really, this was an in-class assignment, but I had learned that if I called it homework, and gave them enough time to finish in class, they actually would do the work. They seemed to feel like they were getting over on the system or something. If I asked them to “review in class”, this time immediately became more social-time. When the fifteen minutes allotted to homework was up, the bell would ring, and they would be off to their next period, which was my planning period.
The rest of the period ran pretty much as expected. Because they had been reading, several of them were able to open the books that they had in class for sustained silent reading and find examples of the levels of diction, as well as abstract and concrete diction. Of course, Travis tried to work a passage from “The Sensuous Woman” into the discussion, and I ignored him. I could see that I was going to have to have a talk with him about his choice in literature, and decided that I’d do that after class. All too soon, the egg timer beeped again.
“Alrighty then, please get out a lined piece of paper, and write me a one paragraph using high diction.” Many groans were heard, and several hands went up.
“Yes Shalisa?”
“Mr. Kyle, I don’t know that kind of English!” She looked genuinely distressed.
“Ok, pretend that you are writing like they do in the “King James” bible, remember that?”
“You mean with all of the ‘thees’ and ‘thous’?”
“Yeah, try writing like that; only use ‘you’ and ‘your’ instead of ‘thee’ and ‘thou’. Ok?”
“Ok…” She replied as she doubtfully eyed her paper.
“Or…you could pretend that you are writing to the President. You wouldn’t want to call him a ‘homeboy’, right?”
“Hmmm. Ok.” She seemed to be thinking that over.
“Give it a try!” I encouraged her.
Turning to another student, I called on him. “Yes Aziz?”
“Mr. Kyle, I’m Muslim. I’ve never read the “King James Bible”.
“Ok, fair enough. But, I’ve read the Koran, and it is most certainly written in high diction. Could you picture how that is written and attempt to write at that level?”
“Yeah!” Then he looked down at his paper too, and his brow wrinkled. “What should I write?”
“Pretend that you are The Prophet. Tell me what a good man is like. Would that work?”
“That’s a forbidden practice Mr Kyle”.
Having read the Koran, I knew that it was full of teachings and thoughts about morals, among other things.
“Sorry, but you can still be teaching me from that, can’t you?”
Aziz nodded his head as he studied his empty paper.
I turned to another raised hand. It was Travis. I already knew what his question was, before he even asked: “Travis, it has to be a minimum of five sentences!” Everyone smiled at that. “And Travis…”
“Yes Mr. Kyle?” He looked up smiling.
“We need to speak for a moment after class, Ok?”
“Sure!” He nodded and smiled. He wasn’t afraid of me. I found that comforting too.
Looking back at Aziz, I saw that he was writing rapidly. He was probably plagiarizing the Koran for all he was worth, but at least he was learning the difference between high diction and low diction, which is a critical lesson for acquiring written academic proficiency. Sooner or later, these kids would get sick of minimum wage and want to go to college. It had happened to me…
