The First Day in My Own Movie

(Continued from Wednesday, August 28, 2013 . . . )

The first five weeks in that seventh grade classroom in Omaha were straight out of the 1955 movie The Blackboard Jungle. Watching it as a college freshman, I’d thought that the unruliness and violence portrayed in the movie’s inner-city classroom could happen only among the really poor, those who had nothing to look forward to. Those whose rage boiled over because of poverty. I didn’t recognize the bias of that belief nor the naiveté.

         Now, five years later, I daily entered a classroom that vied in rowdiness with the movie’s—a classroom of young, middle-class, Catholic students whose lives seemed far removed from those of the high school students in the movie.

         Each day they gleefully dashed to their desks ready to intimidate me. The entry door was at the back of the room; my desk at the front. As I sat there, I could look to the left of the rectangular classroom and see three rows of desks parallel to the inner wall. The boys sat there. To my right, along the wall of windows, sat three rows of girls.

         On my first day in that classroom, I’d discovered, after everyone had quieted down, that they’d completed all the textbooks by Christmas. Hearing this, my mind went into high gear. “I don’t believe that you know everything that’s in those books,” I said. “I’m going to give you some written quizzes to find out. You’ll have to prove me wrong.”

         The challenge prompted them to take paper and pencil out of their desks and settle down. The day passed: a quiz or two; recess; another quiz; lunch; another couple of quizzes; recess; a final quiz.

         As the day progressed, I gave a twenty-five-question quiz on each subject area: English, geography, civics, science, reading, math, American history. Some answers would require a simple true/false or yes/no; others, a word or two; still others, a paragraph of explanation.

         Fortunately, I’d majored in English Literature in college with minors in history, philosophy, and math. I’d had a good education and so, simply by flipping through their textbooks, I thought of questions to ask.

         After each quiz, I had the students trade papers with one another. Then we’d discuss each of the questions to arrive at what might seem the right answer. But I insisted that we listen to other answers to the same question to determine if any of them contained some kernel of accuracy.

         A student grading a paper that had an answer that differed from the “right” one had to try and figure out why the other student had written that answer. Was it a feasible response to a question that might appear to have only one answer? A student could defend her or his answer if the grader argued with it. 

         They seemed to love to debate, although they often resorted to put-downs and yelling. But I’d remain silent, simply watching them or the clock. They didn’t seem to know what to make of me.

         At the end of the day, I collected all the papers and said I’d look them over and give them grades. That night, after getting permission from Sister Brendan to stay up late, I graded and then stapled together each student’s quizzes.

         The next day I asked Jenny, one of the seventh-grade girls, to hand back the papers. She sashayed down the boys’ aisles, humming. Suddenly she yelped, arched her body, and scurried down the row toward where I stood. But as she passed two other boys, she yelped again. When I asked what had happened, she looked down at the floor and muttered, “Nothin’. Nothin’ happened.”

         Walking purposefully down the aisle, amidst catcalls and hooting, I discovered that each boy had a math compass on his desk. At the far end of the row sat Ron—six foot tall already, broad shoulders, muscled arms and chest, smug attitude.

         I’d recognized him as soon as I’d entered the classroom that morning with Sister Brendan. He was the boy who’d done the bashing on the playground the Friday before.

         When I stopped at the side of his desk and put my hand out for the compass, he bragged, “No girl gets by me without tasting the sharp end of my compass.”

         All I said was, “Not any more.”

         From that time on, I passed out all the papers.

                           (. . . continued next Wednesday, September 11, 2013)

Poster and compass from Wikipedia.
Stack of books by Gualberto107 of freedigitalphotos.com