O.W. Holmes Elementary
I was assigned to the teachers’ lounge for my summer Peacemaker Writing Workshops at O.W. Holmes Elementary School. It was the same room we’d occupied this past spring for the drafting of the school newspaper, the SOP 365 Report. The CLC director, Mr. Glover, presented me to a room chock full of students, the Latina teacher I recognized from the regular school-year, a stern disciplinarian attempting some kind of arts-and-crafts programming. I was glad to relieve the room of as many students as would come, for the students must have been in an uncomfortable state of discipline to be held in such close quarters, seated and without movement, and over summer break, no less. The forthcoming students were ostensibly volunteering for a writing class, but they might have volunteered for coal mining to get out of arts-and-crafts, and little interest or talent for writing was actually demonstrated by these volunteers over the course of the summer.
Truth be told, this was a raucous group, split among boys and girls, and none averse to spontaneous bouts of professional-style wrestling in all its dramatic flair. Fortunately for their skulls and socket-joints, there was furnished in this teachers’ lounge where we took up residence an inlaid carpet depicting a map of the United States, not plush but better than tile flooring, and it served admirably for a wrestling pad throughout the course of our summer programming. One might even have argued for the educative value of having students restrict their pro-style wrestling to a mat showing the U.S. map, putting a twist on the concept of “cramming,” as having one’s head impressed on the learning materials, rather than the other way around.
The teachers’ lounge has become my favorite classroom of all to teach in at O.W. Holmes Elementary, although I had had the opportunity to visit every other active classroom in the school during the spring of that year, having successfully lobbied to volunteer as a poetry guide, making the rounds of the classrooms during the regular school-day in addition to my after-school programming of the SOP 365 Report. The teachers’ lounge was a decommissioned classroom complete with blackboards and a corkboard wall, but converted into a lounge with the addition of round lunch tables and cafeteria chairs, vases with silk flowers, a refrigerator, dish sink, and soda machines (convenient for the persuasion of students to perform extraordinary service to the class such as corporal behavior monitoring and clean-up patrols.)
The first order of business was to establish some system in the classroom. We began, upon our first assembly outside of the classroom, to line ourselves up against the wall and to count off from the front to the back of the line. This operation took about five minutes to effect, and not without some pressure by fellow students, teachers, and security staff. Nineteen in all. Keep in mind that, throughout the workshop session, students, known and unknown, frequently enter and leave. Sometimes, if they’ve got “home training,” students will ask permission to leave, while the chance visitor might cleave to the workshop for the duration in happy participation, or else attend or absent themselves at will. Strict attendance-taking becomes thus well-nigh impossible, and one must be contented with an adjustable number of interested attendees.
This phenomenon of free commerce between classes is a spontaneously and necessarily occurring condition of contemporary urban schooling which is ubiquitous in the many schools to which I have had the honor of being assigned or permitted to visit. Incidentally, in the scholarly development of an ideal philosophical structure for the modern school system which I have ever labored to devise prior to my field work, this quality of the students’ freedom to range between classes remains an essential point in the successful reform of schools as I conceive it. Ironically, I had previously despaired of any convincing argument which to present to administrators that such free-range tactics were necessary and beneficial to student learning. Needless to say, I am gratified that there is yet nothing new under the sun, and that necessity still wins the field and rules the urban school of today. In the wisdom of deprivation, the spirit of commerce has overcome coercive regimentation in the urban school, and has settled upon this high promontory of liberty upon which, formerly, only the most elite schools of leadership-training were allowed to occupy.
I must state of my experience that the most underprivileged schools of today – those schools most embarrassing to school boards and other hawks of statistical measurement – possess many qualities shared only with those schools that are termed “elite schools,” whose students are expected to become members and leaders of tomorrow’s governments and boards of directors, whose students are not unknown to remind their teachers that, “My father can earn your annual salary in a day.” Closer to home, provincial attitudes favor working-class industrial training and middle-class commercial training. They surround and misdirect urban education. They cannot see clearly enough the amazing similarities between the most richly and most poorly provided schools in the nation. Gross disparities yet distance these two school types in economy and geography. Encouragements to literacy, and the promise of future wealth and success contrast privilege and privation. Even still, success earned in our ghettos gratifies as much as success in finance or industry. While no one is looking, the ghetto has reclaimed its schools, eroding the former controls and incentives, preparing its own future leaders as only unbridled social instinct can provide; it only seems a catastrophe to those being pushed out. There is no shame in offering the sincere promise to disadvantaged, often disabled, students that they shall nevertheless take collective possession of some, if not this impoverished ghetto, just as the children of the elite are promised the collective possession of our nation’s legacy of wealth. True leadership rewards the same.
Returning to our writing workshop, and given a tentative head count of nineteen, a structure of control among these unruly students came to be recognized, and I duly stamped them into a system. Students came to be grouped into several orders within the class. First, and most important to the immediate maintenance of control, were a few Lieutenants whom I had come to know well through the school newsletter workshops earlier that spring. Interestingly enough, they were all of a family, the Taylors, including a set of twins, and they all had the advantage of a few years and a few inches above the main line of students in the class, most of whom were less than twelve years of age, some as young a six. These Lieutenants were not averse to physically manipulating the unruliest of students, and their habit of yelling at students to keep them in order mimicked the tactics of quite all the teachers and staff with whom I had become acquainted in my volunteer work at this most underprivileged elementary school. Given the mental or emotional disability of many of our present students, the Lieutenants’ assistance was critical to our workshop’s initial success. In recompense for their help during class, and in helping to reset the teachers’ lounge to its original state after class, I provided these Lieutenants with Cokes at the end of each workshop, and, surprisingly, this was a treat highly prized by them.
In the course of time, we needed to develop a more secure system of control in the classroom apart from simple reliance on older and bigger students. The indomitable urge toward professional-style wrestling offered a means to that end. I had therefore established in the class an order of Champions who had demonstrated skill, drama, and most importantly restraint in their wrestling matches. As there was not one student, boy or girl, who did not want to participate in a wrestling match at one time or another, and as they often took to wrestling at will in the classroom, I made this one standing rule: that all wrestling take place on the carpet floor-map of the U.S.A. This was found universally acceptable as it simulated a real wrestling ring, although it did not eliminate all wrestling outside the ring at the outset.
Nevertheless, the matches set within the ring showed to me the quality of the various students’ wrestling, and from their demonstrations I was able to declare three Champions: one heavyweight, one middleweight, and one lightweight. New rules were now put forward, that the three Champions must remain within the confines of the wrestling ring at all times; furthermore, all other students were forbidden to enter the ring. If, however, a student ventured into the ring, or was lured near enough to the ring’s edge by the Champions’ tauntings so the Champions could pull the student into the ring, then the student was considered out of order, and the three Champions were permitted to treat the outlaw as pro-style wrestling rules allowed, namely to suffer three-against-one odds in the ring. In this way, antagonistic students came to learn the penalties for disorder. The reader must be reassured that the students, however unruly, all paid close respect to the dramatic restraint of faux-professional wrestling, and no less than in the schooldays of my own youth.
The Champions took great pride in their status, an went so far as to strip from the wall the decorative paper which covered the corkboard of the teachers’ lounge for the purpose of fashioning championship belts for the Champions to wear or to hold over their heads in taunting the other students to draw perilously near. Once some semblance of order had been achieved in the classroom in the ensuing days, the service which the Champions offered to the orderliness of the classroom became better defined and refined. That is, as control of the classroom became congealed, regular lessons were able to be delivered. Any disruptive student could then be arrested by one of the trusted Lieutenants, and then presented to a panel of Judges, which consisted of all of the female students of the class. The Judges were another of the regular orders of the class. They collectively imposed punishments for disruptive students, along the order of locating needed class materials from throughout the school, like chalk, pencils, and paper. If the student preferred, and they often did, they were allowed to commit themselves to a wrestling match, where a single Champion was to be challenged, selected by the panel of Judges. If the Champion lost the match, then his championship status was transferred to the victor, who was then free from classwork to lord his championship title with the others in the face of all the regular, often jealous, students. Champions, by the way, were easily controlled with the simple threat of having their title-belt stripped from them for insubordinate conduct.
In the midst of all this structuring of students along orderly lines, the classroom had started to stage performance of scenes from Judge Joe Brown off the television. This was a favorite activity, and students required little direction to present a convincing play. Written transcripts were taken to faithfully record the proceedings. The true purpose for these plays was to establish within the school a functioning system of student government which could administer the justice which this entire school, as I had become convinced, was in desperate need. Before long, the inevitable crisis presented itself in the form of an attack on one of our class’ members by the school bully, which for this particular school, Holmes Elementary, the school bully is no light matter, for when at last he had been brought before our court, I would not have guessed him at a day less than seventeen years old!
The encounter happened like this. In the middle of one of our sessions, a student unknown to me presented himself at the door. I went to him, and he told me that there was a student in the bathroom next door to our classroom, and that he was throwing up in the toilet. I went to the door of the bathroom, and there I saw another unknown student ministering to a third student, and this third student I knew. It was Terrel, and he was keeled over on the floor near the entrance to the bathroom. I stood in the hallway looking in, and the two upright students explained that Terrel had been purposely hit hard in the belly with a ball during a game in the gym. The boy was crouched and crying, and as I knew that Terrel was himself a rough kid, and built like a fire plug, I knew that some real incident had happened. Terrel was able to bring himself into the classroom, and our students interviewed him and his friends about the situation. When they heard that it was a certain boy named Charles who had kicked the ball into Terrel’s gut, this was no surprise to anyone, and even the older Lieutenants confirmed that Charles was an infamous bully.
The class resolved to bring Charles before our court to answer for himself. When I asked where Charles was, all the students replied that Charles was in the gym, for this is apparently where the youth spent his entire day. I thought to go there to bring him before the court, so I asked for his description. They said that he was the dark-skinned boy, and he was big; you couldn’t miss him. Some students had apparently gone to the gym already to find him out, and had returned to say that he wasn’t there, but everyone knew that he was upstairs in some favorite spot of his. I ordered the Lieutenants to go find him and bring him to the class to answer for himself. They departed, and along the way they recruited other older students to help.
In the meantime, we arranged the classroom to accommodate the courtroom proceeding. A long table was set up for the Judges’ bench, and two smaller, round tables were placed before it to seat the prosecution and defense teams. The wrestling ring remained in activity, and given the seriousness of the upcoming proceedings, any disorderly student was summarily cast into the ring for quick suppression of any extra energy shown from among the regular students. I had asked of all the older students for a volunteer to represent Charles in the proceedings, and after many refusals, I finally prevailed upon one who would defend the young man. When Charles was finally brought to the classroom, I met him in the hallway to explain what was about to take place. He consented to present his case, and to accept a representative for his defense. Together, they took their place at the table reserved for the defendant. I, myself, acted as prosecutor, and sat at the other table with the victim, Terrel, who likewise agreed to participate. A court reporter was commissioned to record the proceedings, and I have found that transcripts must periodically be read out during the proceedings, in order both to guarantee a correct transcript, but also to give recognition to the individual efforts of the court reporter, that is, to stroke his or her ego.
The courtroom proceedings began according to custom. The Judges were announced, though only two Judges agreed to hear the case. Everyone in the courtroom was called upon to rise, and the one student who staunchly refused to stand was cast into the wrestling ring for the Champions to deal with. I took private notice that, when Charles turned in his chair to witness this brand of classroom discipline, he smiled, nodded approvingly, and continued in a respectful and good-humored way, though these Champions presented no threat to him. At this point in the proceedings, I had to start making suggestions to the Judges concerning the right sequence for the proceedings, which they accepted graciously. Upon such counsel, the Judges began to hear the opening arguments.
I presented the case against Charles, calling Terrel to the witness stand, and asked concerning the activities which preceded the incident in the gym. I did not so much wish to win the case as to prepare the groundwork for future such cases of relative importance to law and order in the school. The defense team cleverly argued that Charles was merely trying to return the kickball to Terrel, and only wanted to get back to his basketball game. They entertainingly entered evidence in the form of a bogus medical document, supposedly from Terrel’s doctor, describing his medical history of stomach ailments and diarrhea, which were alleged to be the real cause of his discomfort. Terrel did not find the humor in this, and I took the occasion to make a formal objection to the veracity of the document, trying to maintain some semblance of gravity in the proceedings. Next, I had witnessed Charles’ representative at court attempting to bribe one of the Judges with a dollar or two, to which I likewise objected amid the hilarity!
At this point, I had hoped for some richer development in the history of the case, when suddenly, the Judges decided to precipitously pronounce guilt upon Charles’ head, and they continued to issue a sentence. Now, Charles and his representative had had enough, and started to bolt out of the classroom. I warned them that, if they ran, they would be admitting guilt. Still, they turned to run.
Now, I was beginning to despair of a successful conclusion to the day’s proceedings, but more importantly, I despaired of a continued presence of such a court of the student body for the future of the school, which I considered essential to any lasting order in this most chaotic of schools. When Charles and his representative fled from the courtroom, the students all turned to me to know what to do. Clearly they did not want to let this bully get away without any punishment, and make a mockery of our courtroom proceedings. I saw that now they were looking to me for direction. There was only one thing I felt it appropriate to do.
“Get him!” I said. Their jaws dropped, and their eyes gawked, and so again, and with still greater force, I pointed my finger out the door and commanded, “GET HIM!”
Every face in the room beamed with a smile, and the students, about two-dozen in all, scrambled out of the classroom yelling and screaming after Charles and his representative. After I had heard the mob turn the corner of the school hallway, I figured the better part of valor was to bring up the rear. I followed the din into the gym, where the two fugitives sought escape in the storage room which wrapped out of sight behind the narrow end of the gym. Through the door on this side of the gym, I could see Charles and the other fugitive clambering wildly over stacks of folding tables and chairs, making no end of racket, while twenty-some kids, half their size, pursued them; I could tell that the two were now genuinely concerned for their safety. Some moments has passed where I could not see the pursuit as it followed into the storage room, out of sight. Then, out of the door on the opposite side of the gym came, first, Charles’ representative, with half a dozen nine-year-olds clinging to his limbs like hounds. He broke free, and ran out of the other entrance to the gym. Then Charles himself came popping out of the storage room, and he wore no less than ten kids hanging from every limb. Charles, I must add, should be commended for his restraint in not harming any of these youths as he, too, broke free, and followed his representative out the door, the students still in dogged pursuit!
I walked briskly toward this other door, and was met by some older students who had returned to say that Charles was holed up in the bathroom. I told them to find Mr. Glover, the director of the CLC program, to tell him that Charles was trapped; I figured he should know. As we exited the gym, Mr. Glover had already come out of his office which was near there, and wanted to know what all the commotion was. I explained that the court proceedings, which he knew of formerly as play acting, had turned into a real court, and this was the resulting justice, and that the school bully was cornered in the bathroom. Well, this relation eased his mind, and Mr. Glover and the students and I caught up with the remnants of our mob, after Charles and his fellow had sought refuge in the game room, where Mr. Isaac had control, and we returned to our classroom to revel in our successful first attempt at bringing real justice to a school formerly overrun by unbridled license. In our final session, we followed up this historic trial with essays retelling the preceding events both from memory and from court transcripts.
I feel compelled make a final note here which I believe to be relevant, given our attempts to foster leadership skills at Holmes Elementary for the betterment of the school. Systematic encouragements to leadership by local and municipal bodies for students of urban schools could only have been first begun as a system-wide effort in the last decade or so. Historically, the mere suggestion of a systematic training of leadership values within the confines of the ghetto was broadly feared and actively suppressed by municipalities until the end of The Cold War. Only with the advent of local complicity with federal mandates to witness the inclusion of women and minorities in municipal government has the prospect of democratic leadership within the urban community been made a priority, or even a clearly stated goal. We sow the seeds of leadership even now on barren, thoroughly unprepared ground. We must therefore expect the growing pains which visit our urban schools as they modulate toward that style of leadership training which they had formerly been precluded even from trying. We witness disorder in our schools, but really what we see is a realignment of priorities toward the freedom essential to real leadership training.
The systematic reform of schooling away from the working-class industrial type formerly established in the urban schools, toward the leadership-training type, has been halting at best from the standpoint of practical management. Fortunately, the neglect of oversight which these late days have witnessed in the worsening under-funding of urban schools has allowed spontaneous social correction to create for itself an atmosphere conducive to leadership training. This includes freedom of movement and advancement based on performing to ability, which the urban school now exhibits out of social necessity. This newly achieved environment of mobility and tolerance within the urban school is often and erroneously represented as an exhausted resignation to license allowed to students only after all attempts at coercive control have been frustrated, and the students are given up for lost. Such a conclusion is the intellectual product of woefully lazy and pessimistic thinkers. There now remains for educators to inform the content of the new urban educational environment with the known techniques of systematic leadership training which have been widely documented in “elite” type schools, and which the urban school can now accommodate after hard-won battles against bias towards the working-class and middle-class school models. To reiterate, the leadership training so often propounded as an ideal in the urban school has, until only very recently, been intentionally and systematically excluded from the curriculum of the urban school by the racism of a not-so-distant past. Our current efforts at its development must respect the fact that the grounds for its cultivation remain sorrowfully impoverished and regrettably unworked.