Warnings and Instructions

At the end of my first year teaching in Baltimore city schools, more than a decade ago, I accompanied my students out on a field trip to the country, the educational purpose: to see how maple syrup was made. It was crisp, spring day, still cold, but the sunlight was very bright, effervescent almost, as it bubbled through the trees.

As I marveled at the landscape, I also marveled at my students, who seemed utterly transformed. There were no “classroom management” problems, no bullying, no hurt feelings. Usually, they did not get along with one another. But that day, I saw them in a rare mood: happy, at peace, in awe. It turned out the lesson was simpler than how maple syrup came to be. They had never seen a forest before.

I enjoyed teaching my students. But it wasn’t hard to see how deeply unhappy so many of them were. Often, they lived in conditions no one should endure. Worse still, they couldn’t leave. And they perceived this on some level — that they had no control in their lives, no autonomy. They were trapped in an uncomfortable reality. It was only natural they sometimes regarded me — another person who told them what to do and where to go — as an extension of that problem.

Seeing them so content in the forest, I had to wonder yet again, was I?

It would be so much easier if the students arrived happier. If all their pressing social and material needs were met before they entered the classroom. After all, it’s difficult for anyone to sit still and learn about history if they are in crisis.

Was I rambling on to them about abstractions while the house was on fire? Or was I doing the opposite? Providing them with perhaps the only safe, sane, space they might have during their day, to sit, read, think, work, and learn? The answer was probably somehow both.

In “Baltimore Rising, Baltimore Healing” Dena Simmons does an excellent job summarizing many of the ways America still systematically targets and destroys black lives.

The overcrowded and underfunded schools in which I teach are not the fault of the residents in those neighborhoods, but rather racist policies which have continued to fence off blacks from whites along economic lines.

Ms. Simmons suggests the solution is to create safe spaces inside schools in which students can discuss these dynamics. Moreover, teachers should take into account students’ emotional well-being. These are the right ideas, but they are more difficult to put into practice then it might seem at first.

In the city schools, by and large, the students are expected to follow directions and do what they are told. The teacher is an “instructor”. The method mirrors the building and its rules. It is a factory setting. Homogeneity is prized, individuality minimized. The teacher plays the role of the boss. The student plays the role of low wage worker they are training to become — someone who isn’t supposed to ask questions, just do what she is told.

We can then zoom out and see how the chain extends far above the teacher, to the supervisors, politicians, and think tanks trying to fix the broken schools.

In this scenario, the teacher becomes the student (who receives the commands from above and must execute them) and the supervisor plays the role of the teacher conveying standardized tests, curriculum, benchmarks, and quotas, down the line.

Meanwhile, in the wealthy, white, suburban, schools of Baltimore County, the children are trained to have a voice. They are taught their opinion matters. They are encouraged to be creative, to have discussions, to use their own sense of agency, to compare idea and delegate tasks. Their pedagogy mirrors their environment. There, students are free to choose, make up their own minds, have opinions, make decisions. In other words, they are taught to fill a different role in society — that of the bosses and leaders, like their parents.

Note how in both systems, the bits of information — what the teacher is teaching is totally irrelevant. The medium is the message. What is actually being taught is socialization, how to learn and behave. The inner city student learns that knowledge is something which is dictated to her.

The essential part of my job is to teach students the means by which they can discuss, create, and compare ideas critically to make sense of the themselves and the world around them — to make them leaders instead of workers.

However, to do this in Baltimore city, as many teachers there know, is often a Herculean task. It is to change the course of a mighty river of practice and behavior, to get it to flow in fact, in the very opposite direction, from student to teacher on up.

Many of the students I encounter, though brilliant, are not used to being creative, voicing their opinion, or having any measure of control at all. Often they respond to freedom in the worst way possible way. All the pressure they are under is released in very valid fits of anger and contempt.

It’s much easier, though wrong, for teachers and students to go with the flow. Teachers are often tempted to simplify their role to that of a boss. The boss has only one job: get the students to “do their work.” “Classroom management” is then employed to address the recalcitrance of people who believe they are working not for their own benefit, but for someone else’s.

I returned last week to the Mondawmin Target in which the Baltimore Uprising began, not to report on it, but by accident. I needed garbage bags.

Besides the lone police officer stationed by the registers, there was no sign that the children’s riot which had sparked the Baltimore Uprising had ever happened.

The invisible lines of force in society, how people usually think, act, and behave, had re-asserted themselves.

Things were “back to normal” in Baltimore, though normal, of course, had been the problem all along. The inequities suffered by blacks were so ordinary to white society, so hard coded into they way we act and behave, they were nearly invisible. Many white people would not believe in them until nearly every black person in America was given their own portable video camera. Some still don’t.

Strangely enough, Mondawmin mall was given it’s name by the poet Henry W. Longfellow. Back then it was a jewel of Maryland, a palace clad in marble surrounded by sprawling gardens and fruit trees.

Standing in the Target is a dazzling experience, something that should be considered even more extraordinary because of how ordinary it is — the ubiquity, the excess of products of all sorts, a vast temple to material need, cool air conditioned, junk.

The sight is not unrelated to Longfellow’s Mondawmin. He named the verdant estate after the Indian god of sustenance and material plenty, a beautiful dark skinned youth, a robbed god.

The question of how to create functional, high performing Baltimore schools is a peculiar one because Baltimore has plenty of those, both public and private, just most of them happen to be in wealthy white neighborhoods.

Maryland is one of the richest states in the richest countries in the world. Nothing truly condemns us to two sets of schools, one bad and one good. The material wealth to have only good schools exists.

Now Mondawmin has come and gone, spontaneous and urgent as youth itself, as the Longfellow poem says, “to warn and instruct” the instructors. But so far, it’s uncertain if we will listen.