Consider Yourself Educated, continued

by Larry Mayer

Approximately two-thirds of this year's 60 students have enrolled for what might be considered their senior year of high school with the emphatic goal of precipitating graduation. To their credit, many have propelled themselves through an obstacle course of anonymous, overcrowded classrooms for 11 or 12 years. This is their final push. The 15-to-one student-to-teacher ratio here offers them a much-needed boost, so that they don't burn out completely.

A handful of graduates have worked extremely hard, juggling night-school classes with full-time jobs and a host of other premature responsibilities. Yet those who have done very little all year have also finagled their way to the Promised Land. Some have cheated, some have faked it, some have been dragged through the mud, taken to the water, and forced to drink; others have maintained the conveyor-belt approach all along. The inventive ones, better yet, have refashioned the curriculum -- taking biology twice, for instance, to meet the science requirement. They demonstrate the uncanny resilience of a mutating virus. And a deep desire to get the fuck out of school already.

"Good Morning!" Lovejoy Williams says. "How'd I do, Larry?" She sings and dances and laughs. In one or another of her multi-colored, outrageous outfits, she's been doing that all year.

"You passed. Not a great essay, but you're okay." Last Friday, I gave the same English examination to all graduating seniors. For lack of imagination on my part, it was a five-paragraph essay on either abortion or capital punishment. I got the idea from one of the regular-high-school exams I'd seen. At the least, I want the students to be able to break down an argument into three discrete and comprehensible points. In her introduction, Lovejoy writes: "There should not be capital punishment -- no man deserves to die, whether they be black, white, purple, blue, or orange." She's direct. The thesis, like her clothing, radiates an in-your-face nerve and verve, an adaptation that undoubtedly has pushed her forward for all these years. I give Lovejoy a B-/C+. Exuberance and conviction win out over coherence and reasoning.

While taking his final exam last week, Jason challenged me: "Why you biting off another school? Ain't you got any of your own ideas for making a test?" I ignored him. The mantra that all teachers must repeat to themselves is It's not personal. It's not personal. It's not personal.

Although the school is racially mixed, Jason is one of the few white boys graduating this year. The whole year I've struggled to convince myself that Jason's academic lethargy and confrontational compulsions are pathological and probably developed over many bad years, both in school and at home. As a teacher, however, my job requires that I neither ignore his problems nor patronize him. The biggest task is to try to view him as an able human being, a responsible young adult with whom I share some common ground. Yet during the last week of classes, Jason once again pushes the limits of acceptable pathology, by opening my desk drawer and breaking my box of brand-new number-two pencils in half, convincing me that empathy, perhaps, is not enough.

By the time many urban students start grade school, they are most likely damaged in a surplus of ways: biological, chemical, physical, mental, and emotional. (The new term is "social ecology.") It's no wonder that the same teachers keep showing up for the same classes with the same students and the same problems. At the Alternative School we have these kids for maybe four or five hours. The rest of the day -- 20 hours -- they fight to survive. The math is simple.

The math teacher -- a first-year recruit -- pokes his head into my room, having handed in his final-exam grades: "Are you done yet?

"Done? What's done?" I ask. "Nick, at what point does a student go from being a troubled kid to being a loathsome adult?"

"Man, I don't envy you," he says. "I'd hate to be the English teacher. I mean, what do you grade them on, anyway?"

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Larry Mayer is a writer and teacher living in Cambridge. His first book, Who Will Say Kaddish? A Search for Jewish Identity in Contemporary Poland (Syracuse University), is scheduled for publication in spring 2001. He can be reached at LMayer27@hotmail.com.