The Best American Essays 2012

by David Brooks

  Ludwig Wittgenstein, of modern philosophers perhaps the most sainted, served time as a schoolteacher. I am not surprised. I am also not surprised that he resigned his position after hitting an eleven-year-old boy in the head. I tried to remind myself of that at least once a week throughout this past year, and not so I could fancy myself superior to Wittgenstein. Rather, I wanted to remember that what I had undertaken was by no means as safe or as simple as redirecting the course of Western thought.

  On the first day of school I begin my classes with John Coltrane’s “Welcome,” at the closing bars of which a palpable attentiveness comes over my chattering students, proof of what I’ve always believed about the source of Coltrane’s genius and the wellspring within even the dopiest-seeming kid. “This is nice music,” one boy remarks, and no one sneers. As I will do with the other musical introductions I play throughout the year, all chosen to fit the interval between passing bells, I key in my selection on a purse-size CD player, as quaint to the iPod generation as a Victrola is to me. I write the name of each artist and piece on the blackboard, including the date of composition when I can find it, usually a year predating that of my students’ birth (circa 1995).

  I wear a jacket and tie almost every day, one of the few adults at school who do. To these I add a pair of well-oiled work boots, an offhand expression of solidarity with the parents of our community but mostly a concession to my falling arches. For the first time in many years I have what can be called a “look”—like me and like the white-collar trade of teaching itself, a strange amalgam. A girl passing in the hall remarks that I always look “spiffy.” I reply that I would have thought I looked old. “Hey, how old are you?” she counters. “Thirty?” I take this as a compliment and beam accordingly, though on reflection I wonder if she is simply trying to agree that I am old.

  In this exchange and in countless other particulars, I find confirmation of the maxim that “kids are kids.” I have been warned to expect big changes between now and the old days, but for the most part the students I meet are interchangeable with types I taught more than twenty years ago, even down to the baseball caps. I’m a bit surprised by the ubiquitous display of décolletage, the respectability of the word sucks, and the number of students who readily identify themselves as “attention deficit.” If such a disorder exists, as I’m inclined to think it does, I’m glad there are medicines to treat it, although hearing someone say “I’ve got ADD” in a culture of such vast distractedness is a bit like having a fellow passenger on an ocean liner tell you that she feels afloat. Who doesn’t?

  As I expected, there have been a number of changes in the school itself. A sophisticated alarm system needs to be deactivated if you’re the first person into the building and set again if you’re the last to leave, and as I am reminded on one particularly flustered Saturday morning, it’s linked to the Department of Homeland Security. In accordance with state standards, paragraphs are now called “constructed responses.” A staff meeting to discuss students in academic jeopardy is called an EST (educational support team). A kid out of jeopardy is making AYP (adequate yearly progress). This profession-wide penchant for jargon in general and three-letter shorthand in particular, a pidgin derived from government commissions and gypsy consultants, makes the school seem forbiddingly foreign to me at first. My skepticism shrinks somewhat after attending my first morning EST and listening to my colleagues discuss how to make a more collaborative effort on behalf of the drowning students they share. Call it what you will, it can be a PIS (pretty impressive sight).

  By far the most noticeable and happy improvement is the number of places to which students can turn for academic assistance. What had previously been one highly stigmatized “special ed” room is now a bustling network of study areas, all staffed by unflappable, die-hard tutors, most of them proficient in several subjects. Some of these areas are devoted to students with identified special needs, but there’s a laudable blurring of the boundaries, at least on the surface, that seems to make it easy for kids to feel comfortable in any given room. The word retard sadly persists in the hallways but is used mostly as an all-purpose, gender-neutral alternative to peckerhead.

  Not surprisingly, many of the more salient changes are technological. The library looks like a NASA control center in which the controllers occasionally spend their break periods with a book. The proverbial dog who ate the homework is now a flash drive. Smoking in the boys’ room is now texting in the boys’ room, though to their lasting credit the addicts of yesteryear were usually able to survive at least an hour without a drag. I frequently hear the phrase “school of the twenty-first century” and understand it to mean the school with more wires. During one of the first staff-training days, the district superintendent tells us that 10 percent of all high school education will be computer based by 2014 and rise to 50 percent by 2019, the implication being how close to obsolescence our methods and we ourselves have become. No one ventures to ask what would seem to be the obvious question, which is what sort of high school education Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had and what they might have failed to accomplish without it.

  Such caveats aside, I come to appreciate the advantages of a computerized grade book, though like other old-timers on the staff I keep an antique paper ledger “just in case.” The end-of-marking-period all-nighter with a roped-in spouse doing backup duty on a calculator has mercifully gone the way of the mimeograph blues. Naturally, the resulting expectation is that the emancipated teacher will gather more assessments and record them in a more “timely” fashion.

  In the increased emphasis on data and the imposed emphasis on standardized jargon and tests, including the standardized inanities that result (no student I meet seems to believe that the universe was formed in six days, but a disturbing number insist that an essay is always formed in five paragraphs), I sense the encroachment of the totalitarian “business model” that has destroyed family farming as a way of life, of the same itch for arcane nomenclature that has turned literary criticism into a pseudoscience. A veteran foreign-language teacher still going strong since my last stint at school says to me with a sigh, “I’m afraid the day of the teacher as artist is drawing to a close.”

  That seems to be the theme of the text we study together as a faculty. According to its authors, who shamelessly recount their exemplary and now franchised successes in a middle- to upper-middle-class high school, the day of the “lone wolf” teacher is done. We must shift from “an external focus on issues outside of the school” to a focus on what business consultant Jim Collins calls “the brutal facts” of our “organization.” The notion that the very same teachers who made the greatest difference in my life need to be purged from the ranks is dispiriting enough, but the outrageous suggestion that the “brutal facts” of education have more to do with the schoolhouse than with the larger society in which my students live is enough to make me want to spit. Or teach.

  What has definitely not changed since my first tenure at school is the degree of poverty and social dysfunction suffered by students in the region. Quite possibly it has gotten worse. I taught through the Reagan years and left during Clinton; I’ve come back during a catastrophic recession, the demon child of deregulation and its gory consort NAFTA.

  The difference first comes home to me with the deceptively familiar FFA (Future Farmers of America). Back in the old days a kid who wore that gold-lettered dark blue corduroy jacket was as often as not a kid who came to school smelling like a barn, sometimes with manure in the tread of his boots. It takes me a while to realize that of the half dozen or so FFA members I have in my classes, only one lives on a farm; that is to say, the parents of the others have become lifetime members of the Past Farmers of America.

  If you can imagine Silicon Valley running out of silicon, you have some inkling of what happens to an agricultural community when small-scale agriculture starts to die. In the early spring, when a young man’s fancy turns to love, the front page of a single issue of the local newspaper headlines thr
ee stories: a twenty-eight-year-old man drowned after attempting to fly his snowmobile over the Connecticut River in a state of drunken delirium, a two-year-old boy accidentally shot to death by another child with a .22-caliber rifle, and a wretched holdout of a farmer charged with animal cruelty for housing his starving cows in a mire of their own accumulated excrement. How the farmer and his family were housed is not mentioned, but I doubt it will produce any arrests.

  To teach with your eyes open in a region like this is ever to be on the verge of tears—though not always of pity or rage. By the metric of students qualifying for a reduced-price hot lunch, the high school where I teach ties for the third poorest in the state. Yet its standardized-test scores are among the very highest; the year before I came its scores in writing were the highest. What this means is that more than a few teachers and students are joined in a heroic effort. I see it all around me; I feel it every day. Back in the nineties I could arrive at 7:00 A.M. and be one of the first people in the building; this year I need to arrive half an hour before that merely to compete for the same distinction. And no one is cracking the whip; no merit-pay carrots are dangling in our faces. It takes one of my English-teaching colleagues two trips to get all his bulging crates and satchels of student papers to his car every day, three if his little girl has joined him after school. (And I never see that little girl without remembering what my daughter said when she was that age: “I wish I could make two daddies, a daddy to grade the kids’ papers and a daddy to play pirates with me.”) One fruit of these herculean labors is an understandable and, even to a jaded heart like mine, moving pride in the school. When the principal asks the student body “Who are we?” there is an unmistakable James Brown vibe as they say it LOUD: “Lake Region!”

  I try not to think of the poisonous fruit growing on the same tree, especially as I am also laboring to make it grow (and shouting “Lake Region” with the best of them). If a kid from a poor school can do so well on a standardized test, then obviously it does not matter so much that she spent last winter living in an unheated trailer behind her grandmother’s house or that he missed a week of school because of all the flea bites he picked up at his father’s house. Hey, a baby sleeping in a stable might grow up to be the next Jesus Christ. Public education’s commendable aim of creating “equal opportunity for all” is too easily subverted by the egregious aim of creating a clean conscience for the few. If everybody can “read at grade level,” then we need not be overly concerned if some people get to read fabulous dividend statements and other people, who may be working twice as hard, get to read pink slips. All we need hope is that the latter sort never get to read Marx.

  Along with poverty—I want to say arising from it, though I know the causal connection goes only so far—is widespread household turmoil. This was true in the past but feels nothing less than pandemic now. Day after day, “constructed response” after constructed response, I read unsolicited expressions of abandonment, bewilderment, and self-laceration. If I wasn’t so fat and was getting better grades maybe my dad wouldn’t have left us. A common complaint among students, I notice, is “all the drama.” Ostensibly they are talking about school, the typical cliques and dustups of teenage life, but essentially they may be talking about home, where adolescence never dies.

  Given my empirically based conviction that a stable home life is the single most reliable predictor of a student’s success in school, I am surprised that the Republican Party, self-appointed champion of “family values,” takes no pains to press the point. Of course, to do so would undermine its agenda of dismantling public education, hamstringing teachers’ unions, denying same-sex couples the rights of marriage, preventing working mothers from achieving income parity, curtailing reproductive rights, outsourcing manufacturing jobs, and filling the coffers of the various charlatans who sell education in the form of standardized tests.

  And of course the Republican Party is not the only faction holding a ten-foot pole against the question of what it means to be a responsible adult. That precious bourgeois squabble we referred to as the “culture wars”—all it means to me is two different ways of making war on children, two rival sects in the ancient religion of child-devouring Moloch: one that sacrificed and continues to sacrifice working-class children on the altar of American exceptionalism, and the other that sacrifices them to the frivolous exceptionalism of the “transgressive” lifestyle or the political escapism of the catchall canon. Shall we bomb the Taliban or put their writings on the syllabus? “It has been vivid to me for many years that what we call a race problem here is not a race problem at all,” James Baldwin wrote many years ago. “The problem is rooted in the question of how one treats one’s flesh and blood, especially one’s children.” The race problem, and just about every other problem that crosses a teacher’s desk.

  A child of our common flesh and blood bends over my desk examining one of the framed postcards I keep there to cheer me. “Wow, what is that place?” he asks. I tell him it is the great Reading Room of the New York Public Library, sent to me by a woman I used to teach. He’s a bit of an operator, this one, the kind who can make you feel good even when you know you’re being had, but I detect a heartfelt quality in the wistfulness with which he asks, “And you’ve been there?” I make a mental note to give him the picture at the end of the year. That never happens, though, because he is shunted to a new guardian and a new school before I can recall my intention. That’s how it seems to go with many of the students I worry about most: they are whisked away, though few have enjoyed this kid’s peculiar privilege of being referred to by a former foster parent—all in fun, I’m sure—as “my nigger slave.”

  I suppose I am willing to bet more money on this young man making it to the New York Public Library someday than I am on the likelihood of his taking a book off the shelves if he does. The same holds true for many of his classmates. I can’t be sure if the resistance to reading that I encounter nearly every day marks a new development, because fourteen years is too long an interval for my memory to be trusted and because the sections I now teach are not the “honors” levels I taught in the past. Mine are “average” kids, but they are by no means stupid kids. Still, I do not remember feeling as frustrated then as I often feel now that so few of them want to read.

  It’s nothing new that some kids find reading a chore. What strikes me is the frequent lack of correlation between the ability to read and any inclination to do it. That, and the number of times I hear someone say, “I hate to read.” A girl tells me so in private and sobs so preposterously that I worry I might laugh. After she calms down, I gently suggest that she read a passage aloud. Her fluency is impeccable; she could work for the BBC.

  I realize that in some cases the reluctance to read has its basis in the lack of a suitable place to do it. I ask students to write a paragraph on “where I read,” and get more than one account of how hard it is to concentrate in a house “where people are always yelling.” Even at school, though, and even when the time and quiet are provided, the book is not always read. I can’t resist tipping off two of my favorite rascals, who often visit with me before our first-period class, that there might be a quiz on last night’s reading assignment and that any young man less prepared than they undoubtedly are would do well to use the next twenty minutes to read it. The passage is short enough to finish in that time. Quicker than I can wink, they pull out their books and turn to the assigned pages, bending over them like monks in a scriptorium, doughnuts in hand. In three minutes they put the books aside—enough of that for one day—and go back to chatting. They flunk their quizzes.

  Where the resistance to reading seems the strongest and proves the most maddening is with major, long-term assignments, for which I scrupulously supply written instructions, reading them aloud and slowly to the entire class. I make extra handouts for students who tend to lose things. But there is little else I can do beyond repeating the mantra What does the sheet say? in response to every bogus question, though often that takes the
form of Why didn’t you consult the sheet? after the assignment has been handed in.

  I try to give the matter a political slant. When a rule is written down, I tell the students, then the writer is bound by it no less than the reader. That is why we have a Constitution. In an autocratic state the king’s whim is the law. Maybe one day he feels like reading a six-hundred-word essay; the next day he feels like a six-line poem. But in this case, I can’t hold you accountable for any requirement that isn’t spelled out on the sheet. You can wave that sheet in my face as evidence, and I can’t win the argument simply by saying “I wrote the sheet.” I have to win by pointing out to your satisfaction what the words actually say. I seem to be getting through—somebody’s raising his hand.

  “Do you want us to hand in our rough draft, too?”

  A local pediatrician once told me, when I asked how he managed to keep his sanity in the face of so much needless grief, “I try to remember that except for a very few psychopaths, most people on most days are doing the best they can.” I take that for my working motto, though I remain haunted by the thought that if “a kid is just a kid,” then a sixteen-year-old kid is a kid just two years away from voting.

  On the morning after Osama bin Laden is killed, I’m expecting a barrage of comments, in anticipation of which I decide to let Homer speak my piece. From top to bottom on my blackboard I write a dozen lines from the Odyssey, what Odysseus says after he has slain the suitors and his faithful servant Eurykleia is about to rejoice. “No crowing aloud,” he tells her, though he’s willing to add that the suitors got what they deserved. “To glory over slain men is no piety.” I leave the lines up for three days. No one asks me what they mean or what they are doing on my blackboard. As nearly as I can tell, no one reads them. For that matter, no one mentions Osama bin Laden. At the close of the third day there is nothing left for me to do but erase the lines and go for a haircut, which in my case involves reducing a half inch of salt-and-pepper thatch to a maintenance-free quarter and which I know will infallibly arouse keen interest and lively comment (all of it sweet) the next day.