The afternoon’s lessons passed without incident, but unsatisfactorily. The children neither chatted nor laughed, nor in any way challenged my authority, but at the same time they were uncooperative. They listened to me, or did the tasks assigned to them, like automata. My attempts at pleasantries were received with a chilly lack of response which indicated that my earlier remarks had got under their skin. Their silent watchfulness was getting under mine.
Not all of them, however. Tich Jackson seemed disposed to be very friendly from the beginning, and though he had joined with the others in their laughter, whenever I looked at him he would smile, naturally. Another one who showed no resentment was Patrick Fernman, a thin-faced intelligent boy whose dark cowlick was always getting in his eyes. One other member of the class excited my curiosity. He was a well-built dark-skinned boy obviously of mixed parentage named Seales, Lawrence Seales. He never spoke unless addressed directly, and though dressed in the same T-shirt and jeans uniform as his colleagues, he seemed somehow aloof, taking no part in their ribaldry; and yet he showed no willingness to be friendly with me either. He was quite bright and he read very well, but he remained a long, watchful distance from me.
On my way home that evening I passed by a tiny hole-in-the-wall tobacconist’s a short distance from the school. Hanging on the upper part of the open doorway was a black noticeboard on which were pinned a number of cards advertising goods for sale and accommodation required or available. I stopped for a moment and looked at the board. The long trip to Brentwood twice each day would be tiring enough during these fine May days; come winter with its wet and snow it would be worse. It might be a good idea to find suitable accommodation nearer the school.
“ … help you?”
The man stood just inside the doorway of the shop, half camouflaged against the background of candy jars and slatted wooden boxes of soft drinks, his round unshaven face a pale blob above the collarless striped shirt which bulged heavily at the waist.
“Not really, I was just taking a look. I might like to find a room near by.”
He moved farther into the doorway, his thumbs hooked into the narrow braces from which his baggy trousers depended.
“Yes. Work around here?”
“I’m a teacher at Greenslade School—began today in fact.”
At this he screwed up his eyes as if the better to focus them on me; his look was careful, comprehensive.
“Teacher, ah yes.” He moved closer to me and pointed a stubby forefinger at the noticeboard without relinquishing his thumbgrip on the braces, so that it made an angular bow with his body.
“These not good for you; for teacher not good. Sometimes good ones I have, these not.”
I looked at him in some surprise; this was quite unexpected.
“Other times you come, something good I tell.”
He smiled and turned back into his shop, and I walked on in wonderment at the amazing unexpectedness of human kindness.
At home that evening I discussed the situation in the classroom with Mom and Dad Belmont and listened carefully to their counsel. We agreed that it was very necessary for me to gain the children’s confidence and respect before their resentment crystallized into some unpleasant incident which might for ever wreck any possibility of future good relationship with them.
Chapter
Eight
EACH FRIDAY MORNING THE whole school spent the pre-recess period in writing their Weekly Review. This was one of the Old Man’s pet schemes; and one about which he would brook no interference. Each child would review the events of his school week in his own words, in his own way; he was free to comment, to criticize, to agree or disagree, with any person, subject or method, as long as it was in some way associated with the school. No one and nothing was sacred, from the Headmaster down, and the child, moreover, was safe from any form of reprisal.
“Look at it this way,” Mr. Florian had said. “It is of advantage to both pupil and teacher. If a child wants to write about something which matters to him, he will take some pains to set it down as carefully and with as much detail as possible; that must in some way improve his written English in terms of spelling, construction and style. Week by week we are able, through his reviews, to follow and observe his progress in such things. As for the teachers, we soon get a pretty good idea what the children think of us and whether or not we are getting close to them. It may sometimes be rather deflating to discover that a well-prepared lesson did not really excite Johnny Smith’s interest, but, after all, the lesson was intended to benefit Johnny Smith, not his teacher; if it was uninteresting to him then the teacher must think again. You will discover that these children are reasonably fair, even when they comment on us. If we are careless about our clothing, manners or person they will soon notice it, and it would be pointless to be angry with them for pointing such things out. Finally, from the reviews, the sensible teacher will observe the trend of individual and collective interests and plan his work accordingly.”
On the first Friday of my association with the class I was anxious to discover what sort of figure I cut in front of them, and what kind of comment they would make about me. I read through some of the reviews at lunchtime, and must admit to a mixture of relief and disappointment at discovering that, apart from mentioning that they had a new “blackie” teacher, very little attention was given to me. They were more concerned with the sudden failure of the radio-gram during their dance session the previous Wednesday, and the success some of the boys had had as representatives of the local club’s boxing team.
It occurred to me that they probably imagined I would be as transient as my many predecessors, and therefore saw no point in wasting either time or effort in writing about me. But if I had made so little impression on them, it must be my own fault, I decided. It was up to me to find some way to get through to them.
Thereafter I tried very hard to be a successful teacher with my class, but somehow, as day followed day in painful procession, I realized that I was not making the grade. I bought and read books on the psychology of teaching in an effort to discover some way of providing the children with the sort of intellectual challenge to which they would respond, but the suggested methods somehow did not meet my particular need, and just did not work. It was as if I were trying to reach the children through a thick pane of glass, so remote and uninterested they seemed.
Looking back, I realize that in fact I passed through three phases in my relationship with them. The first was the “silent” treatment, and during that time, for my first few weeks, they would do any task I set them without question or protest, but equally without interest or enthusiasm; and if their interest was not required on the task in front of them they would at and stare at me with the same careful, patient attention a birdwatcher devotes to the rare feathered visitor. I would sit at my desk busily correcting some of their written work and feel their eyes on me, then look up to see them sitting there, watchful, waiting. It made me nervous and irritable, but I kept a grip on myself.
I took great pains with the planning of my lessons, using illustrations from the familiar things of their own background. Arithmetic was related to the kinds of problems which would conceivably occupy them and their parents within the domestic scene: the amount of money coming into and going out of a household, for instance, and the relative weights of foods and fuels and the measurements of familiar journeys or materials. I created varying problems within the domestic framework, and tried to encourage their participation, but it was as though there was a conspiracy of disinterest, and my attempts at informality fell pitifully flat.
Gradually they moved on to the second and more annoying phase of their campaign, the “noisy” treatment. It is true to say that all of them did not actively join in this, but those who did not were obviously in some sympathy with those who did. During a lesson, especially one in which it was necessary for me to read or speak to them, someone would lift the lid of a
desk and then let it fall with a loud bang; the culprit would merely sit and look at me with wide innocent eyes as if it were an accident. They knew as well as I did that there was nothing I could do about it, and I bore it with as much show of aplomb as I could manage. One or two such interruptions during a lesson was usually enough to destroy its planned continuity, and I was often driven to the expedient of bringing the reading to an abrupt halt and substituting some form of written work; they could not write and bang their desks at the same time.
I knew I could not long continue this type of pointless substitution. It was very clear to me that most of my teaching would be by word of mouth method because of the rather low academic standard of the class in general; everything must be made fully explicit, and I could not possibly avoid doing a great deal of talking. So I felt angry and frustrated when they rudely interrupted that which was being done purely for their own benefit. I did my best to keep these difficulties from my colleagues. I was very keen to disprove the distaff view that the men teachers were inadequate for the job, and I had no wish to give Weston any occasion for gloating, so I kept plugging away, tailoring the lessons to suit the children. I would sometimes walk around the neighborhood after school to learn something of the background in and against which they had been reared, and though this helped me to understand the absence of certain social niceties from their conduct, it made that conduct no more bearable.
One morning I was reading to them some simple poetry, trying, by careful exposition and analysis, to give them something of the beauty it contained both in form and imagery. Just when I thought I had inveigled them into active interest, one of the girls, Monica Page, let the top of her desk fall; the noise seemed to reverberate in every part of my being and I felt a sudden burning anger. I looked at her for some moments before daring to open my mouth; she returned my gaze, then casually remarked to the class at large: “The bleeding thing won’t stay up.” It was all rather deliberate, the noisy interruption and the crude remark, and it heralded the third or “bawdy” stage of their conduct. From then on the words “bloody” or “bleedin’” were hardly ever absent from any remark they made to one another, especially in the classroom. They would call out to each other on any silly pretext and refer to the “bleedin’” this or that, and always in a voice loud enough for my ears. One day during an arithmetic period, Jane Purcell called out to me: “Can’t do this sum, Mr. Braithwaite, it’s too bleedin’ hard,” and sat there looking coolly up at me, her large breasts greasily outlined beneath the thin jumper, her eyes innocently blue in appeal.
“Tell me,” I replied, my voice chill and cutting with repressed anger: “Do you use such words when speaking to your father?”
“You’re not my bleeding father.” Her voice was flat and vicious. I was answered, and I shut up. You nasty little slut, I thought, I played right into your hand.
When the bell sounded for morning recess they rushed out into the corridor and I could hear her being congratulated for “putting the black bastard in his place.” Some of her familiars loudly protested against my question, considering it “bloody cheek” and expressed in clear Anglo-Saxon words what their replies would have been if I had dared to make any comment about their parents. Somehow or other my attempt to correct the girl’s language had been translated into a vicious and unwarranted attack on her parents.
After this incident things became slightly worse than before, and I could not escape the feeling that Weston had every justification for his attitude to the children; their viciousness was so pointless, so very unnecessary. Apart from their language other things were disturbing me. I would often come upon them, boys and girls, in the corridors or on the gloomy stairways, kissing and fondling with adult intentness; at my appearance they would break off and stand about, merely waiting for me to move on so they could resume their interrupted pleasures. After school they would hang about on the stairs or in the washroom, the girls laughingly protesting against the boys’ advances in noisy, bawdy terms; or sometimes I would see a group of them in a corner of the playground in a kind of combined operation.
Although I argued with myself that their conduct, especially outside the classroom, was no business of mine, I could not escape a growing concern about them and about my relationship with them. Besides, the younger children were imitating the behavior of the older ones, and some of the more adventurous small boys would even make “passes” at the older girls. One small boy miraculously escaped serious injury when he crashed through the glass roof of the girls’ lavatory white trying to spy on them.
This incident caused some very heated discussion in the staffroom, but oddly enough it was more concerned with the difficulties which would have resulted if he had seriously injured himself, than with the essential moral questions involved. The girls, too, rapidly recovered from the shock of being suddenly showered with broken glass and could be heard with their cronies in the corridor outside the classroom, laughingly reproving the absent adventurer for his stupidly roundabout way to so unimportant a discovery.
Matters came to a head one afternoon during recess. I had gone to the staffroom to fetch a cup of tea and returned to find the classroom smoky from an object which was smoldering in the grate of the fireplace. Several girls and boys were standing around joking and laughing, careless of the smoke and making no attempt to smother or remove its source. I pushed through them for a closer look, and was horrified to see that someone had thrown a used sanitary napkin into the grate and made an abortive attempt to burn it.
I was so overcome by anger and disgust that I completely lost my temper. I ordered the boys out of the room, then turned the full lash of my angry tongue on those girls. I told them how sickened I was by their general conduct, crude language, sluttish behavior, and of their free and easy familiarity with the boys. The words gushed out of me, and the girls stood there and took it. By God, they took it! Not one of them dared to move or speak. Then I turned to their latest escapade.
“There are certain things which decent women keep private at all times, and I would have thought that your mother or older sisters would have explained such things to you, but evidently they have failed in that very obvious duty. Only a filthy slut would have dared to do this thing, and those of you who stood by and encouraged her are just as bad. I do not wish to know which individual is responsible, because you are all to blame. I shall leave the classroom for exactly five minutes, in which time I expect that disgusting object to be removed and the windows opened to clear away the stink. And remember, all of you, if you must play these dirty games, play them in your homes, but not in my classroom.” With that I stormed out of the room, banging the door behind me.
I went upstairs and sat in the library, the only place where I could be alone for a little while. I felt sick at heart, because it seemed that this latest act, above all others, was intended to show their utter disrespect for me. They seemed to have no sense of decency, these children; everything they said or did was colored by an ugly viciousness, as if their minds were forever rooting after fifth. “Why, oh why,” I asked myself, “did they behave like that?” It was nothing to do with my being a Negro, I felt sure, because Hackman had not fared much better. Then what was it? What was wrong with them? They’re trying to break me, I thought, they want to make me into another Hackman, lurking away in the staffroom when I should be in the classroom, should be the teacher in charge—the boss—as Clinty had said. That was it! They wanted to repeat their victory over Hackman. Fine, we’d see! I had done everything I could to meet them halfway, even more than halfway, but now I would take a very different line with them, even at the risk of contravening the Headmaster’s carefully expressed views. I was now no longer angry, but determined to take firm action to set my class in order. From now on the classroom would be kept clean, in every way; I would not be asking it of them, but demanding it. No more “bloody” or “bleeding” or anything else of that nature. And quiet, we’d have that too. No more banging de
sks. They had pushed me about as far as I was willing to go; from now on I would do a little pushing on my own account.
When I entered the classroom at the end of recess, the fireplace was washed clean, the windows were open, and the children were sitting quietly in their places. The girls seemed sheepish and refused to meet my glance, and I realized with something of a shock that they (at least most of them) were ashamed; the boys, on the other hand, were watching me expectantly, as if waiting for me to say or do something. I made no reference to the incident. As far as I was concerned the party was over; but I would need a little time to think up some effective way of bringing that fact home to them.
Chapter
Nine
NEXT MORNING I HAD AN idea. It was nothing clear cut, merely speculative, but I considered it all the way to school. Then, after assembly, as soon as they were quiet I waded in. This might be a bit rough, I thought, but here goes.
“I am your teacher, and I think it right and proper that I should let you know something of my plans for this class.” I tried to pitch my voice into its most informally pleasant register. “We’re going to talk, you and I, but we’ll be reasonable with each other. I would like you to listen to me without interrupting in any way, and when I’m through any one of you may say your piece without interruption from me.” I was making it up as I went along and watching them; at the least sign that it wouldn’t work I’d drop it, fast.
They were interested, in spite of themselves; even the husky blasé Denham was leaning forward on his desk watching me.
“My business here is to teach you, and I shall do my best to make my teaching as interesting as possible. If at any time I say anything which you do not understand or with which you do not agree, I would be pleased if you would let me know. Most of you will be leaving school within six months or so; that means that in a short while you will be embarked on the very adult business of earning a living. Bearing that in mind, I have decided that from now on you will be treated, not as children, but as young men and women, by me and by each other. When we move out of the state of childhood certain higher standards of conduct are expected of us … ”
To Sir With Love Page 7