Working

by Studs Terkel

  It isn’t the kind of free school you read about. We’re involved in picking up basic skills that others have neglected to teach the kids. Some of them have feelings of rage, undefined, and they’re acting it out in school—dangerously. We try to calm them down.

  In a neighborhood like ours it’s very dangerous. It’s low income and there are many ethnic groups. This community has experienced its war on poverty and hasn’t changed. The kids now don’t believe in politics. They don’t believe things will get better for them. There’s a feeling of hopelessness and despair.

  They’re from ages six to seventeen. The age difference doesn’t really . . . Certainly a fifteen-year-old kid is not going to see an eight-year-old as his equal. But kids do throw off the age barrier and relate to each other as human beings. Because they see us doing the same with them.

  The person’s who’s sixteen realizes he has a lot of catching up to do, work. He knows I’m not gonna embarrass him. Other kids are having the same problems. I discourage competition in the classroom. The only one I accept is the student’s competition with himself. He has to compete against where he is, against where he wants to be, and against where he has been. I think every kid understands that. They don’t have to prove anything to me. Each kid has to prove to himself that he’s worthwhile. There’s no cheating here. There’s no reason for it.

  We’re not trying to jive ‘em into learning. We lay out powerful materials in front of them, and tell ’em they’re perfectly capable of doing it—and not to make any excuses about it. We use newspapers, too, and catchy urban stuff—but more as diversions. If you con someone into learning, you really believe they’re not capable of it. So we’re straightforward. Our learning materials are very hard. That’s tough.

  I have some that may end up in college, but I don’t push them. I sent a boy to Latin School.75 He got a scholarship. He was so unhappy there he did everything he could until I took him back. I thought he would have everything to make him happy. Bright, colorful people who smelled of the security of success, friendly teachers, a magnificent building, all the books he could read. But he was missing something—friendship.

  I don’t think they want to be doctors or lawyers. It’s not because they don’t know. It’s that they have no expectations. Some have vague feelings of wanting to be teachers. They aren’t interested in professional roles. See? They just want the security of working—a steady job. Something their parents haven’t had in Chicago. These kids are living out their parents’ hopes. It’s popular today to look at success of minority groups in terms of upward mobility. I don’t know that upward mobile groups are so happy.

  The majority of our parents are on welfare. When they screw up, they get ashamed and hide from us. The family’s falling apart and we’ve known them for a long time. They can’t face the fact. They know it doesn’t have to be as bad as it gets sometimes. They know what they’re capable of.

  We only get to know the families if they want to know us. If a kid doesn’t want us involved, we trust that that’s the best thing for him, that somehow he needs us all to himself, not to share with his family. If there’s a real problem between the kid and his family, the greatest respect we can show him is not to get involved. To give the kid a chance to pull himself out by himself. We trust the kid enough to be an autonomous individual. Hopefully, if he feels better about himself, the family will pick up on that. Very often the kids become effective—quote—therapists—unquote—in the family situation. One kid has carried the major load in helping his father get through some difficulties.

  I try to be fairly aware of their feelings. Sometimes I feel guilty that I identify too much. I always let them know when they touch on my feelings, and what those feelings are like. I think children are unaware of what adult’s feelings are like. Some of these kids that I’ve taught for a while—I’ve had some for four years—who are sixteen and seventeen, are getting a taste of those feelings. On the other hand, adolescents have new feelings, different from the ones I had when I was their age. So they’re willing to share my feelings as an adult, because they know that I know they have new kinds of feelings. Maybe that’s the pain—trying to share it with them. They’re reaching across and trying to touch something they’ve never experienced before —adulthood. In a specific situation of urban life—poverty.

  In my school the teachers have the decision about who they want to take or not. No administrator does that. He decides what he wants to teach and how he teaches it. My only requirement, as an administrator, is that he teaches well.

  Our classes are segregated by sex. It’s easier for them to study. They don’t have to play out the traditional sexual roles demanded of them in the neighborhood. They’re not secure in being men, so they play at being rough around their women. They have to be. The girls overact and become overseductive and overteasing. We give them a chance to have one place in their lives where they can put aside these roles. Our students have a chance to become more natural in their sex roles as they get away from the defenses that their parents have felt.

  We spend so many hours here. Our lives, fortunately or unfortunately. It’s very hard for us to get away from it. My work is everything to me. I find myself trying to get an hour or two of personal life now and then—in vain. I’d rather die for my work life than for my personal life. I guess you can’t really separate them. The school’s not an institution. We have a building, that’s where the school exists. But it also exists when we leave.

  We often work after six. The people we work for—the National Institute of Mental Health—once wanted us to do an honest time sheet. After they saw our honest time sheet they said, “Just please put in eight hours a day on the time sheet.” (Laughs.) Weekends? What weekends? (Laughs.) I work Saturday morning, writing letters, administrative details. I usually work Sunday afternoons and Sunday evenings.

  My first year I taught at an all-black school on the South Side. I worked with a very strong woman teacher who was well liked by the students. I picked up a lot of her strength. My second year I was on my own and very unhappy. The students were holding back and I was holding back. I couldn’t get involved in their lives and they couldn’t in mine. We were playing roles. It was like a polite dance. I liked them, they liked me. We both knew there was a great deal missing.

  I have to have complete freedom in what I’m going to teach, and what words I use in the classroom. If I want to cuss at them for something, I cuss at ‘em. A certain kind of cussing is an emotional release. If I want to discuss intimate matters with them, I want to be free to do so without justifying it to an administrator. I want to go to the parent’s house and scream and yell at ’em if I feel that’s gonna shape the kid up.

  If I see the day’s gonna be a rotten day because everybody’s in a lousy mood, I want the freedom to pick up and go someplace and not pretend it’s going to be an okay day. I don’t tell them, “Let’s be happy today, have fun.” Sometimes I say the opposite. (Laughs.) I say, “I’m very unhappy today and we’re not gonna have fun, we’re gonna work.” They pull me out of it. And when they’re in a lousy mood, they don’t hide it. They certainly let me know it.

  We hosted a free school from Minneapolis. I thought the students were unhappy because they didn’t have a whole lot of direction. There was a great deal of liberty that I don’t think the kids wanted. The teachers seemed more interested in theory than in the actual work of teaching. It was incredibly well funded with a staff of twenty-five to 180 kids. There wasn’t much I could say to them. In these situations adults are robbing adolescents of their childhood. Children deserve a chance to be irresponsible, to learn from mistakes. You lose your childhood soon enough in a low-income neighborhood.

  I don’t think these kids are capable of being adults—or want to. In some free schools adults are ready to give away their adulthood and take away from students their childhood. It’s fraudulent and becomes chaos. They’re forcing a young person to be older than he really is. The freedom of our school is bounded by
two obligations: learning and no violence against another person, physical or emotional. That includes me too.

  Our school has sixty-eight students and we’re still too big. I wanted to set the limit at fifty. But I’m too tenderhearted. (laughs.) If someone knocks on our door long enough, they can get it open. I make a distinction between people who deserve to be cared about and some who have completely given up. They don’t deserve the attention because they take too much away from the others, who somehow want to pull some worth out of their lives.

  The self-destructive ones deserve someone to completely mother and father them. If someone is willing to commit his or her life to that one person, okay. But not in a classroom with other people who want to care as a group. You see a kid who’s been fine for six months just suddenly collapse, and there’s no way . . . What happens is the other kids spend an awful lot of time ignoring the fact that it’s happening. They expend a lot of energy protecting themselves emotionally—from it catching on to them. A teacher goes through an awful lot of anguish watching someone they care about give up.

  I was very upset yesterday. A kid collapsed in October and was sent away for criminal activities. He reappeared on a furlough, begging to come back when he gets out. Though I care about him very much—I don’t know. It’s like a ping-pong game. I haven’t decided.

  Grades? I give grades, but they aren’t entered on anything. I simply keep them in mind as a trend . . . Kids like grades, ’cause they like to know where they are right now. Records? No. They have enough records. They have police records, social history records, welfare records. (Laughs.) I should have to keep records?

  I think the parents are glad we’re around. We take a great deal of pressure off them. We give them a chance to get on with other things in their lives. We’ve had a lot of families move back South. A great deal of our neighborhood has gone under the bulldozer of urban renewal. Families who haven’t done so well after eight, nine years have now decided they’ll give the South another try. Kids are getting in neighborhood trouble. City life may be just a bit too hard.

  We’re really content when our students get a full-time, good paying job. We’re always around for him to learn if he wants to. He’s still interested in learning about himself. He realizes his life doesn’t end when he gets a job. Or when he gets married, his life doesn’t end. He doesn’t end up in heaven or hell because he got married.

  From what I’ve read about concentration camps, there’s a similarity in feeling to ghetto areas. The walls aren’t built, they’re there. How your life can become concentrated. Rather than escape from it, I’ve tried to do what some survivors did—find meaning in it to share with other people. Not in any martyr kind of a way, because I can always leave. But it’s something beautiful to me. Being able to be hurt by things and then understanding how it happened and explaining to others who have been hurt by the same things.

  I run into people who say how much they admire what I do. It’s embarrassing. I don’t make any judgments about my work, whether it’s great or worthless. It’s just what I do best. It’s the only job I want to do. I work hard because I have to. I get tired. At four I feel as though I’m ready to die. (Laughs.) I don’t feel bad about it. This is my life. I just am.

  KITTY SCANLAN

  She is assistant professor of the medical-surgery unit at a Midwestern university’s medical center. “That’s just a title. I’m an occupational therapist. It’s an emerging profession—like medicine was, maybe a hundred years ago.

  “We get a heart attack patient. We try to help him find a life style that is satisfying. We had one wealthy man who could see nothing but work. If it meant dying in three days, he’d rather die working than live another fifteen years in a way he wasn’t accustomed to. Some of our patients are death-oriented.”

  A hospital is a dehumanizing institution. People get in and they become arms or legs or kidneys or bladders or something besides Joe Smith the human being. If a hospital was a good place for people to work, it would meet the patient’s needs. There would be no need for me.

  The nurses, the doctors, the medical students, are set up on a rigid status kind of system. If you buy into this kind of system, you buy the idea that “I’m not quite as good as the guy above me.” The resident doesn’t strike back at the attending man when he has a bad day. He strikes out at the nurse. The nurse strikes out at the hospital aide or the cleaning lady.

  Many patients tell me the best person for them has been the cleaning lady. Yet the doctors and nurses, everybody is saying that the cleaning lady just does a rotten job—“That dirt’s been on the floor three days!” The cleaning lady deals with the patient on a human level. She’s scrubbing the floor in the room and the patient says, “My son didn’t come to visit me today.” The cleaning lady smiles and says, “I know how you feel. I know how I’d feel if my son didn’t come to visit me if I was sick.” The cleaning lady doesn’t see the patient as a renal failure or an ileostomy. She just sees a poor lady who’s sick.

  Until recently, I wasn’t sure how meaningful my work was. I had doubts. A surgeon does a really beautiful job. That’s meaningful to him immediately. But it’s not the kind of sustaining thing that makes a job meaningful. It must concern the relationship you have with the people you work with. We get hung up in the competition: “Who’s responsible for saving this life?” “Who’s responsible for the change in this dying patient?” “Rather than saying, “Isn’t it beautiful that we all together helped make this person’s life better?”

  I worked in the leading rehab hospital in the country. The schedule was very rigid. Everybody punches time clocks when they come to work and when they leave. You get so many minutes for coffee break. The patient’s day was regimented as my day was regimented. You have a quadriplegic who at eight o‘clock goes to occupational therapy—nine o’clock goes to physical therapy—ten o‘clock sees the social worker—twelve o’clock goes back to occupational therapy. We see him as a quadriplegic rather than as a person. We’re, both of us, things.

  That’s what happens in hospitals—not because people are unfeeling or don’t care, but because they feel put-down. You have to protect yourself in some way. Many things in the institution frustrate me. The doctor who refuses to deal with the patient who knows he’s dying. He says, “He doesn’t want to know anything.” Or the alcoholic with cirrhosis. What’s the use of putting him in this hospital bed, prolonging his life, to send him back to the lonely, isolated world where he’ll sit in his room and drink and nobody to cook for him? You know there’s no place to send him. Or the old lady who’s had a stroke, who lives alone. She’s been very dear to all the staff and you know you can’t keep her in that hundred-dollar-a-day bed, and she’s shipped to some rotten nursing home that welfare put her into. She can’t live alone. And the bastards you have to deal with—sarcastic doctors. They’re not really bastards—it’s the way the institution makes them. You think, “What’s the use?”

  For several months I worked with hemiplegics, elderly people who’ve had a stroke. Half their body is paralyzed. First thing in the morning I’d get to the old men’s ward and I’d teach them dressing. They didn’t think they could do anything, but they could dress themselves. If people can take care of themselves, they have more self-esteem.

  They were in long wards and they had curtains around the bed. I’d start out with just the shirt, work on getting the affected arm into the sleeve. Some people, it would take ten days to learn. Some could do it in one day—getting their shirt on, their pants on, how to wash themselves with one hand . . . The patients taught me a lot. They have better ways they’ve learned on their own. They’d say, “Wouldn’t it be better if I did it this way?” I learned a lot about self-care from them. I try to tell my students to listen to the patients.

  Being sick can be like going through early developmental stages all over again. It can have profound growth potential for people. It’s like being a child again, to be sick. The doctor is like the parent. I’ve seen it happ
en with kidney transplant patients. People who’ve been seriously ill may come out much stronger, happier . . . Some kind of learning. Something can happen in the sick role. It’s one of the areas where we say it’s okay to be dependent, as an adult, in our society. It’s not intellectual learning.

  I think the luxury of individual patients is coming to an end—and I’m glad. Group treatment is far more effective. Patients I’ve worked with helped each other much more than I helped them. If I get five old men together—hemiplegics—and do some crazy thing like tie a red ribbon on their affected arm, it gets to be a game or a joke. They look at what the other guy is doing—he didn’t know he had that side of his body—and say, “Hey, what you’re doing is wrong.” I could say it over and over and over and it wouldn’t mean anything. They learn about survival from each other. They learn it by discussing what their lives were like, what they’re like now. I can’t tell them. I don’t know what it’s like. I’ve never been paralyzed from the neck down.

  The kind of thing we do can be done by anybody in a general hospital. It’s easy for a nurse to learn how a hemiplegic dresses. If they were able to take time with the patient, they could do what I do. The best I am is a good cleaning lady in medicine-surgery.

  I had so many doubts about my work. I’d think, Oh God, the doctor doesn’t see what I’m doing as important. I finally learned it didn’t matter what he thought. If I believed in what I was doing, I didn’t give a damn what the doctor thought of it. I began to see his own protective cover.

  There’s a doctor who thought we were play-ladies. Occupational therapy uses crafts, fun things. I thought of it as a loss of status. I saw it as not nearly as important as taking temperatures and all these vital, life-saving things. Now I find it exciting, more important than the other matters. I see it as the kind of thing missing in a lot of people’s lives. It wasn’t the people higher up who didn’t recognize the importance of our work. It was I who didn’t recognize it.