by Ron Suskind
He retreats into the room, letting the door slam shut, and sits down at his desk. He’s supposed to write an entry in his journal tonight about Slater and flips through his pages of notes—rantings, really, of his outrage at the way the kids are treated, about the injustice of it. He reads them once, then again, but writes nothing in the journal. Tonight he can’t seem to locate his fury.
Larry Wakeford stares in silence at the blonde, butch-cut, mischievously cocked head of a student—a delightfully contentious senior named Leslie—and notices a ray of late afternoon sunlight reflecting off her nostril stud. He chuckles.
“Listen, Leslie, I’m not sure if I’m actually exercising some sort of tyranny or not. I’m just giving guidelines for an assignment,” he says while leaning forward, fingertips on the edge of the seminar table, in a purposeful pose. “I think we need some sort of rubric, some sort of accepted criteria for our work in this class … or there would be chaos. We all can agree on at least that, can’t we?”
Murmurs ripple across the room, a lovely, high-ceilinged address on the second floor of stately Sayles Hall, with dark wood paneling, aged to perfection, narrow twelve-foot windows, and twenty students in Fieldwork and Seminar in High School Education who are just limbering up.
The issue du jour involves “rubrics,” or how the format of an assignment can favor the strengths of some students and highlight the weaknesses of others or, in any event, how it can stifle creativity. The subject, discussed theoretically in previous classes, has circled around to delicious relevance on this early March Monday’s discussion of the upcoming midterm paper. It is noted simply on the syllabus as “five pages, typed, double-spaced, on the topic of diversity in the classroom, using observations from each student’s fieldwork.”
Larry is certain of one thing: his winking suggestion that the syllabus line may just be a starting point, that the students may actually search for “some sort of criteria” that “we all can agree on” and have it stick, will mean a few minutes of edgy, vigorous discussion. He crosses his arms, leans his back against the chalkboard, and lets them have at it, winning a respite, after an hour of lecturing, to watch how various kids might connect educational theory to their passionately held views about grading and fairness.
“Why couldn’t we, for instance, write a three-act play that deals with issues of diversity in the class we’re observing,” says a thin white boy, one of only three guys in the class.
“Well, let’s not forget you have to include observations from your journal and some attendant analysis. But—a play—hmmmm, maybe,” Larry shrugs, keeping it going as a girl near the far wall discusses various writing styles that might be “untraditional, yet, you know, appropriate.”
As he watches, he gets the “this-is-what-I-came-to-Brown-for” rush. He knows he’s an oddball around campus: a fifty-one-year-old assistant professor, nontenure track, whose appreciation of teaching on this hallowed academic ground is heightened by long years of deprivation, twenty-five, in fact, slogging through eleventh-grade biology classrooms and assistant principal jobs at public high schools.
Sure, there were years he loved it, especially the eleven years in Chapel Hill, where professors’ children from the University of North Carolina mixed with a manageable minority, 20 percent or so, of black and Latino kids from the town’s poorer sections.
Then it fell apart, all at once. His marriage of twenty-five years collapsed. That was the main thing. Unattached, with his kids already off to college, he followed the Chapel Hill principal to Cincinnati and spent a year as an assistant principal at a well-known magnet school in the city.
That’s where he read an ad in Education Week magazine about three-year teaching stints at Brown, with possibility of renewal. High school teachers were encouraged to apply. Larry immediately realized that competition for the fellowships would be fierce, but, beyond being a damn good teacher, he had some reasons to be hopeful. He’d had Ted Sizer, Brown’s famous education professor, back when he was getting his master’s in education at Harvard in the late ’60s; his mix of teaching and administrating might intrigue them; and he “presented” well, with his easy, affable manner, accessible good looks (much like the fatherly, gray-haired actor William Windom), and the slightly rumpled demeanor of a professor, all tweed and oxford cotton and rep ties. He looked like he belonged at a university. People always used to say that.
He’s up for renewal for a second three-year stint in a few months. He looks at his watch—5:25—about five minutes left in today’s class. Better rein it in. “I think the key element some of you are not considering is the issue of skills: that you’re not only here to freely express yourself on a particular subject but also to build certain time-honored skills, like clear expository writing and analysis. That’s a big part of what you need to be evaluated on.”
The class quiets, considering this.
“I mean that doesn’t work all that well for me,” says Cedric. Larry looks over. Cedric and a Latino girl from modest, inner-city origins are the two students that most intrigue him in the class, kids who are now observing life at the kind of awful schools from which they sprung. “What do you mean it doesn’t work for you, Cedric?” he says softly, trying to draw out Jennings, who doesn’t talk much in class.
“I don’t know,” Cedric says after a moment. “It’s just that the things I see at my junior high school get me so angry, so passionate, that it’s hard to be all intellectual, or whatever, about it.”
“Why don’t you write a poem about it!?” chirps Leslie from across the room, as everyone, Cedric included, begins to laugh.
“Well,” Larry says, checking his watch again, so they’ll all know time is up. “I’ll leave it this way: if anyone wants to propose a different rubric for this midterm paper, they need to clear it with me first. Otherwise, five pages, double-spaced. See you all next time.”
On a Friday afternoon a few weeks later, Larry closes the door to his small office in the education building, sits back down at his desk chair, and gazes at the phone-book-sized stack of midterm papers. Best to just shut himself in and push through the grading, however long it takes. He promised he’d hand back all the papers on Monday. By dusk, after a few hours hunched over his desk, he’s well over halfway done. Most of them are what he expected—kids lifting observations from their journals, mostly mentioning exchanges between the teachers and their students, then weaving in some footnoted passages about diversity or tracking from the three books they’ve had to read thus far in the semester. In a few papers, he sees an occasional bit of original analysis. He marks a B at the bottom of the paper before him, scribbles a few comments, and puts it in the completed stack.
He looks down at the next one. “Oh God,” he laughs, a full page of verse. Actually, he realizes, flipping it over, two full pages. He turns back to the first page and looks to the top right—“Cedric L. Jennings.”
Shaking his head, he lifts his red Flair pen and begins to read.
As I gaze into this rainbow of kids
I often wonder what nature will bid.
Girls embellished in jewelry and fads,
It’s hard to distinguish them from the older lads,
Boys wear earrings, pants below the waist,
In society’s eyes they’re indeed a disgrace.
Although these kids are in their teen years,
many have had to shed grown-up tears.
Rape victims and welfare recipients are in this array,
sometimes they’re the brightest in this display.
Yet, I can no longer glory in this beautiful rainbow,
the teachers are telling them that it’s time to go.
They line up in their single files,
many saying good-bye to their pals,
And, as I look a while longer, I become confused.
What was supposed to be a rainbow has become misconstrued,
There was one line of kids, who each had books.
The others were only concerned with
their looks.
When the talking finally stops, they began a long procession.
Will the teacher or the kid be giving the lesson?
Walking through the halls can lead to dismay.
“Just say no” is the slogan of the day.
There’s a poster for each case, one on every wall;
Over there’s the room where they dump them all.
Inside, problems from past and present cause distress.
Is it something the teachers are really able to address?
Teachers don’t have time to analyze each dilemma,
so they group the kids with proscribed curricula.
These curricula are not based on intellectual ability,
instead they target students who lack behavioral stability.
It’s not that easy for these kids to behave;
Many of them, teachers think, are headed for an early grave.
But does a kid’s knowledge depend on his behavior,
or should he depend on the teacher as his savior.
To meet the needs of each kid is hard,
that doesn’t mean they should be called “retard.”
Larry looks up and rubs his eyes; page two still to go. Jesus, he mulls, it’s an epic poem. God knows he didn’t expect this, but maybe he should have seen it coming. There were kids like Cedric, he recalls, at the magnet school in Cincinnati, a school that was about 60 percent white, 40 percent black. Plenty of the black kids arrived there from toxic inner-city junior high schools and were creatively gifted but short of basic skills. He used to see poems a little like this—verses, raps, or whatever—from the kids who could no more step back from the fiery elements of their poverty and blackness than some Vietnam combat vets could from the war. Everything was passed through the stark prism of their experiences and they just bled onto the page—sometimes awkwardly and, God knows, far from iambic pentameter—but often with a stunning inventiveness. Not that anyone expected their insightful effusions to take them very far; not, the joke was, until they included sections for poetry writing and personal testimony on the SATs. How, he wonders, did this Jennings kid manage to get to Brown? He flips to the second page:
For teachers, hostility is not on the prescribed diet,
but hope will keep the kids from causing a riot.
Calling kids stupid is not the right way to go;
this will stop the continuous educational flow.
These kids are brighter than the teachers think.
Some can audit someone’s taxes in just a blink,
Instead their minds are deteriorating with their kind,
leaving educators in an ever tightening bind.
These kids are crying out for attention.
The answer is not always found in detention.
So, will grouping them in sections solve the mystery?
The answer may be obtained by looking at each kid’s history.
Their minds are eager, can’t you see,
these kids are yearning for real diversity.
But teachers are always telling kids, “no you can’t,”
So the kids end up fighting and darken their chants.
They want to be challenged, but their brains slip into ease,
withholding their knowledge is like being a big tease.
All this yields is a lack of respect.
Homogeneous grouping may be the prime suspect.
I must admit I’m not pleased with this picture,
Nor the time it’s taking for this painting to configure.
But a true artist must possess patience.
Developing new ideas for his latest creations
Yes, red, yellow, and orange will do,
But there’s something still missing to create the perfect view.
Always looking at same hues is really no fun,
Maybe I’ll just let the colors run.
This is, indeed, a great idea:
This mixture will be named the picture of the year.
With others I won’t conform, to prove my expertise
My God, have I created a masterpiece?
On Monday afternoon, Larry waits until the last moment to pass out the midterm papers, not wanting the kids to be looking at them during class. He hands back Cedric’s without any marks or a grade. As the class sifts out, the student comes forward.
“Why don’t you come by and see me in my office and we’ll talk about your paper,” Larry says, making sure his tone is upbeat. “My office hours are three to five on Thursday afternoon.”
Cedric stands there, stricken, holding the paper out in front of him like a burnt offering Larry might still, somehow, accept. “Don’t worry, Cedric, it’s nothing bad,” Larry says finally, and then watches ruefully as the student slips out.
Over the next three days, Larry finds that the “poem predicament,” as he dubbed it to a colleague, is regularly floating to the surface of his thoughts, making him reflective about his role as an educator, his twisting career, even his late ’60s stint in the Peace Corps in Colombia, South America. He remembers how wise some of those so-called primitive villagers were, people that he, a pink-skinned young man from Harvard, was sent to help.
Sitting in his office on Thursday afternoon, he knows he needs to arrive at some decision and unearths the basic boilerplate of his role as a college professor. The rules are clear: it was a passionate, evocative poem, maybe even brilliant, but not the assignment. Yes, someone in class made a light-hearted comment about writing a poem, but he clearly stated that anyone wanting to alter the assignment needed to get it cleared first. This effort utterly disregarded the assignment. That means a C or maybe even an F. He chews on this prospect for a moment and looks to shore it up, meditating that the upholding of accepted academic standards is precisely what enables institutions like Brown to offer a diploma that has meaning, a seal showing that the recipients can master valuable skills of reasoned discourse, of deduction, exposition, and logical thinking, abilities that will help them to approach any subject, no matter how foreign, throughout their lives.
He sits for a few moments, trying to get comfortable in this posture. There’s a knock on his open door. “Cedric, come in,” he says, rising, and the student sits on the edge of the office’s only other chair. “You know, I’ve thought a lot about your paper in the past couple of days,” Larry opens, warming up.
“You didn’t like the poem, did you?” Cedric suddenly elbows in, swallowing the last word. Larry’s planned monologue is disrupted, and he discards it. “Actually, Cedric,” he says softly, “I loved it. I was moved by it.”
A pursed smile, almost like relief, crosses Cedric’s face, and he and Larry just look at each other for a moment. The room seems warm and very quiet, and Larry, after such a long, bumpy journey to this place, suddenly feels younger and more trusting than experience should allow.
“I’m going to give you a B,” he says haltingly. “But you have to understand two things. Your final research paper, which has to be according to the assignment, may carry more weight than normal in your overall grade.”
Cedric nods, saying nothing, waiting for the second thing. Larry looks out the window, wanting to get it just right. “If you’re going to make it here, Cedric, you’ll have to find some distance from yourself and all you’ve been through,” he says after a moment, as he leans forward, making sure their eyes meet. “The key, I think, is to put your outrage in a place where you can get at it when you need to, but not have it bubble up so much, especially when you’re asked to embrace new ideas or explain what you observe to people who share none of your experiences.” He stops, sensing this may be futile. “Maybe I’m not making myself clear.”
“No, no, you are,” Cedric says, with an eagerness that startles the teacher. “I’m understanding more about that all the time. I really am.”
And Larry Wakeford, watching him go, is surprised to feel his reasonable doubts about this student’s future begin to lift.
13
&nbs
p; A PLACE UP AHEAD
Cedric looks down at his copy of the poem and then passes it across his cluttered desktop to Zayd, who’s sitting in Rob’s wooden chair.
“Tell, me what do you think, I mean which parts you like the best or whatever,” Cedric says as he watches Zayd begin to read.
They’re talking again. Cedric was the one who broke the ice, calling Zayd one night last week, one dorm room phone to another. “You know who this is?”
And Zayd replied, “Well, I used to have a buddy who talked a little like you, whoever you are.”
During the month of silence, Cedric missed having Zayd around, though he’d never tell him that. In fact, he doesn’t want to come right out and tell Zayd lots of things he’s realized lately, especially the nascent insights discovered from the writing of his wrenching sixty-eight-line poem. Cedric, of course, knew that the assignment was supposed to be a dispassionate analysis of diversity in the classroom, with examples and quotes and all that, and he tried writing such a paper. About eight times. But each start looked worse than the last, a bland paragraph or two that barely touched on the ferocious emotions that had been unearthed by his visits to Slater.
By early last week, forced into action on the night before the paper was due, some verses arrived in his head just like song lyrics sometimes do. It was just after midnight. With few alternatives, he began to fuss over opening lines and rhymes, trying to squeeze some concepts about tracking and homogeneous grouping into his own format. By 4 A.M., bleary, with lines sixty-seven and sixty-eight beginning to swim together, he finally slumped off to sleep. It wasn’t until a few days later that Cedric read a copy in the clarity of day and realized that the poem was as much about his journey, his anger, and his regret as it was about the kids at Slater. Much of it, he recognized, might have been written for, and to, the kids at Ballou. That was mostly what he saw rereading it, that the poem was sort of a letter back to all of them, even his tormentors, telling them that he understood how, in the same way he needed to push against them, they needed to lash out at him.