Forum; Fifth Grade Chronicles with Tracy Kidder

Dear friends, From the Longhorn Radio Network, the University of Texas at Austin, this is Forum. I do think, though, that one of the big differences that it falls on teachers' backs in the way is that there are some changes in the problems that children are bringing with them into school, that in the minimally affect how easy they are at educate. And I have them mind, you know, drugs and teenage pregnancy. Tracey Kitter, Prize-winning writer and author of Among School Children, a Chronicle of a Year in the Life of the Fifth Grade Class. I like to read her to come away feeling that glad that there are people like this, Mrs. A. Jack in the world,

and realizing, first of all, this is a very difficult job, and that it is a job that really can make a difference. I also think that no one in this book should come away feeling very good about the way in which a lot of children in this country are being raised. You know, I think it's horrifying. And I think that there's plenty of evidence of that. This is Olive Graham. Our guest on Forum today spent a year with Mrs. A. Jack's Fifth Grade Class at Kelly School in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Tracey Kitter has condensed nine months of a school year into a few hundred pages that describe lessons that take place in and out of the classroom. The ethnically culturally mixed classroom made for a kaleidoscope of experiences that challenged the writer as well as the teacher. Tracey Kitter became part of that classroom, part of the interior landscape for those children. This Holyoke classroom was Mr. Kitter's choice on the basis of the city as well as the teacher.

I chose the city first, and later on chose the teacher. She was on a list I had of five good elementary school teachers in the city. And I hadn't watched her teach before I started doing the research for this book. I was prepared to start over again the following fall if she didn't seem right, but she seemed perfect as time went on. Why pick the fifth grade to relive? Well, I didn't pick the fifth grade, I picked the teacher. I hoped to have one of the older elementary grades, partly because I hoped that kids at age would be a little more articulate than the younger ones. Although there was a moment when I thought I might end up writing about a first grade teacher and what I figured I'd end up writing a lot about then was how children learned to read, which could be very exciting. And as it turned out with this book, I think I ended up writing about the kinds of problems children bring to school with them, and how a big-hearted and competent teacher tries to deal with those problems. This is much more a book about a year in the emotional life of a teacher than it is. Anything else, I think of it that way anyway. The teacher's name is Chris Zajak. Chris Zajak, yes.

Did she feel any radical changes in the course of her career up to that point? Does she anticipate more? Because of this book? Yeah, in the class. This happened a few years ago that I sat in on her class. I think the one thing that really changed for her during that year was that this was probably the first... This is the first time in her career when she had another adult in the room every day, who was as interested in what was going on as she was, and who she could talk to all the time. Teaching was an extremely lonely job in a gregaria setting, and I think that year was different for her and that it was less lonely. That's probably the distortion that I introduced into what I was observing. The year after this, she taught again, she taught sixth grade, and then year after that, she was talked into running the reading and writing program in another elementary school in the area teaching teachers in effect. She's still doing that. I think she wants to go back to a classroom. She's a person who always tried to make some sort of change from one year to another as a teacher, hoping to avoid what she saw in too many of her colleagues,

which was this kind of terminal boredom that starts to start to set in on teachers. How did you assess the kinds of support that classroom teachers get? I thought it was almost nonexistent. And at least in this school, and I gather that this is not an atypical school. It was a pretty good school in many ways. It was orderly, and it wasn't without being tyrannical, and that seemed like a jail. Those class sizes were good because of the principal, or some fairly small. But I think the way they've typically been set up is each woman to her room, each to her own duties. There is a wonderful side to that, and it allows a teacher to go in and close the door, and to be part of the bureaucracy for a little while, and then the best teachers are able to make that little room into a little village, a little embryonic community, as John Dewey once said, in which is always better than the community outside, and there's no racism there. I'm talking if there's a good teacher now. It's a place where kids can learn to get along with other people and get to find out who they are, and who they might become,

where on the hands of a competent teacher they may learn to take success. All kinds of good things can happen, but the price that we pay for that, I think that could be retained, and we could still solve this problem of the intellectual isolation of teachers. Some studies suggest that teachers tend to get set in their ways after about four years. Teachers typically are indoctrinated into this job by just being thrust into that classroom, without very much help at all. The principal, in effect, just closes the door, and I remember my mother coming home every night, and tears during her first year of teaching. I don't think that kind of crucible is certainly not necessary, but I do think it's quite typical. Teachers are pretty lonely in those rooms sometimes. As Chris says, I quote her in the book at one point. I think one of the most poignant things she said to me is that the worst thing about it is you don't even know if you're maybe doing something wrong. Teachers are generally left to judge their own work, and they tend to be very harsh judges of it. I think the reason for that is that failure is pretty easy to see inside a classroom, but ultimate success with a child won't surface usually for a decade or more. The lack of collegiality amongst school faculties is notorious in America,

and at the same time, what was also notorious is the shoving of paperwork down onto teachers' backs, and the imposition of silly little rules meant to serve bureaucracies. I think of the distribution of air conditioning at Kelly School, the school I was in, as paradigm of the way in which our educational leaders, so-called, have treated education in this country. I was to say there was air conditioning in the administrative offices and none in the classrooms, which would get to about 100 degrees in September and in June, and make teaching impossible. I think if we really wanted to reform education, we wouldn't have education summits, we would start in the classroom. I wrote this book. I didn't set out to try to solve the problems of education or to prescribe solutions. I wanted to write a good book. I wanted to write an interesting story. It seemed like I had an interesting one that was full of emotional intensity, and so on, and interesting characters. But if I had set out to do that, I think I'd like to think I'd have started and roughly the same place, because I don't know what else education, formal education, he isn't this country, except what goes on in these little rooms.

We operate our school system, supposedly, on a local level. But from what I read in your book, I didn't see any of those forces impinging it all on Mrs. Ajak. That's true. The federal government spends the least of the three people who pay for schools, for our public schools. The states and state governments pay the most, and second in line are the various school districts themselves. And it's true that the local school districts can, and do exercise, you know, most of the power over schools, you know, affluent communities teachers complain of too much parental interference, and in poorer communities, they tend to complain that parents don't get involved enough. And this takes their community for reasons I'm not entirely sure of. I think it was a whole bunch of reasons. There was a very little parental involvement. But you know, even when there's a fair amount of parental involvement, teachers tend to have enormous autonomy inside their rooms. And I was really interested in that unit here, the most basic of units. Often there were face-offs between the teacher and some selected students.

Is this really a picture of what goes on there? Is that warfare week after week? I think the very first thing a teacher has to do is get control over the room. She has to be able to impose discipline without being attire in. But if she can't do that, she can't do anything else. It seems to me. And it's what children want. After all, they want to feel safe. And they want to know what the rules and limits are. And they want someone there who is in charge. I believe that quite strongly. Even the rebellious ones want that. She had a very difficult student that year. She had two very difficult students. And it was a constant struggle to try to keep those kids under control. At the same time, try to teach them something. Try to get them in condition to learn. At the same time, teach the rest of the class. And it was a struggle that she didn't always win. Well, the one named Clarence was particularly disruptive. I mean, he would attack the other students as well. And he'd do it when she wasn't looking.

She could keep him under control pretty well. But she began to feel that it was taking about half of her energy and her time. And she began to feel that the other children were being cheated. And then, of course, in my story, Clarence, the authorities moved Clarence into a special class. And that's almost worse because Mrs. Ajak felt so guilty that she didn't fight against this. And yet, I think she sensed right away that this was the right thing to do for the rest of the class. So that by doing something that was probably wrong, she was also doing something that was right. I think it was a terrible position to put her in. The child should probably never have been put in her class in the first place. I mean, it isn't fair. It isn't democratic. It isn't right to have children in classrooms who are taking far more than their share of the teacher's time and energy. On the other hand, whether getting them out of the classroom or not is right. It depends entirely on what the alternative is. And in this case, the alternative wasn't too good. It was just putting them among a bunch of other very disturbed children. Sort of like making them join the street gang. But he had the same curriculum at the other school?

No, no. I'm not sure there was any curriculum at all. The curriculum there was behavior modification to try to get these kids to learn how to behave themselves in that setting. The story about Robert, too, looked like it could have gone other places as well. I knew things about the turbine, actually, that she didn't know. And because of the decision that I made to tell the story largely through her eyes, some of that stuff just didn't fit. Robert was an extremely disturbed child, if it seemed to be anyway, and bizarre behavior. A boy who seemed to make himself almost deliberately, unattractive to his teacher, not to hang on to her attention. And she made some progress with him. She really did. There were little moments, the most poignant of which was that during this awful science fair, where she really felt she'd blundered. And he tried to do a science project and failed utterly. And she realized too late that she should have helped him more.

The rules were you weren't supposed to help the kids, and their parents were supposed to. But of course, he didn't have anyone at home to help, but she missed a chance there. But to her credit, she never pretended that she hadn't made a mistake when she did. He was somewhat self-destructive. Yes, he was. Yeah, he used to hurt himself in class, hit himself, slap himself, bang his thighs. How long did it take to get him some observation? Well, she went to work on that the very first days of school. It was months and months and months before he really had his psychological tests and so on and so forth. And then there was this struggle to get him to a psychiatrist. And I'm not sure, by the time the year ended, he still hadn't gotten to one. My book ends with the ending of that year. And I've chosen not to talk about what's happened to these kids since then, because it is important to me that they not be identified. And I'm afraid if I talk about what's happened to them since I'd make it easier to identify them. But I think it's safe to say that the odds are that even headed for a very good place.

In spite of her efforts. Does this community with its lack of parental support look at the education of its youth as a right that they deserve? I don't know. It's hard to generalize. There are many people of tremendous goodwill in that town who believe deeply in the importance of education of children, including children who aren't their own. But the town recently voted. In Massachusetts now, the end of the economic miracle happened. And the state aid education has been cut quite a bit. In Holyoke, the city that I wrote about elementary school children this year, do not get art, musical, physical education, which is criminal, I think. The city with the voters in the city were asked to override one of these tax cutting measures that's still in place. And they wouldn't do it. The situation in that town is such that what's called the white population, white is to distinguish them from Puerto Rican.

There's a complicated reason for that. They can't use the term hanglo in the city, because it claims to have a second nation's second largest St. Patrick's Day parade. It's aging, as aged, the white population. And the Puerto Rican population is very young. So the time I was there, about 50% of the school children were Puerto Rican. Now they're about 60% of Puerto Rican. And I think in effect with the town voting not to override this tax cutting measure. And the town, by the way, has very low property taxes. I was basically saying that, no, they were not interested in educating Puerto Rican children and children who went their own. I'm afraid that attitude is pretty widespread in America, the idea that once your own children are raised not a school, your obligations towards children have ended essentially. And so your grandchildren come along. And of course that's a disastrous attitude to take, particularly now, when as Jesse Jackson says, you know, lots of babies are having babies. And it's one thing to say, God, you know, the parents have abdicated their responsibility. This is terrible. This is awful. I remember Mrs. Ajax saying this in the teacher's room one day. A slight argument with a colleague.

Unusual argument. I might say that they're unusual to hear a saying this. And she said, oh, it's awful. It's terrible. But something's got to be done about it. I mean, and what she was saying in effect was you can't, just because we have someone here to blame, doesn't mean we should take it out on the kids. Something's got to be done for these children. It doesn't matter if their mothers are 16 years old or if their mothers are drug addicts. I mean, I think the proper attitude is to say that they belonged all of us, you know. Well, is there a business or industrial community there that's worried about what the- Yes, there is. Is it a matter of ways? There is a business community that is really trying to do something now. I'm a little nervous about that. There's one really wonderful businessman there who's real open-minded. And I don't know too many of the other ones yet. I do know that the business community in America generally tends to take the attitude that the real purpose of education is schools are boot camps for the great industrial army. And the purpose of education, of course, is to serve the economy. I deeply disagree with that. You know, that is not the purpose of education.

It's one of the side effects of education, perhaps. But there are people who will say that the reason for the deficit and our balance of payments is our shoddy public school system. Our public school system may be shoddy, but I think that the blame for our deficit and our balance of payments lies much more squarely at the feet of the business leaders of our country. That's just my opinion. It seems more logical to me in any case. The other thing that's a problem is that when that businessmen tend to think of all problems as being soluble in business terms, but schools aren't like businesses. And when you think of ideas that are being advanced, still being advanced, such as merit pay, I mean, I think you have to stop and think about that for a minute. It's always nice to reward the best workers the most. But the whole point of schools, if there's anything behind our dream of equality of opportunity through schooling, then we ought to arrange for every child to have good teacher. What happens now is you've got to kind of lottery. There are good teachers in every school in America. But whether your kid gets one and when you're not as a matter of largely of luck and how much you know as a parent about that faculty and how much,

whether you can get in there and know where the levers are and pull a few strings, that's of course not the way it should be. Merit pay alone. It seems to me as a recipe simply to perpetuate a rather bad system that's already in place. We're not manufacturing goods, and we're not providing services in the service industry since, trying to educate children, trying to awaken minds. How much education do we really want them to have, or do we just want them to have skills? Well, that's another question. There are educational historians on the left who believe that we never really wanted a fully educated citizenry, not in the sense that we wanted an educational system that was devoted towards individual joy and enlightenment. But I think I paraphrased some of that thought by saying that their ideas that we always wanted to, we really wanted was a tranquilized workforce that would learn enough but not too much in school. And I don't believe that that's really true.

I mean, it's so hard to make a generalization like that stick. I do think, though, that a good education is in some way subversive, usually. I mean, if you really teach elementary school children that it's important to share and to cooperate, well, that isn't quite the same lesson as the great capitalist economy has in store for you. I don't think. I mean, it's sure it's important to you as a business leader to have your workers cooperate and share. The main idea is to go out there and get as much for yourself as you can. That tends to be the idea. What did Mrs. Sejack feel were the chances for this particular collection of students? For some, they were just glowing. Excellent. She had that one girl came from a very good and fairly well-to-do family in local terms, well-to-do. She was a very bright, a lovely girl with tremendous sympathy for all of their children. Judith, the puttering girl I mentioned, who came from a very poor but very strong family,

if all goes well for her, she'll get a full scholarship, you know. The places like Gail will come and compete for her. There's a whole bunch of kids, though, for whom it's hard to know, but you can't feel too sanguine about. There's Robert and there's Clarence, and there's that boy, I think, of Pedro, who turned out, you know, she tried to get tested right away, who appeared to be retarded, turned out to be in the near genius level, but had no language at all. She did everything she could for him. I mean, it took about eight months for him to get tested. She did get him into a special class. I do think it's important, though, to add that it was clear to me that good teachers do make a lot of difference in children's lives. It's not always a dramatic difference. It can be, just arranging a success for a child or just providing a child, particularly one who's been abused or neglected that astonishing revelation. She thinks I'm worth something, maybe I am. I can have lasting value.

We know that actually from some psychiatric studies of one psychiatric study, in particular of women who were sexually abused as girls, who very often remember a teacher who helped them get through it. Did you find any significant evidence of... Abuse? Physical abuse, yes. No. Well, lots of reason for suspicion. In some cases. And yet, never any evidence. No. In some other parts of the school and some other classrooms, occasionally the whole news would spill out. But basically, I think it's probably true for most teachers. Basically, she's just working on symptoms and in sort of stomach-turning possibilities. You know, they're sitting in front of you. Well, some of the descriptions of the children seem to indicate that they didn't have care. The same clothes for days or something like that. Yeah. There was a boy in her... Yes. Well, that's true. And there were children who were allowed to stay up past midnight watching TV. You know, these are fifth graders have to get up in the morning around six to go to school.

That's terrible. That may be the worst thing about TV. Forget the licentiousness in the violence. Kids stay up past midnight watching it. Given the climate for reform in education in some places, how can we affect some of this? If many communities simply aren't willing to pay for it. Is there some other way to... Well, somebody's going to have to pay somewhere along the line if we really want to change things. Because my sense is that if we want to reform education, we've got to start where education actually takes place. And I think the first place to start would probably be with teachers. We need a lot more information. We've got quite a lot. We can use some more about the effect of pay raises. But maybe even more important than pay about ways of improving working conditions and just the effectiveness of teachers. But across the board improvements are necessary in our faculties. And they're necessary in order to raise the status of teachers in order to recruit good people.

I have to think that the property tax is an insane way to try to finance education. It's inherently unfair. And I think we may be seeing... You know, we may be in the next decade. Texas has. Yes, and maybe that over the next decade we'll see an end to that. I don't know what that's going to mean. I mean, you know, I'd hate to see rigid federal regulations imposed through the money that come to local districts. There's already too much of that in our state anyway. I mean, our state put up a whole lot of new money not so long ago when the Massachusetts miracle was still taking place. And for lots and lots of new programs. And Mrs. Ajax said to me when it all had ended, I'm sure that it did some good somewhere. But I as a classroom teacher never saw any difference. So I think, you know, a much more enlightened approach to reform is needed. I can't lay out a prescription for it. I'm not a presidential commission, you know. I do think, you know, there are recipes for reform that will be appropriate in some school districts that wouldn't work at all on others.

But the one thing that we know now, we do know that there won't be any reform that will work unless teachers are enthusiastic about it and are willing to put it in place. Otherwise, it'll just be stuff that's not on paper. These institutions are geniuses at filling out the proper forms, you know, and not doing much else. You cited some books on education that were written 20, 25 years ago. Has there been a generation of change in the assessments of the problem? Well, I mean, one of the distressing things is to look at some of those books, particularly the sociologies of teaching and see how little some things have changed. The status of teachers. But again, I'm talking generally, there are enormous differences, you know, from one region to another, from one district to another. And there were, I do think, though, that one of the big differences that falls on teachers' backs anyway is that there are some changes in the problems that children are bringing with them into school, and inhumanly affect how easy they are to educate.

And I have in mind, you know, drugs and teenage pregnancy has seemed to me to two big changes. I'm awful suspicious of that notion that things are always getting worse, you know, or that things were much better just a little while ago. I do think that the status of teachers in this country has never been very good. I mean, I have plenty of evidence for that. But I think we are seeing, we have some real problems in some of our schools. Our teachers are just feel put upon, abused, and they're kind of almost, you know, and they just lost interest in their jobs. There are too many teachers like that. I mean, one teacher like that is too many. What about the curriculum itself? I'm not so worried about that. And certainly as far as the elementary school goes, you know, there was this great cry for back to basics. But frankly, all that was. The slogan was doing, was expressing nostalgia for curricula where it was already in place. What are you going to teach elementary school kids besides science, math, English, you know, reading, so on. Now, as for techniques, as for the techniques for doing that, I mean, there's a great deal that can be done training teachers. I mean, there's been a lot of very useful research and techniques for teaching the academic subjects.

Unfortunately, they don't seem to get to the classroom very often. I was kind of horrified at some of the examples of the written expressions of some of the students. Yeah, they were pretty horrifying. And they're horrifying also. It was the fact that at the beginning of the year half the class didn't know a name of the country that lived in. That's fifth grade. By the end of the year, they all did. You know, one of the things that I thought was better. And it was happening in a lot of classrooms in that school. When I went to elementary school, in fact, all the way through junior high, I never wrote anything except one paper. I had a junior high that I copied out of an encyclopedia. These kids wrote all the time. By the end of that year, many of them had improved enormously as writers. You know, I thought that was really quite cheerful. There were a lot of kids that had made tremendous academic progress. And there were some near miraculous moments for some. On the other hand, there were some, you know. You concentrated not only on the writing, but on their history lessons, as well. Was some of going on with that?

Yeah. Well, I thought it was. There were the lessons that she gave that I liked the most. She loved history. And that was the thing she was best at teaching. She was a terrible science teacher, but she was pretty good at teaching everything else. But she really loved teaching history. And they were often hilarious. They made the best copy. What about mathematics? She's a pretty good math teacher, particularly a good remedial math teacher. I think in part because she had a lot of trouble with it herself in school. But there's a lot that's known about teaching math that she could have benefited from. And yet, instead, what did she get? But a textbook salesman coming to the school to tell the teachers how to teach math. And it was a joke. What was the textbook selection there? The process. I think it was just the school administrators who chose the text. In closing, is there something that you'd like to bring out about this experience that you feel readers could also benefit by? Well, I guess it's more what I'd like a reader to come away feeling after reading this book. I'd like a reader to come away feeling that, glad that there are people like this, Mrs. Ajak in the world.

And realizing, first of all, this is a very difficult job. And that it is a job that really can make a difference. I also think that no one who reads this book should come away feeling very good about the way in which a lot of children in this country are being raised. I mean, I think it's horrifying. And I think that there's plenty of evidence of that in this book. And I think also we ought to realize that if we're going to lay these problems on our schools, ones that they didn't create and they can't solve themselves. I mean cocaine, I mean child abuse, and I mean TV. Then we're going to have to give them a lot more resources. If this is, in fact, the social service agency that we're turning it into. Our guest on forum has been Tracy Kitter. Mr. Kitter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for his book about the creation of a mini computer, the Soul of a New Machine.

His latest book about a fifth grade class in Holyoke, Massachusetts entitled Among School Children is published by Houghton Mifflin. The views expressed on this program do not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Texas at Austin or this station. Technical producer for forum, David Alvarez, production assistants for forum, Christine Drawer, Byron E. Belt, and Elliott George Garcia. I'm your producer and host, Olive Graham. Kassette copies of this program are available and may be purchased by writing forum cassettes, Longhorn Radio Network, Communication Building B, UT Austin, Austin, Texas, 78712. From the Center for Telecommunication Services, the University of Texas at Austin, this is the Longhorn Radio Network. I do think, though, that one of the big differences that falls on teachers' backs anyway,

is that there are some changes in the problems that children are bringing with them into school, that inevitably affect how easy they are at educate. And I have in mind, you know, drugs and teenage pregnancy. This week on forum, a year in the life of a fifth grade classroom.