How to teach kids of all colors. Require memorization, reading, writing, says this superannuated English teacher (leaving 3rd "r" for others to prescribe). Also, Annie, get your gun . . .

Posted 6-12-96, offered here again as a public service . . .

Not Out of Africa author . . . "It is not I who speak, but my skin that speaks for me?" asks scholar Mary Lefkowitz in her book rebutting Afrocentrists' claim that Western civilization came out of Africa. She is addressing the question whether she as a white person is not to be believed by black people. Smart people, black and white, will be skeptical in all sorts of situations. But should skin color be a determinant?

The not quite visioner . . . The old train-derailment joke went this way: Finnegan the investigator, criticized for overly detailed accident reports, cut it to the bone. His next report read: "Off again, on again, gone again, Finnegan." So was I off again, on again about my speaking at a Vision 2000 meeting on education, until it was too late: they got someone else.

In my on-again state, I had this to say: Here are some things schools should do, in no particular order and with a superannuated English teacher's bias: They should require memorization. In geometry they memorize formulas, I assume. Play-acting means knowing lines. Baseball averages at least used to be a piece of cake -- Luke Appling's .388 in 1936, etc. Why not poetry?

Tell me not in mournful numbers . . . Hail to thee, Blithe Spirit . . . I wandered lonely as a cloud . . . We few, we happy few [to fight on St. Crispin's Day] . . . Friends, Romans, countrymen . . . Margaret, are you grieving? . . . (Hopkins) I caught this morning morning's dauphin (Hopkins again) . . . [and even] Poems are made by fools like me, but only God can make a tree . . .

That's from being a schoolboy in the '40s and early '50s. You just had to be there and do what you never would have done on your own. This is school, to lead you beyond what you had in mind for yourself.

Secondly, schools should press reading vigorously. Make bookworms out of those kids. I mean it. So much operates to make them listeners and watchers and passive reactors. Put them to work reading, deciphering from letters to words, words to chapters, chapters to whole shelves of books. It is the business of schools to promote this. Again, it's a case of what no one else does. (Don D. from Taylor Street had never read a book as a St. Ignatius High sophomore. I started him with John R. Tunis, whom I'd read as a seventh-grader. He loved it.)

This reading prepares them for thinking and doing -- "maketh the full man," said Francis Bacon. Discussion, a third recommendation, makes them "ready" -- quick on feet, agile, prepared for give and take, listening and reacting with a view to on-spot communication. Very important, and already a part of today's schooling. Indeed, discussion and work groups are an advance on '40s schooling, where whole-class operation was the norm almost exclusively.

Fourth, schools should require much writing -- "across the curriculum" is the going expression, and that's fine. There's a rub here, however, and it's who's going to read and comment on what they write?

I'm sure teachers have many good ideas here. In the '50s I had freshman and sophomore boys publish their work, compiling a collection for reading by teachers and others. OPRF High School history department goes way beyond that with its marvelous annual, "Interpretations," about which more anon.

More to the point, who will read and comment? Writing "maketh the careful man," said Bacon. But not if it's done carelessly. The teacher has to be ongoing audience and critic, and this takes lots of time. Which brings us to the cost of schooling and the bothersome question, how big can classes be without sharply limiting this ongoing critique of students' writing? You may ask that. I certainly do.

More pedagogy . . . In our meetings about how to spend the $1/4 million on "academic support," there has been mention of teaching with a view to African-American learning styles, as if there's something so unusual about A-A students as to require a whole new set of methods -- a sort of "It is not I who speak, but my skin that speaks for me," as author Lefkowitz bemoaned.

In this case it's not skin color -- though we assume that’s supposed to help -- but whether you understand A-A culture, can talk A-A language, etc. Bull.

We have a common, overriding culture and lots of individual styles. A good teacher senses what each student needs and tries to bridge whatever gap there is from age, experience, etc. But an A-A culture that works for all or most A-A kids? Bull.

Kids of all stripes and inclinations spot phonies. We don't fool them. William Stringfellow in the '60s made it regularly to Harlem, wearing always the same snappy clothes he wore mid-town and downtown. He was a WASP Episcopalian lawyer of privileged background and did not try to disguise it. A Harlem friend commended him for not dressing down.

So with black kids, who like any others will take advantage of a teacher who, embracing this black learning style business, decides they learn best by rapping with each other during class, rather than listening and taking notes and otherwise cooperating.

I say beware of the pedagogy that makes much of being black or white or anything else. Everyone has to learn to read in our society, whatever his or her alleged verbal richness. Good reading teachers will push their charges to reading well, they won't avoid the issue by letting them chatter away lest their self-image suffer by being told to be quiet.

More wisdom on targeting black kids . . . It's a bad idea, one of our committee members told the staff person in charge of our work on spending the $1/4 million. He's against dividing students "along racial or gender lines" -- black males are the target preferred by some. Target them along lines of achievement, grade average, etc. -- "objective criteria," he says. Otherwise you play a game you can't win, I say.

Another question is whom to target even using scores, grades, etc. -- all underachieving students or the very low-achievers. Pro-referendum campaign literature a few months back specified all. The community voted the $1/4 million (as part of a much bigger amount), in other words, having been told it was not just for flunks and dropouts. The committee that made that pitch -- that promise, we may say -- was co-chaired by a PONTOON leader, by the way. Now PONTOON, $1/4 million in hand, wants it spent along rather different lines.

Readers retaliate . . . The worm turns, and what do you get?

* Reader J., a North Side Chicagoan, thinks I might have picked a name for this sheet with better initials. Like the lad confessing mortal sin, I can only say it seemed a good idea at the time.

Reacting to the account of PONTOON's performance at the high school board meeting, he found it gratifying because it showed him there are at least as many assholes here as in his condo association. I have sent him the appropriate passage from Seneca -- from his essay "on wrath" -- for soothing his savage breast.

* Reader G., an Oak Parker, considered my account of the PONTOON performance "inspired" -- I am not making this up -- but wants to target low-end performers. Not especially blacks, but "ones with lots of F's regardless of race." Now you’re talkin'.

* Reader L., another Oak Parker, says he read Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire years ago but remembers little of it. He does remember the place where someone is running alongside the Emperor's horse on a road trip and wants me to tell him when I encounter it so he can read it again. Should I do it?

Annie get your gun permit? Feminists better get on the pistol-packin' mama bandwagon if they really care about controlling one's body, says Laura Ingraham in the 5/13 Wall St. Journal. The dude who thinks the gun may be loaded will think twice, the argument goes.

A friend on the West Side 30 years ago told me of her friend who had to wait often at night for a bus and carried a small gun at all times, in her muff. The man who asked her for a light was a dead man, which is what I call taking back the night.

Word to the wise . . . To keep getting this Blithe Spirit, you must say you want it, at least indirectly. If you did so once, that's sufficient. A few of you, holding positions of prominence or held in special affection by me, get it either way. Sorry. It's the price of fame. Anyone may stop the mailing by declining to receive it.