Teaching the mother tongue at Loyola Academy 1959-60. Teaching how to write. The paperback option. Bleeding on a composition. Hashing it out with students.
All was not social-problem-solving for me as a teacher. There was ever the classroom and the prospect of leading a roomful of boys to first place in tegional exams. These were taken, all on one day, at a dozen Jesuit high schools in the middle part of the U.S., including the New Orleans-based Southern Province. We believed in competition and made no bones about it.
You had to pass an entrance exam to get into a Jesuit school, and once in, you were grouped in A, B, C, etc. classes, top to bottom based on scores, no apologies given. Schools congratulated themselves on the height of their cutoff point, and still do, competing for the more promising students.
This was the Jesuit way, at Loyola and Ignatius, as it was the Dominican way at Fenwick and the Carmelite way at Mt. Carmel High on the South Side. So it was that the four Chicago-area high schools run by these three orders wanted their own days for entrance exams, fearing the effect on enrollment of a common exam day.
How so? These were days when many parents cared passionately about getting their kids into Catholic schools, and not just because public schools were lesser opportunities. If a boy was unsure of passing the test, he was wise to take a placement exam for a Christian Brothers school or other school committed to serve the general population. Call it elitism, or better, merit-based selection.
In the desperate days of 1959, on the other hand, exceptions to the selectivity model were made at Loyola, where students were needed to fill seats in empty classrooms. Mike English instituted a 1-K section, lower even than 1-J, for kids who would not have made it into Loyola but had money for tuition. The school’s existence was at stake: it was time for a fine-tuned departure from the Jesuit model, if not a dipping of the flag.
The also-rans were not for me, however. By this third year of my teaching, 1959-60, back under Knoepfle as principal and with the English-Reinke team at the helm, I was assigned A, B, and C classes, freshmen and sophomores, it being decided, apparently, that there was more bang to be gotten from the buck this way from Bowman, who was big on reading and writing but less so on discipline, or classroom management, which for these students was a minor issue. For me, therefore, were sections that moved briskly along. The boys came from families where reading was taken for granted. All had well above the minimum requirement for the reading habit. They were ready for the academic varsity.
The Jesuit high school writing series, by a Jesuit in Dallas, was very helpful. Freshman and sophomores used Correct Writing and Adult Writing respectively, about writing the sentence and the paragraph respectively. The books presented an orderly approach, offering dozens of rules, examples, and exercises. A four-year brown-cover handbook was eminently citable. In it each rule was tagged with letter and number. We went over them so often, I could just scribble F-11 on a paper, and the student would know it meant his sentence wandered without focus. As a writer I have thanked my stars that I taught freshman and sophomore English to such students out of such a book. It made me a copy editor for life.
The literature book -- too big, too heavy, too expensive, and not especially imaginative -- was something else. We turned to paperbacks -- cheap, packable in a hip pocket, offering an unlimited store of reading to match each boy's capacity and interests. Boys could pack a book in a hip pocket, have it ready any time. It was literacy on the go. I'd order a supply of books from the school book store, and they'd be ready in a week for assigned reading by all.
The paperback option permitted me to assign books as the year progressed, gauging student progress and acting to suit. For paperbacks at low rates, I had the book store. But I also had school and public libraries. Every kid had to get a public library card. The book store became a fall-back option. Better they got the book out of a library, because it could be habit-forming, I figured. One student lived in an unincorporated area near Winnetka and had to make do somehow as to libraries. But it's a land of public libraries, and my requirement got boys to darken their doors at least for the time it took to get a card.
Note that I had authority in the matter: they cared how well they did, their parents cared, they built on previous experience. We were in step with each other. Even the burly St. Ignatius student who read his first book as a sophomore had not been so culturally determined as to shrug his shoulders at the possibility.
Taylor Street was rough and ready, but it did not penalize reading. The paisano kid was not worried about acting Irish a la Beverly, as black kids worry about acting white, or defiantly reject the concept. This is a case for black kids of overcoming their environment. We all have to do that, one way or another, picking and choosing what we keep, negotiating within ourselves with the impulses and instincts we grow up with. Taking self-ownership, you might say. With a little luck, we come to terms in the matter. Or don't.
At Loyola my students read books I assigned on which they were tested for content-absorption. And they read books of their own choosing, for which I gave extra credit if they could show they had read it well enough to answer my quick questions about it at my desk at the end of the school day. They knew where to find me and could come by in the 15 minutes or so after the final bell, hand me the book, at which I gave a quick look, figuring out a few main fact-oriented questions on the spot.
There were no book reports, just reading and remembering a reasonable amount of what was read. Neither were there book reports for assigned books: I'd quiz them 100 pages at a time, a series of five quick questions every few days as they read assigned pages, all fact-based, again the sort of thing they could be expected to know. The answers were short, on half sheets of paper. I could mark the quizzes in a jiffy that night, return them the next day. This was important so that each would have a record of how he was doing and have regular reminders of the quizzes' importance. He'd know right away in fact, when we worked over the five questions just asked.
Here’s where the iron was struck while hot. Discussion focussed on the immediate issue of whether the kid got the answer right or wrong. They would grin or grimace as they learned the right answer. Sometimes they argued their case. If the argument was good enough, I’d concede. Those arguments were worth it, allowing us all to have our say, including me. These were great moments with kids who knew how to read the material at hand and cared about what they read.
I assigned no book reports, as I said. They had been the bane of my existence as a student, when I would groan at hearing friend Bill brag about writing one in 47 minutes. Mine would take days, as I told too much about the book, which I had loved reading but got all tied up writing about.
I wanted my students to write, of course. They did a composition a week, often based on the book being read, so that they could react (with evidence) to what they were reading without writing a review as such, which is something proven writers get paid for regularly. These were unproven writers getting the hang of it. I was looking for sentences and paragraphs that made sense and were spelled right and had decent syntax and due respect for data.
I also told them how long they should write, say 300 to 500 words. I did not want them to kiss off the assignment, nor did I want them to ramble. I was not interested in someone's slapdash, loosely constructed life story. Some could write long and not waste words, but most could not. On the other hand, if one of them pulled it off, I did not complain.
Correcting the essays, I would bleed all over the sheet with my red ballpoint, often using proofreading marks supplied by the brown handbook. Such a series this was, one of Loyola University Press's finest. It was dropped years later at Loyola and probably in other Jesuit schools -- "change for the sake of change," one of my former students, then an English teacher at Loyola, told me. A shame.
The amount of red marking had nothing to do with the grade of a given composition. I once showed a two- or three-pager to the class with as much red as typescript, to which I gave an A+ for its intelligence and overall excellence but also because it was venturesome and detailed and gave me much to comment on, even to correct. The writer got his money's worth, I told the class. His parents’ money, that is.
Compositions were due on Friday. I returned them on Monday. We discussed them then. There was much discussion, with plenty of opportunity for me to drive home various writing principles. Getting quizzes and papers back pronto was of the essence. It was important they knew their mistakes early, so as to avoid them next time around. This was writing to learn how to write, not to pass a test.
— Later, alligator . . .
— More to come, from Company Man: My Jesuit Life, 1950-1968 —