Stumbling
Forward
Submitted
by Gregory
Greenleaf
Winslow High School
Winslow, Maine
Past teaching: freshman and sophomore
English
Present
teaching: senior English and introduction to drama
I am on a hill and am waiting for my dog to bring
back the bouncy pink ball we've played with for years.
On this March day the wind is strong and numbs my exposed fingers.
The ground, though bare of snow, is still frozen, and the grass is the
color of my creamy morning coffee. Only
the calendar day proves it is spring. Another
toss and again I am waiting on a hill for my dog to boomerang back to me.
I glance over my shoulder and luxuriate in what I see: Penobscot Bay is
raging and devouring itself. The
crests of white remind me of the rabid froth I once saw smeared across the
muzzle of a mad raccoon. A pink
ball is dropped at my feet. Another
toss.
A child's wail pierces my solitude. I look below me and see two figures, a woman and a child, emerge from the beach and begin walking back to town. The wail travels on the wind's invisible cable lines and reaches me louder than before. As the child runs ahead, the woman stops and divides. She puts down a child she has been carrying. From a distance, the distressed bundle is simply a blue jacket and a red hat. It does not move as the mother walks away; rather, it turns to where it wants to go. The bundle unleashes a sound that combines all at once frustration, anger, and sorrow. Unmoved, the mother walks away up the hill, and the bundle unleashes. The mother is able to advance alone a few more feet before instinct tells her to turn around. Surprised by this turn of events, the blue blob quiets down. Neither advances towards the other. They look from afar like two gunfighters preparing for a draw on an empty street. In one swift motion the mother raises her right hand in the air and does an exaggerated goodbye wave--the kind of wave that I've seen in beauty pageants--and walks away.
I pick up the pink bouncy ball and hold it in my hand. As my dog obediently sits next to my feet and waits for the next toss, I gaze towards the bundle and await its decision. Another message is carried on the wind; I receive it and translate the code. The bundle stumbles after its mother. My dog chases the bouncy pink ball.
To refuse to do an action implies that a deliberated conscious decision has been made between two or more choices. Do adults truly refuse to be good role models, or do they sometimes act compulsively without consideration of how their actions impact themselves or others. I believe the latter is true. However, for those adults who refuse to be good role models for children, my solution to this problem would be to round them up and send them all to live in a retirement community in Florida where opportunities to encounter children and negatively influence them are as rare as sightings of pink flamingoes in Maine! Who should be of more concern for our society, rather, are folks who show an inability or a powerlessness to be positive role models for kids. These are the people, parents in particular, who strive to be good role models but fail. Thus, the question we should be asking ourselves is why some adults are unable to be good role models for children?
In the second act of Eugene O’Neill’s play A Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Mary Tyrone, while in the clutches of a morphine induced high, tells her children that “None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.” Mary’s observation reminds me that we are all in some sense damaged goods. Such a result is simply a consequence of living life. For some reason, though, some people are able to transcend life’s brutality and find happiness and meaning while others get stuck in the mire and pain which is their past. The reasons for this are unknown to me, but the effects of living with a mired individual are not.
Let’s begin with an examination of two real life examples of parents who displayed an inability to be good role models for their children. The first story is set in a wealthy community located in a suburb of a major metropolitan city in California and was told to my wife by our mutual friend Rick, an Episcopal minister. Rick, who moved to California a year ago to take a position in a church, believes that one of the main issues of his ministry there will be to help teenagers who are heavily using drugs and drinking alcohol. According to Rick, the parents of these teenagers are sincerely distressed about the self-destructive lifestyle their kids are living. Unfortunately, many of the parents who bemoan the actions of their children are the same parents who are fighting their own battles with chemical addiction. They do not see a connection between their own battles with alcohol/drugs and their children’s use of addictive substances.
Today’s youth do not respond to a “Do what I say, not as I do” model of upbringing. They look to parents and other influential adults to provide them with models for behavior and ideals to live by. Teenagers are keen observers of hypocrisy and are acutely affected when the adults they look up to fail them because it only reinforces their own tendency to view the world with disillusioned eyes. Consequently, if the majority of what they witness as children is primary care-givers wallowing in a daily drudgery of destructive, self-absorbed behavior, what is the most that we can realistically expect from them when they become teenagers, surely one of the most grueling and stressful times of life? Imitation is the highest form of flattery, but it can also be the highest form of mockery.
The idea that an adult may be powerless to be a role model for a child is certainly evident in this next example, a situation my wife, a minister in the United Church of Christ, witnessed several years ago. One humid summer day she made a pastoral visit to a woman at her home. The woman, a mother of three young boys, was a married stay at home mom. This particular visit made an impression on my wife because while they were both sitting and talking on a couch, the mother would allow her sons to climb on her and jump from her shoulders, head, and legs. “I could see that she was being physically hurt by their actions, but she did nothing to stop them from using her body like a trampoline,” my wife told me, “and it was only later when I discovered that her husband physically and sexually abused her that her inability to correct her sons’ behavior so they would not hurt her made sense to me. Her self-esteem was so low that she could not say no to them, and they knew it and took advantage of that fact.”
In response to statements that women should just leave abusive relationships if they do not want to be abused, advocates who work with and offer support to victims of domestic abuse testify that it is simply not that easy for a woman to leave. The abuser, through physical and emotional violence, acquires too much control over the woman for her to step back and after years of abuse make the rational decision to leave. In addition, even if a woman wanted to leave, where would she go? With what money would she use to live on? Could she be sure that she would maintain custody over the children? And so she stays. Neither the abuser, who is unlikely to initiate a change in his own learned behavior, nor the abused, who is going to need the assistance of a number of community resources to find the personal strength to leave, raise their children. And the children grow up with a distorted understanding of what a loving relationship is like which increases the likelihood that they too will participate in the cycle of abuse as adults. And they raise their kids, and all this time not once has any adult “refused” to be a good role model.
The children of the jailed, the chemically addicted, the poor, the snobs, the disenfranchised, the ignorant, the racists, the homophobics, the alcoholics, the unloving, the sexually abusive, the vanished—I am their twelfth grade English teacher. I am also that raging child caught between a decision to advance or retreat. Behind me is another job, an easier way to make a living. What lies ahead are hours of grading, low pay, angry parents, uninterested students, high stakes testing, frustration, budget cuts, and inadequate resources. But I stumble forward, screaming and raging, because I know that only ahead of me will I find self-fulfillment. This fulfillment comes in the classroom when my students and I work on writing essays or reading literature that is meaningful and empowering. I use the word empower to mean using self-knowledge and knowledge of the world to make reasoned decisions that will allow a person to lead a happy and healthy life. We teachers sometimes forget that empowerment is a derivative of meaningful teaching. We forget that we have the power to empower because often all society seems to want us to do is help students do well on a state mandated multiple choice exam. Our task is much more complicated. When we empower our students, we give them the ability to find themselves. The more students we empower the more adults we will have in the future who will naturally be good role models for children. Society can help teachers by giving us the resources that would make our job easier. That requires money. In addition, we should all offer more support for organizations like Literacy Volunteers and Habitat for Humanity whose mission is to empower and educate adults. Finally, all parents can make sure their children know they love them. That requires time.
Questions regarding the required reading
A
gregory greenleaf production
Q1. How unusual was the six year old boy who commented upon the problem of evil?
I think meeting such children is extremely rare because young children, at least the ones I have encountered, have limited abstract reasoning abilities. This child made a comparison between the irregular motion of stars and human behavior! I would be impressed if an adult spoke as figuratively as the boy did, so for a six year old to do it simply astounds me.
Sometimes teachers meet students who remind them of themselves. Sadly, Mike reminds me of myself when I was in college, not a senior in high school! Although philosophy is not taught in public schools, Mike utilized me in class and after school to discuss some ideas he had thought or read about in one of his books. Over the course of the year we’ve had conversations about Platonic forms, relative idealism, identity, God, ethics, forgiveness, and evil. He so enjoyed reading Crime and Punishment in class that he went out and bought The Brothers Karamzov and read that. I never told Mike what he should think about each topic he raised but encouraged him to keep an open mind and not to feel he had to figure everything out before he was twenty. That was unnecessary. Some people have a black and white/good or bad moral perspective. Mike’s mind welcomes the grayness his ideas and readings create for him. That impresses me and is the quality I most admire in him.
Q2. As I noted above, I was surprised to read that young children may possess the maturity to reason abstractly. The same can be said for “ethical introspection.” According to the dictionary, to be introspective requires a person to be reflective about his or her own inner life; therefore, to hold that young children have to capacity to think critically about their ethical values is not a position I find easy to support. However, I do think young children possess a conscience. A conscience is something that a person does not have to find and reflect on. It makes itself known through our emotions. Where it comes from, nature or nurture, is a question I’ll leave to the experts. Whatever the answer, I believe children feel its presence from an early age and use it to determine what is right and wrong behavior. In my opinion, children feel their ethics more than they reflect upon them.
Q3. This question irritates me. I initially wanted to plead innocent to the charge of teaching morality. It scares me to think I do this because it makes me feel rather arrogant. I, Gregory Greenleaf, will teach you right from wrong. Sounds easy, right? Well, racism and homophobia and classism and all the other phobias and isms are learned prejudices Although I would like to think I am not a prejudiced person, I know that I am. And I should teach morality? Yet, in some way or other we all have prejudices, whether we acknowledge them or not. I acknowledge mine, and I work hard to corral my prejudices. Maybe it is because I have acknowledged my prejudices to myself and to my students that qualifies me to teach morality. I teach morality with humility.
And what exactly do I teach? One lesson I teach tries to help students acknowledge their own prejudices. This is not an easy task because the vast majority of students do not believe they possess any type of prejudice. We begin by reading the novel Yoruba Girl Dancing by Simi Bedford. Set in the late forties and early fifties, it is a story about a girl, Remi, who leaves her Yoruban culture at the age of six and travels to England to attend school. The story offers many examples of racism, and students react passionately against the way Remi is treated. One scene in the story that prompts a lot of discussion is when Remi travels to a clothing store to buy her school uniform. When Remi tells the sales-assistant the name of her school, the sales-assistant looks up in her records the school’s uniform color. Remi is informed that she will have to purchase a uniform in the color “nigger brown.” My students were shocked to discover that a shade of brown was once commercially described in such a way and it was acceptable.
One of the post reading projects my students do is take a test that measures a person’s prejudicial inclinations. It is a test that can be taken through the Southern Poverty Law Center’s website. This psychological test compares a person’s subconscious feelings about two groups of people. For example, students can check their attitudes about people who are fat or thin, gay or straight, white or black, young and old, and a number of other categories. The majority of people who take the white versus black test usually end up scoring like I do and the majority of Americans do, even blacks. We have “a strong automatic preference for white people.” Once my students discover this about themselves, many are quick to deny the result. Some even retake the test several times to try to get a score that is less troubling. After the test we talk about the ways we acquire prejudices and what we can do once we acknowledge our own prejudices. We also read an article from Psychology Today called “Why We Hate” and discuss its content.
I once team taught a unit about the Holocaust with a history teacher. He taught the history of the Holocaust, and my students read The Diary of Anne Frank. One of our final projects was to build a bulletin board memorial using photos of children who were killed in the Holocaust. Yes, morality can be taught in all types of classes. I know I do in mine.
Q4 There is a Sylvester the cat and Tweety cartoon where Sylvester has an opportunity to finally eat the rather annoying little yellow bird. Before he can gobble his feathery appetizer, however, he is visited by a tiny Sylvester angel and a tiny Sylvester devil. Of course, each pleads his case as to which action should be taken. If I remember correctly, the little devil disposes of the little angel. This gives Sylvester the opportunity to ignore his conscience. The symbolic battle between the conscience and the deadly sins as a debate between a little angel and a little devil that takes place on the shoulders is part of our cultural imagination. It is also a visual representation of what happens when a person is a moral witness. To be a moral witness is an active engagement. When we are moral witnesses we make a conscious decision to either construct or modify, affirm, or dispose of our moral values. Put more simply, it is an opportunity for me to “practice what I preach.”
My first year of teaching was extremely difficult. Not only did I have to create units and learn how to grade papers with a rubric, I also had to figure out how to “keep under the radar.” In Maine the first two years at a school are probationary. That means that a school can fire a teacher without having to give a reason. Thus, new teachers who want to be hired back for the following school year try not to create conflict or become known as troublemakers. The school I was teaching in had a very conservative curriculum and also emphasized that teachers “teach the curriculum.” One of the novels I had to teach was Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan. I had never read it before but looked forward to teaching it because I believed it might interest reluctant readers. Little did I know that the book I was going to teach is extremely racist and portrays Africans as little more than animals that need a white god to protect as well as punish them. Tarzan is truly the “Lord of the Jungle” in that he not only defeats alligators and tigers in hand to hand combat, but he also rules over the African “savages” who are described as ugly and just slightly more evolved than the ape. How does a teacher teach a racist novel? How does a first year teacher teach a novel in a school where it is a required text? Quietly and truthfully, I determined. Looking back I wish I had raised my objections and fought to remove it from the curriculum. I didn’t because I wanted the job that had been difficult to find. I wanted a good reference from my principal. I wanted a consistent income. I am proud to say that I taught that book in such a way that my students learned about the consequences of colonization in Africa, learned the definition of the word stereotype, were able to recognize stereotypes when they occurred in Tarzan, and determined for themselves that Tarzan was only good to read because it allows one to see how racist ideas and beliefs can be promulgated in society through a simple adventure story. By the way, I resigned my position at the end of that school year. When I left, my bridges weren’t burning, but they were pretty wobbly!
Q5. Courage: “To follow your bliss.” I take Joseph Campbell’s words of advice for my definition for courage because I have seen that living an authentic life is one of the most challenging endeavors a human being can undertake. To live authentically is especially challenging for teenagers. Teenagers desire acceptance from their peers, but they also want to rebel against social rules they find inhibiting. To do so sometimes risks “not fitting in.” For example, Jack is a student at my school who is “out of the closet.” I admire his courage to tell people he is gay and consequently expose himself to ridicule and violence for the sake of being true to himself. Although Jack has been called names on the bus and at school and has even been threatened with violence, many students accept Jack and are concerned about his welfare. Still, the murder of Mathew Shepard lingers in my mind. Jack lives in a culture that is predominately homophobic, and it will continue to be until our children learn to embrace diversity and not fear it. For the sake of Jack and other gay young adults, we educators must speak against homophobic comments when they occur in the classroom and in the teachers’ room. We must model the courage that students like Jack exhibit every school day.
Q6. The ability of young children to hold a sophisticated discussion about what it means to be courageous impressed me. I was most struck by one girl’s comment that “you become courageous.” Her comment reminded me of a discussion I had with students concerning how each of us knows we are a good person. My students and I were reading Macbeth. I presumed they would intensely dislike Macbeth because he betrayed his country and murdered several people in order to hold onto power. However, one student raised his hand to meekly say that he did not dislike Macbeth but felt pity for him. I asked if he meant that he felt pity because Macbeth failed to reach his full potential as a great leader. He clarified his point and said that he felt pity for Macbeth because Macbeth did not have the will power to do what he knew was right. “Deep down,” he said, “Macbeth was a good person.” As a class we went back through the text and found passages where Macbeth expressed reluctance to kill the king. Sadly, the lure of power and the urgings of his wife were too powerful to deny. I challenged the class to explain to me how someone can at the same time be a cold-blooded murderer and deep down a good person. Our discussion talked about peer pressure and why teenagers sometimes do actions they know “deep down” are wrong. One student noted that we judge people by what they do and not what they feel inside. Thus, Macbeth did not deserve sympathy because “actions still speak louder than words.” Macbeth, for all the talk, was an evil man. Yet, other students were able to empathize with Macbeth because they were able to reduce his actions to an incidence of peer pressure. He deserved our pity more than condemnation. When I drove home that night, I thought about our conversation and was delighted that it had happened. I also was delighted with the fact that some of my students had found a quality in this Scottish nobleman that they could relate to-the power of peer pressure!
Q7. The word witness implies passivity. A witness is simply a person who hears or sees what others are doing or saying. However, in the reading the word is used to refer to the process of monitoring what one believes or values in relation to how one acts. More specifically, to be a good person requires one to be a good witness. That requires a person to be actively engaged with his or her own moral values and to see that those values are not subjugated by daily temptations. Based on this view, a good person is a work in progress.
Q8. I expect my seniors to behave in class and to speak and act in a constructive, not a destructive manner. If a student is disruptive in my classroom or is trying to get another student in trouble, I calmly send him or her to the office where they will receive three hours detention. When the class is over, I meet with the student and tell the student that I do not tolerate disruptions of any kind. I speak in a voice that is firm and sends the message: “Don’t mess with me.” What I have learned in my four years of teaching is that some students test teachers early in the school year. A teacher really has only one chance to make a memorable impression, or he or she will continue to be tested throughout the year. I make my strong impression and that is that. Students eventually learn where the line of acceptable and unacceptable behavior is, and they learn not to cross that line. It is my job to make sure that I am consistent about where I draw that line.
Q9. I know a lot of wonderful teenagers. They care about their community, they work hard to reach their potential, they are accepting of differences, they teach me things about the world I never knew, and they often exceed my expectations. I think the danger is not overestimating teenagers’ potential or capabilities but underestimating them. Yes, there are teenagers “out of control,” but it has been my experience that these kids come from home environments that are less than nurturing. As a teacher, all I can do to counter the “real world” is to provide for students a classroom that is safe and nurturing. Finally, despite all my kids are up against, including their own brain development, my kids know that I have high expectations because I believe in them. Sometimes a child just needs to be believed in. Sometimes that makes all the difference.
Q10. No. My school already does a program like White Hats, and I am in charge of it. As to the other pilot projects, my plate is full as it is. I’m also expecting my first child in September!