The Waring School, the 1980s, Part One
This is the first part or chapter of a writing project the end of which is not yet in
sight. The project to start with will take me back to the 80s when
my wife, Josée, and I were teaching at the Waring School in Beverly,
Massachusetts.
It was a custom in the school at the time for both
students and teachers to keep idea and image cards, containing words and pictures,
although mostly words as those who liked to draw also kept sketch
books.
The cards were 3 by 5 index cards that we carried about
with us (I kept mine in the inside pocket of my jacket) and from which
we would read out loud to the others during a tutorial or writing
class.
Earlier today I was cleaning out a file cabinet,
preparing our coming move to Tampa, and I stumbled on a pile of my own
cards from that period. Unfortunately most of them are not dated, but
the few that are are from the eighties so I'll take this as the
time period of which I'm speaking.
The first card is dated, March
30, 1987. And I'm in a restaurant, the Lilas Rose, and it must be in
France where I was at the time, traveling with a group of juniors from
our school, on our annual French trip.
"This evening on the road
to Annecy there were men working on the new autoroute to Geneva.
Americans, I thought, are great road builders. We do other things well
also — but not many of these kind of things do we teach in our school.
"Listening
to the 'children' in the car. Subjects of conversation were likes and
dislikes, family, TV and movie personalities, the unusual things they
had noticed, like cars and people. Never once did I hear the word
France, or the French Revolution, or the French civilization (let alone
Chemistry or Physics), all the things we have them do in school, things that were not alive for them.
"But other things are, as I
realized while listening to them. Perhaps for this reason we only
succeed in school in putting their memories to work. School? That's
memorizing things, at least for the so-called good students. For all
the others, if they stay in school, school? That's behaving, doing what
they're told, and most of all listening to the teachers go on and on.
"Ideas?
That's what I do with myself, probably that's what I do to the
children, who themselves remain generally passive in respect to ideas.
Writing idea cards… perhaps this does force them to have ideas. But
only some do, most don't.
"The chattering I hear in the car. The
way they talk when they're not in school? What they talk about. During breaks, during lunch? Should
I start attending their lunches in order to listen to them? And myself,
when I'm not with them? What do I do? What do I do when I leave school?
Watch Hawaii Five-O and the like, NCAA basketball…?
Next in my
pile are six cards, the number 2 card missing, that give a brief
time line of genetic history between 1944 and 1972. I evidently copied
the notable events in this history from some publication, the name of
which I didn't note down on the card.
Today I would have taken
this history, as well as everything else that may interest me, from the
Internet, and rather than note down my takings on a card I would have
copied and pasted what I found into a document and then saved it onto
my computer's hard drive.
It's probably most of all because of
the Internet that I no longer carry idea cards in my vest pocket.
Actually, I almost never wear a vest. (In Tampa to where we're now
moving, we wear just shorts and t-shirts almost year round, and we never wear shoes and socks.)
Now I have a laptop
computer with wireless Internet access that fulfills most of my
communication needs. But I imagine that in a very short period of time
I'll have an i-phone and a Kindle, both of which would probably fit
into the deep pockets of my Cargo shorts and would become, perhaps, my
unique window (s) to the world.
Without a doubt the biggest
change in my own life, occurring when I was well into my fifties, was
the advent of the World Wide Web. Just 20 years ago my information came
nearly entirely from books and periodicals (I was no longer enrolled in
a University). Now, and for the past 10 years of so, the information I
need in order to live the way I want to live comes nearly entirely from
the Internet, and, if from books and periodicals, only from those that
I've first encountered, and in many instances only read, on the Web.
Now I'm back with my pile of
index cards from the 80s, the genetic history time line, from 1944 to
1970. Why those dates? I suppose I'll find the answer to that as I
reread my time line.
I smile now at what I was then, and at what I
may still be. Then I thought it was enough to tell the kids something for them to learn. Or at least I acted that way. And I still think, or at least act as if, it were enough
to tell my grandson something for him to learn it and make it his own,
which of course is never the case.
My assumption then was that I
needed only to familiarize myself with, say, the history of the major
developments in genetics, and then present that history in abridged
form to my students ("present" meaning what? — reading to them, telling
them, having them memorize it for a test?) and that they would learn it
no less well than I. Of course they never did. And why not? Because
only to me was that history interesting and important.
As I reread my genetic (history)
time line cards I realize that I've pretty much forgotten what I then
wrote down (and evidently presented to my students). I see I began with
1944 because that's the year that Avery and others identified the
molecule that carried the genetic information as deoxyribonnucleic acid
or DNA.
I don't see now why I stopped my timeline at 1972. Crick
and Watson's determination of the structure of the DNA molecule as a
double helix was in 1953, and in 1966 teams led by Nirenberg and
Khorana cracked the genetic code, demonstrating that each of 20 amino
acids is coded by a sequence of three nucleotide bases called a codon.
But what happened in 1972?
A couple of things I noted then on my
cards in regard to this history still greatly influence my view of
life, still make me wonder why the discoveries of science and
scientists have not replaced the texts of religion in our thinking
about what's most important in the schooling, if not education, of our
young.
"The genetic code," I wrote, "is the same in man, mouse,
and in all living creatures. And so far there is only one exception,
and it's not Jesus, let alone Mohammad, but a protozoan, the
Paramecian." And on the last card I wrote, "cancer, a cell gone berserk,
— the growth genes having been left on, like we may leave the gas stove
on when we leave for the weekend."
So there were two things on
these cards, two things that to me then, and to me now, seem important
to know, perhaps even vital. I made note of an underlying, fundamental
biological sameness to all life, that which ought to make us respect
all of life. And I referred to the biological control regulation that
is necessary for normal, healthy life, and that when not present results
in terrible things happening, in particular cancer.
I thought it
was important that my students grasp for themselves both of my
observations, but of course, as I only suspected then but now know,
there was absolutely no way I could give them my understanding of
anything at all.
Kids have to be ready, and educators as a rule
don't take into account their readiness, and that's why more than
anything else, kids learn so little of what they're "taught." When I'm
with my grandson who right at this moment is taking his first steps,
and is doing so without me, entirely on his own, I can only marvel at
what he has learned because he was ready.
Would that he could
learn everything in the way that he is now learning to walk (and
tomorrow will learn to talk). But instead of that his parents may soon
take him and put him into a class with others having only chornological
age in common with him, and expect him to learn to read and all the
rest, but of course for too many without my grandson's advantages that doesn't necessarily happen.
