Mr. Dallas Says, “You Have to Care Enough to Know” (Pt. 1)

Knowledge is power, but so is ignorance. The careful deployment of ignorance has as much to do with the state of our ghetto schools as anything we know. What kind of ignorance? Well, if you have to ask, you don’t need to know.

It is astounding and embarrassing how little we need to know in order to work in a ghetto school. That is, it is embarrassing how little we need to know about what our students value, how they see the world and why they do what they do. Imagine the audacity of a teacher or administrator, newly hired by a Catholic school, who held forth in class about the evils of the pope. Imagine the audacity of a teacher or administrator, newly hired by the Scarsdale school district (average S.A.T. score: 1300), who held forth in class about the evils of the Ivy League. Now, witness the audacity of teachers and administrators in our ghetto schools who daily hold forth about how their students have no manners (home training, for those who do care to know).

Mr. Stickfigure has never been a pizza-party and soda-pop teacher. Rarely has he offered sugary incentives for work well-done or otherwise. On one occasion when he did provide some paltry refreshments to his class, however, he discovered what he should have never doubted: To a student, each kid offered their heartfelt and unprompted “thank you.”

Now, I am by nature a fan of home training and consider good manners next to godliness. As my students voiced their appreciation, I began to feel embarrassed. Embarrassed, in part, because the meager treats I had offered on this single occasion did not seem worthy of my students’ dignified responses. Embarrassed, more, because I was witnessing something intimately familiar to me: I was witnessing children who had all been taught good manners by their parents, and yet it appeared to me as a surprise. Why had it taken me so long to discover this fact? Because it had taken me so long to give my students something to say thank you for. When I finally did, I saw not just my students and their parents, but my parents, too. In my students’ eyes I saw my mom and dad’s eyes when I returned home from being a guest at someone else’s house, and in my students’ voices I heard my parents intently enquire: “Did you say your thank yous?”

Mr. Stickfigure still does not offer many non-academic rewards, but he has never since complained about the parents of his students.

Mr. B. Dallas, among the most distinguished of my distinguished colleagues, often says, “You have to care enough to know.” His aphorism crystallizes the central dynamic of urban education. Teachers must care enough to know what our students value and what they believe in. We must care enough to know what our students’ parents value and what they believe in. When we care enough to know, we will know everything we need to educate our students.

Sadly, Mr. Stickfigure would add that the converse is also true: If we don’t know, we don’t care.

On Responsibility, Pt. 1

Responsibility is a pernicious discourse. It is a name used in vain. As a thing, responsibility can only be taken, but when we talk we are always giving it away. No wonder it becomes such a worthless currency to those we pawn it off on.


We pawn it off on our students, telling them what they are responsibily for. Maybe we should blame Oliver Wendell Holmes, sitting on the Supreme Court, working out precisely who will pay the consequences for everything in the universe. Maybe that is when we began to confuse responsibility with liability.


The ideas are similar enough that we have allowed ourselves to confuse them. Liability refers to consequences and assigns who will pay for them. Listen to yourself the next time you say "responsibility." Couldn't you have more precisely said "liability"?


"You are liable for getting your work in on time."


"You are liable for your behavior."



Don't teachers tell students this all of the time? And don't we mean that they will have to pay the consequences for how they work and how they act?



But we are not lying to them when we say these things. Worse, we are misleading them. It is true that students are liable for many things, but we don't say "liability," we say "responsibility." Who can blame students for coming to shun responsibility, having learned of it through this sad, defeated discourse?



Responsibility can only be taken. It must be accepted and embraced. Only then does it become empowering. How do we find ourselves so bamboozled as to debase this noble notion and foist it upon our students as a liability?

What Should a Teacher Do During the Summer? Part 1

However I respond to this question today, I will be sure to have violated my answer by September. Nevertheless, it seems apropos to ask ourselves at this time of year: What should teachers be doing now? Mr. Stickfigure, for one, does not think we should be teaching summer school. This is not to say that we should be doing what Mr. Stickfigure does during the summer, which is almost nothing except for going on killer vacations with the beautiful Mrs. Stickfigure. For my part, I only went to school during the summer once in my life, and that was to finish the last class for my master’s. Thus, I can say with certainty that my summers were better spent during the previous 18 years of my education. Now, teaching summer school is not the same as going to summer school, I’m sure. Still, I am a better student than I am a teacher. During the school year I am driven, as a teacher, to offer my pupils a learning experience that, as a student, I could appreciate myself. It’s a round-about way of doing the job, I know, but my instincts as a student are more dependable than my instincts as a teacher. And what my spidey-senses have always told me is that someone who never wanted to go to summer school should not sign up to teach it.

That’s just Mr. Stickfigure, however, and we already know he’s a bit off. Why can’t the normals teach summer school? Or at least the teachers who are better teachers than they were students, can’t they teach summer school? Sure, and more power to them. In fact, they will need it. Mr. Stickfigure crawls to the end of June like a runner with an Iron Lung at the Iron Man finish line. The thought of manning-up for another round in July is tiring to think, let alone to undertake. Fortunately, schools are staffed by more resilient folks than Mr. Stickfigure. Still, teaching during the summer takes endurance, and endurance takes pacing. Let’s just say that Mr. Stickfigure routinely forgets to save energy for that last quarter lap.

But even those teachers with greater endurance than Mr. Stickfigure should not be teaching summer school, because summer school is un-American. Let us not forget that summer is the only season when school is traditionally not in session. Both teachers and students who go to summer school should be the first to realize that this is not summer school, this is de facto year-round schooling. After all, fall, winter and spring are already accounted for: add summer school and do the math. It should not have to be stated, but year-round schooling is a well-known totalitarian mechanism which all honest, God-fearing, law-abiding Americans resist by nature.

We mustn’t forget that without summer vacation, there would be no summer as we know it in America. Summer in America is much more than a meteorological fact, it is a way of life—in all of the laden senses of that phrase. Summer is what forces us to create an alternate yearly calendar which stands in contradiction to the very laws of celestial motion. At any time, we must be able to translate between the years 2006, 2005-2006, and 2006-2007—any or each of which can describe the same or different times. We maintain this divided cosmos because it buys us time. Summer is what gives us time to grow two inches, get our braces removed, kiss somebody in another state. Summer is what forces us to find something to do with our own kids for two months. Summer is what gives us graduation and back to school and the beach and anticipation and beautiful cyclical asymmetry. And the space between the end of one school year and the beginning of the next is what gives us time for all of this. This is the space filled, like the snap of a cuff, by summer school.

From Mr. Stickfigure's Archive of the Unpublished

Saying Maybe to Urban Education

Maybe I’m starting to guess what happens to guys like me, if they’re lucky, who stay in urban education. Maybe we become those principals with the fierce eyes and the cutthroat dedication to our students’ performance. Maybe we even write books for educational publishing that outline our program and philosophy. Maybe we give seminars and get involved with teacher-training at the colleges. But always with that fierce look in our eyes, that look that says: “Get between me and these children’s test scores, and I’ll cut your throat!”

Good god, that’s not for me. I feel like the Adam of education. I look around at my brethren and I tell them, “I have seen it! ‘Twas a paradise I knew as a boy.”

Schools have to be based on children playing, don’t they? Yes, there must be discipline, but that starts with the adults, who must have the discipline to hold the world at bay, to make the space where their children can play together in an atmosphere of warmth and safety. Who believes, out in this godforsaken land, that what kids really need is a little time and room to play? Who has time to believe this when the children can barely read, barely do math, barely stay children another day?

But I have seen it, brothers and sisters.

And what was it, really, but a community raising its children the best that it could? Is that paradise so lost to us that to expect it of our communities and our schools is to expect the miraculous? Maybe it is too much to expect. Maybe we are too used to seeing our young men die in the street and our young women turn tricks there. Or maybe we thought those young men and women were not a part of our community. What were we teaching them in our schools before they were turned out? How many of them had enough time to play?

And how much more fierce will my stare have to be if I am to carve out the space to play for the little children of my ghetto school? I don’t think I could bear it. And I don’t think I could bear it if I succeeded and I had to look around at all of the other schools spitting our children back out onto the streets.

So put it this way: It’s fight or flight. Maybe it’s worth it to try, maybe I’d be lucky enough to succeed. Maybe someone else might get something from it. Maybe it’d make a difference. But I still don’t know if I can be one of those principals with eyes as fierce as silver badges.

When my eyes become that way, whole cities will move.

Until then, I make no promises to urban education.