Yesterday was a hard day of work at the prison. I was utterly defeated by the unbelief displayed by the kids. At first I took this to be nihilism, but it was not. There was a very narrow belief in the rightness of oneself. No they are not nihilists that would credit them with certain selflessness; they are anarchists. Each acting as sovereign unto themselves. This combined with all of the turbulent emotions and desires of any teen age boy is a dangerous mix, and could explain how many of them arrived in prison.
Do not worry, they did not manage to keep me down, I wouldn't be writing if I hadn't manage to pick myself up. But, the time I spent down in the dirt was instructive, it forced me to reexamine my strategy and the assumptions it was based on. I come out of Thursday's classes battered, bruised and knowing little more about my students, or how to teach them than the day before; however, I realized how unrealistic even my revised expectations were.
I know that my education is the result of 18 years of near continuous schooling by dedicated teachers with significant resources at their and my disposal. This was previously an abstract thought and it was easy for me to see the beginning and the end results and a few larger steps in between, but it is nearly impossible for me to see the whole process in all its incremental steps. I remember the difference between English Grammar class, and English Lit classes, I liked the latter and was bored out of my skull by the former. But, I cannot differentiate between 4th grade grammar and 6th grade grammar. The analytical thinking and writing skills nurtured and emphasized in my Literature classes rely on a deep foundation of grammar that I did not enjoy for one day of the 6 years it took to develop. A foundation so deep that many of the functions of writing I do instinctively without consciously applying the various rules I learned in elementary school. Likewise with science; I remember all of the experiments and little of the time spent accumulating information so that I could then apply it to experiments.
What I realized is that my students do not have these foundations, they have not spent the same amount of time, with the same consistency of instruction and application of will on their part, that I had by the time I was their age. In fact, many of them they do not have a fraction of the foundational knowledge that I did at their age. This is not all their fault and in most cases is the result of the great privilege I have enjoyed, but it also raises a fundamental question about my mission for the next two years. What do I need to teach; should I try to overcome their foundational deficit in the few years they are in prison, or should I start a process that should have begun a long time ago and accept the motto that slow and steady wins the race? I want to teach the analytical thinking skills that I believe are the greatest rewards of an education but am now doubtful that this is possible except in a few cases.
So I lied. I did learn something about my students, or more appropriately I acknowledged a reality that was always there. My belated insights also extended tangential themes like privilege and mission, so all in all Thursday was a useful day, but this knowledge does not make it any more fun.
