Rick supposed it had been good experience, although he still wasn’t quite sure. He’d had no trouble with the boys there, mainly because Miss Daniels, the teacher to whose class he’d been assigned, never left the room when he taught a lesson. He taught exactly eight lessons during the semester. The rest of his mornings spent at the high school were devoted to work in the English office — typing up tests, running the mimeograph, little chores that helped the department chairman — and observation at the back of Miss Daniels’ room. The observation had been enlightening, in that he’d learned a good deal about Miss Daniels’ technique. He did not, unfortunately, get much opportunity to develop his own technique.
Nor had his conferences with Professor Kraal helped, and those conferences could have contributed a great deal toward his understanding of the vocational high school. He invariably left a conference feeling bored, tired, and unrewarded.
“Someone’s got to get the trade schools,” Kraal had said, and that seemed to sum up the attitude of everyone concerned. That plus the always-thought but never-voiced addition: “And no one wants the trade schools.”
All right, no one wanted the trade schools. No one wants leprosy, either, but...
But what? Rick wondered. Suppose the college had given elective courses titled Teaching the Trade School Student. Sure, let’s suppose that. Would there have been a mad scramble to elect those courses? Doubtless, oh yes. Ohmyyes.
Everyone was just dying to learn how to teach the trade-school student. Everyone was just itching for the opportunity to get out there in the system and land smack in the middle of a trade school.
Sure. He knew at least twenty people who’d yelled bloody murder and threatened mayhem when they’d been assigned to vocational high schools for their student teaching. Picture anyone actually counting on the trade school as his career. Picture that.
“What are you going to be when you grow up, Johnny?”
And proudly: “A vocational high school teacher.”
But... but there were teachers who ended up in the trade schools, and goddamnit, their job was to teach kids who happened to be in those schools. The system was there. It existed. There were kids enmeshed in that system and some of them, surely some of them, really wanted to learn, were really counting on the system to teach them a trade, something from which they could earn their daily bread. You can’t condemn a kid because he’s not a mental giant. There’s a poetry in repairing the carburetor of an automobile, too, even if the kid repairing it can’t spell carburetor. Then why ignore the system? Why give birth to it and then flush it down the toilet?
Why pretend it’s not there?
Why prepare a teacher for an altogether different type of student, an ideal student, and then throw him into a jungle hemmed in by blackboards and hope he can avoid the claws and the teeth? If the teacher survives, well all fine and dandy. If he doesn’t, the wild animals will surely survive, won’t they? But who wants wild animals in the street?
Or was that why the system had been invented? Was Solly Klein right? Was it just to keep the kids off the streets, just to keep them out of trouble for the major part of the day?
No, Rick couldn’t believe that. Maybe Solly Klein had been in the racket for a good long time, and maybe Solly had seen things Rick would never see, but Rick could not believe the system was sham. A lot of thought had gone into its conception, a lot of careful thought, a lot of consideration for the kids who were at a total loss groping with the subjects taught in the academic high school. When had the system come into being? Rick wondered.
He did not know.
He did not know, and he felt a deep shame for not knowng, the same shame he’d felt about not knowing the average I.Q. of his students. Why hadn’t anyone told him? Wasn’t that something he should know? Goddamnit, wasn’t that one of his tools? Would they send a soldier onto a battlefield without a goddamn rifle? Would they send a surgeon to an operating table without a scalpel? Not when a human life depended on it.
Well, a great many human lives depended on what he did at North Manual Trades High School. He taught a lot of kids every day, and every day he went into the blackboard jungle without even knowing how many teeth there were in a lion’s mouth. Or how many claws on a lion’s paw. Or anything about a lion at all. They’d taught him how to milk cows, and now they expected him to tame lions.
Perhaps they expected him to behave like all good lion tamers. Use a whip and a chair. But what happens to the best lion tamer when he puts down his whip and his chair?
Goddamnit, it was wrong! He felt cheated, he felt almost violated. He felt cheated for himself, and he felt cheated for guys like Joshua Edwards who wanted to teach and who didn’t know how to teach because he’d been pumped full of manure and theoretical hogwash. Why hadn’t anyone told them, in plain, frank English, just what to do? Couldn’t someone, somewhere along the line, have told them? Not one single college instructor? Not someone from the Board of Ed, someone to orientate them after they’d passed the emergency exam? Not anyone? Not one sonofabitch somewhere who gave a good goddamn? Not even Stanley? Not even Small? Did they have to figure it out for themselves, sink or swim, kill or be killed?
Rick had never been told how to stop a fight in his class. He’d never been told what to do with a second-term student who doesn’t know how to write his own goddamn name on a sheet of paper. He didn’t know, and he’d never been advised on the proper tactics for dealing with a boy whose I.Q. was 66, a big, fat, round, moronic 66. He hadn’t been taught about kids’ yelling out in class, not one kid, not the occasional “difficult child” the ed courses had loftily philosophized about, not him. But a whole goddamn, shouting, screaming class-load of them, all yelling their sonofabitching heads off.
What do you do with a kid who can’t read, even though he’s fifteen years old? Recommend him for special reading classes, sure. And what do you do when those special reading classes are loaded to the asshole, packed because there are kids who can’t read in abundance, and you have to take only those who can’t read the worst, dumping them onto a teacher who’s already overloaded and who doesn’t want to teach a remedial class to begin with?
What do you do with that poor ignorant jerk? Do you call on him in class, knowing damn well he hasn’t read the assignment because he doesn’t know how to read? Or do you ignore him? Or do you ask him to stop by after school, knowing he would prefer playing stickball to learning how to read, and knowing he considers himself liberated the moment that bell sounds at the end of the eighth period?
What do you do when you’ve explained something patiently and fully, explained it just the way you were taught to explain it in your education courses, explained it in minute detail, and you look out at your class and see that stretching, vacant wall of blank, blank faces, and you know nothing has penetrated, not a goddamn thing has sunk in? What do you do then?
Give them all board erasers to clean.