"Where's the class?" asked the Americorps "City Year" volunteer in my mentor teacher's classroom. He's supposed to follow around several students who need individual help staying on track for graduation.
He looked around at a bunch of empty deskchairs as the rest of the class slowly filed in, chatting and joking."There should be 15 more people here."
My mentor grinned. "I know. Isn't it great?"
Apparently a few more kids in the class had been suspended, besides the six who were out last week, and five had been bumped up to the Honors class. The teacher, the two City Year volunteers - one a little too cheerful, blonde and blue-eyed, but who never quite met my gaze, the other a mild-mannered African American at least 6'7" tall, both wearing red City Year insignia vests - and I assumed this would be a pretty good afternoon. After all, there were four of us to a much-reduced group of 9th graders.
More fools us. Silence never once descended during either the 5-8th period class or the 9th period class - not when the teacher was speaking, not when the announcements came over the loudspeaker, not even when, per the usual routine, students shared their bellwork journals about their favorite relatives besides their parents. I flatter myself that there was relative quiet when I read aloud part of the short story"The Most Dangerous Game" from the literature textbook , but I'm not sure that was the case since I was concentrating on giving my reading some dramatic flair.
The Americorps volunteers spent their time at the back of the room, apparently doing schoolwork; I didn't get a chance to ask them how old they were, but they both looked to be in their early 20s. My teacher kept threatening to "break up some groups, because you can't settle down and write," but she didn't move anyone for almost 15 minutes. In any case, the moves were ineffectual as the talking did not stop.
While they were working on their "favorite relative" prompt, I read the short story they were all discussing and was shocked by how inappropriate it was for this classroom. Written in the 1920s, the vocabulary was Victorian; the historical background needed to understand the main character was almost certainly unfamiliar; and the subject matter (an exile from the Russian Revolution buys a remote island, builds a castle on it, and hunts shipwrecked sailors for sport) completely irrelevant to these kids' lives.
"This is an awesome class," the white City Year volunteer told me at one point. "You should have seen them last week. They're like on their best behavior."
"I was here a couple of days last week, and they seem a lot worse now," I replied.
"Oh no," he insisted. At the end of the day, when I told my mentor what he had said, she widened her eyes. "Ridiculous. This is the worst class I've had all year."
This internship is supposed to give me the opportunity to put into practice what I've been learning from my textbooks, and what it's doing is showing me how right my textbooks have been. High school English classrooms are hard to manage because the material is so boring, instruction is not in the least bit tailored to the individual students' needs, and the teacher-student dynamic resembles more a power struggle than a learning community.
Still, my mentor brought home a good point for the class. In the story, the Russian exile talks about how it is a "mathematical certainty" that he will always bag the hunted animal, and that nothing is more boring than perfection - which is why he decided to hunt the most dangerous game of all, i.e., men. In order to explain that sentiment, the teacher asked the kids whether they like doing video games once they've perfected them, or whether they start looking for a greater challenge. They related to that right away, and I'm sure they came away with at least a little insight into the character.
Next time I get the chance, I need to ask her how she grades all these journals - what her scoring rubric is, whether she does a lot of correcting for grammar. If she does, that would be another point for my textbooks over what I am seeing in the classroom.
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