The Language of Class in the Classroom

An excerpt from the Introduction:

As a teacher in the public school system, I developed a fascination with the many ways in which we tend to stifle communication and understanding by mistaking words for indelible truth—or even for the exact thoughts of the speaker. We treat sloppy and slippery words like precise and matter-of-fact things, and complex and layered meanings like hammers driven into nails with force. We also treat words as political tools, designed more to help one group or another get its way than to help illuminate meaning. We do not require much substantiation for words. What the President says, for example, is given more weight than what he does.  (Meanwhile, the spirit of play is irreverent towards the sanctity of words.  We often mark what we say as being playful by being tongue in cheek, saying what we do not mean.  Adults might scold children in a mock over-serious tone not to laugh.  Or we might explain to our dog that the rawhide does not belong to him.  In play we happily occupy the space between words and meaning, words and truth.)

 

The words really began flowing for me when I started writing about the wildly opposite directives I received in two very different classroom settings. Although they could not have been more different—one a summer music teacher training which seemed geared mainly for private schools, the other my Spanish-speaking Title 1 first-grade classroom under the daily threats and orders of No Child Left Behind—they seemed to represent two sides of the coin of our culture of inequality.  When looked at side by side--in my case, experienced by the same person--they seemed to illustrate everything  which both disturbed and fascinated me about the insidiousness of our society's deep schisms.  The juxtaposition highlighted for me our two opposing sets of values and beliefs about education, depending on social class. 

Above all, the two sets of classrooms reflected for me the depth of our misguided relationship to language: the profound differences between them boiled down to how language was used. The two schools were uncannily alike in their absolute—one could say stubborn—lack of awareness of the existence of the other’s unspoken code of conduct, the air that the other breathed. I discovered that while teaching at my low-income public school under No Child Left Behind meant being expected to spell everything out without developing meaning or relevance, the musical education approach involved developing meaning without ever spelling out what we were doing or why.   Our teachers never named for us what it was that we were studying exactly—that was left for the students to decipher. Instead, through richly interactive hands-on experiences, we (and our future students) were encouraged to be active in creating our own meaning and to contribute to a group creation, including that of the classroom culture itself. Any learning material, in other words, was treated as a jumping off point for a creative group venture. Meanwhile, in the public school classroom that I returned to, under threats of school closure and all kinds of daily harassment, great lengths were gone to in order to make sure that instruction was kept at the level of the correct words and labels. At my school, with a new writing program in place, we were supposed to tell our students starting in Kindergarten which genre to write in, which phrases sounded good, and the kind of voice that was desirable during writing time.

In both spheres, what we were allowed to say or not seemed to serve more to keep an incredibly unbalanced social situation in place than to illuminate meaning in a Big Picture way.  So in my music teacher training, I found not only the more deeply creative relationship to language and meaning which I craved as an educator, but at the same time an insidious elitism which kept me locked in my reforms-based public teacher's cage, alternating between silence and feeble whining. While the politicians continued to blast the public schools on the news for not making bigger improvements on state tests, the truth of what comprises a quality education seemed to remain a closely guarded secret.

I came to believe that for all intents and purposes, the lack of discussion was a continuation of the intensified social stratification which kept real learning, and real freedom, at bay, not only at my mostly Latino school but for us all.