Lit Up Page 17
The students talked about friends and relatives who had died, and gloomy Justin spoke about a friend of his mother’s who committed suicide—“the liveliest person I’ve ever known”—and how everyone danced after the funeral. Several of the girls said that Mr. Goldman wasn’t teaching well the previous year. They had resented that—some of the kids had made a joke out of it at the time. But now they wished they had reached out to him. “Mr. Goldman was sweating bourbon in the hallway,” said Marina, who knew what trouble looked like. “I asked him, ‘Is there more than what we see?’ But I didn’t push it. He was a grown man.” And the others made similar remarks. They had nothing to be guilty about, but they felt a vague sense of responsibility for a teacher who had gone off the rails. At least the girls did.
As the conversation wound mournfully toward the end of the hour, I felt an easing in myself: Viktor Frankl, whatever his vanities, had known what “naked existence” felt like and had gotten some of it down on paper. That was an achievement no one could take away from him. And I felt sure that Mr. Leon’s habit of reading ominous books with his students and asking them why they lived and other such questions was just what they needed. The death of a teacher may have been tough for students to handle, an unwarranted and unwanted intrusion, but they handled it, and I admired their strength. Mr. Leon treated them as adolescents uniquely qualified to talk about things that, later in life, too burdened or sophisticated, they might try to avoid. They were sophomores—high school rather than college sophomores, and their conversations were sophomoric, thank God.
In a further twist—this was the beauty of Mr. Leon’s way of teaching—his furrowed-brow reading list, his obsessive insistence on self-definition, did give pleasure. Mr. Leon flattered his students, and, whatever their occasional resistance, they knew it and benefited from his flattery. They did not—putting it mildly—read joyous texts, but literature provoked and licensed the conversations they had, and the result for the students of English 10G, in the end, was a lot closer to happiness than misery.
CHAPTER TWELVE
HILLHOUSE: THE YEAR
Read Around Day
Jessica Zelenski
To Kill a Mockingbird
Fathers and Children
Information
Harrison Bergeron and Francis Macomber
Shakespeare
Presentations
Ishmael Beah
Absolute silence. Hardly a sigh or a shift in position. Twenty-three students were reading in silence, and I thought to myself, “You can’t fake attentiveness—there’s always some giveaway.” If you weren’t reading, your eyes would be elsewhere or veiled, looking inward. These teenagers were lost in books.
* * *
Two weeks earlier, in late April, it wasn’t clear that anything like this would happen. On that day, the students, tenth-graders at the James Hillhouse High School, in New Haven, Connecticut, were taking part in a classroom ritual called a “Read Around.” The students sat in four groups, pressing chairs with tablet arms together and making a kind of stable common ground for each group. Of the twenty-three students in Period 3 English, thirteen were girls, ten were boys; eighteen were African American, four were Hispanic, and one was white. Their teacher, Jessica Zelenski, placed multiple copies of a single book before each group, and asked them to read some pages that she assigned—a sample, not very much, but enough to get the feel of the thing. After a while, she moved the books from one group to another until everyone had sampled all four. Three of the books were memoirs, one was a novel. The memoirs were A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (2007), Ishmael Beah’s account of his time in Sierra Leone as a teenage warrior in the nineties; Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003), Azar Nafisi’s best seller about teaching English and American literature to Iranian young women after the Ayatollah’s revolution, the same book that was so important to Sean Leon; and Elie Wiesel’s harrowing concentration-camp narrative, Night (1958). Miss Zelenski also offered the students Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, a popular novel from 1989 about Chinese immigrant moms and their daughters in San Francisco.
Initially, on Read Around day, the students looked at the books without much interest. They turned them over, reading the back-jacket copy, flipped them around again, putting them down, picking them up and putting them down. “Books smell like old people” said Denzel Jefferson. A boy with thick dark hair and a long, sorrowful face, Denzel fell in and out of focus in class, and occasionally made devastating remarks. One girl, a redhead who could be tough, took a look at Ishmael Beah’s volume and said, “I won’t read this. This doesn’t interest me.” Amy Tan had a couple of takers, but Azar Nafisi, I could see, was not doing well—the book was too grown-up, a mistaken choice, as Miss Zelenski later admitted.
I had been visiting Hillhouse all through the academic year 2013–14, the year after I attended classes at Beacon. New Haven was proud of its magnet schools, and it also had a variety of ambitious charter high schools. Hillhouse was one of two comprehensive—i.e., regular neighborhood—high schools in the city (the other was Wilbur Cross High School). Seventy-six percent of the students at Hillhouse were African American, 20 percent Hispanic, 2 percent white. A little over three-quarters of the students’ families lived below the poverty line. A Hillhouse internal audit, done in the spring of 2014, revealed that for every ten students who entered the school, fewer than six finished in four years, and that 42 percent of the 960 students were chronically absent (missing over 10 percent of school days). If one judged by standardized state tests in math and English, and by SAT scores, Hillhouse was the worst-performing public school in New Haven and one of the worst in the state. “There is a dynamic of not wanting to demand too much from students for fear of upsetting them,” the report said. But Miss Zelenski, a white, forty-two-year-old veteran teacher, believed that inner-city kids needed literature. “Maybe they’ll enjoy life more, if I can get them reading,” she told me. “I would like to nurture in them the idea that there are other worlds. You don’t have to experience things the way you do now.”
On Read Around day, Miss Zelenski moved from group to group, clopping around quickly in boots. She told the students about the background of the books—the situation of women in China in the 1940s and in Tehran after 1979, and so on. At each table, if the sampling wasn’t going well, she would read a few paragraphs aloud and then hand off the book to a volunteer, who continued reading aloud to the others. “Don’t worry about mispronouncing words,” she said. The other students at the table, eyes on the text, grudgingly followed along or just listened. Things had settled down.
Miss Zelenski’s chosen texts were her way of interpreting an academic unit called “Social Injustice.” Like the teenagers at Beacon, these students were fascinated by disaster. And like such books as Slaughterhouse-Five and Viktor Frankl’s memoir, the books she chose were devoted to experience embedded in history. Neither Sean Leon nor Jessica Zelenski assigned feel-good narratives or pop fiction. At Hillhouse, Miss Zelenski’s students had to commit to reading their choice and writing a paper on it; finally, they had to make a class presentation on related issues of social injustice suggested by what they had read. That was the commitment. But on April 24, on Read Around day, I wasn’t sure the students would actually read the books they had chosen.
* * *
Hillhouse is located on Sherman Parkway about a mile northwest of Ezra Stiles College and the rest of Yale. The redbrick building, constructed in the fifties, is grand and spacious, with long and wide halls; the athletic facilities, which the school shares with the city, are superb (Hillhouse has a history of good teams). Standing on the front steps and looking out, I saw neat small houses, lots of small cars, and a big playground across the street. My provincial Manhattan eyes didn’t see a city, but New Haven, with a population of around 130,000, is actually the second-largest urban center in Connecticut (after Bridgeport). Yale and a raft of good hospitals dominate the local economy—it’s an “eds and meds” economy, as people said. Yet i
t was still a poor city, one of the many urban victims of deindustrialization in the fifties and sixties. The median family income, averaged for 2009 to 2013, was $37,000, a little more than half the median family income for the state; the murder rate in New Haven in 2013 (per hundred thousand people) was six times that of the entire state, the rate of rape two and a half times that of the state. The awful days of the crack wars—at a peak in the eighties and nineties—were long over, but, still, only 4 percent of American cities were rated more dangerous than New Haven. During the school year 2013–14, three young men, former Hillhouse students, were shot and killed in gang violence near the school. Some of Miss Zelenski’s students knew one or more of the men. They were stoic about it when I asked. “It’s life; it happens,” said Denzel Jefferson, who had lost a friend. His long face was set in a mask; he averted his eyes and wouldn’t say more than that. At Beacon, when a teacher dies, the school comes to a halt. At Hillhouse, when former students of the school are murdered or a current student loses a friend to gang violence, life simply goes on.
“We get the dropouts from the magnet schools,” Miss Zelenski told me. “The magnets also purge low-performing kids before state tests, and they come here. We get kids with learning problems, behavior problems. We can’t turn them away, and we can’t kick them out.” Kermit Carolina, the school principal, a large man with a strong voice, confirmed what she said. “We take everybody,” he told me in his office. “Kids with no credits, kids who have been incarcerated. A lot of these students have been distracted by the social environment they grew up in—absent parents, brothers in jail, crime in their neighborhoods. Many of them come to us with low skills. We also have kids from foreign lands, lots of English-language learners. Then there’s the transient population. People move round.” According to a PowerPoint presentation prepared by Mr. Carolina’s office, only 25 percent of Hillhouse students are ready for high school work when they enter in the ninth grade.
Kermit Carolina himself grew up in a single-parent family a few blocks from the school. “Hillhouse is surrounded by very poor neighborhoods, and the school is a kind of oasis for these families. The most important thing,” he said, “is to keep the kids in the building.”
On Sherman Parkway, a police car was permanently parked in front of the school, sometimes two cars; two armed policemen, big guys, lounged just inside the building. The walls were surprisingly bare of the drawings, collages, photographs, and constructions that covered other high school walls—some mistaken notion of cleanliness made the halls look prisonlike. Yet there was nothing dangerous or threatening about the halls. Between classes students gossiped and laughed, they hugged and high-fived and mock-punched one another. Some had ear buds connected to MP3 players, the wires dangling across their chests like skinny necklaces. Once the class bell rang, the halls were virtually deserted; staff members occasionally patrolled, and a formidable-looking woman with heavy keys, catching a student in the wrong place, said, “Commit to your education! You’re not engaging with school!” The lunchroom was noisy and happy, with students jumping from table to table; the large, well-stocked library, with many displays featuring African-American writing and biography, was quiet and mostly empty. Physically, Hillhouse was well equipped. But I thought of Mamaroneck High School with its extraordinary student services, its crowded library, its teacher-training programs. Hillhouse did not have a college office—no one person to guide the students through the maze of applications, tests, financial aid. The gap between rich and poor America couldn’t have been any clearer.
* * *
The Read Around, after its stuttering start, was going well. The group that was reading the assigned passage from Elie Wiesel’s Night was a little shocked, and a girl named Anika Roberts, pretty, very dark, with a round face and large eyes, said she couldn’t believe what she read in the book about massacres, she would have to see them for herself. As it turned out, this was exactly the reaction of Wiesel’s town, Sighet, in Romania, and Wiesel himself, when a survivor returned in 1944 and told everyone of mass executions of Jews not far away. No one believed him. Anika had caught the mood of disbelief that, in the beginning, pervades Wiesel’s tragic narrative.
The girl who said “This doesn’t interest me” when she was presented with Ishmael Beah’s book heard some of Beah’s hair-raising experiences and good prose, and now she was interested. In 1993, Beah fled the marauding Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone, joining other boys in the swamps and forests. In his description of his early days on the run, the prose breathes with fear:
I was scared when the wind blew, shaking the thatched roofs, and I felt as if I were out of my body wandering somewhere. There weren’t footprints of any kind. Not even a lizard dared to crawl through the village. The birds and crickets didn’t sing. I could hear my footsteps louder than my heartbeat. During these visits, we brought with us brooms so that we could sweep away our footprints as we went back to our hiding place to avoid being followed.
His parents, as he found out, had been killed by the rebels. The government armed forces corralled him; they gave him weapons, amphetamines, and cocaine. According to Beah’s account, at the age of thirteen, and for two years after, he killed dozens of people in Sierra Leone’s civil war in a state of amoral exhilaration. He survived and settled in the States in 1998 when he was adopted by an American woman, Laura Simms, who worked for the UN. He studied at Oberlin, where he had a great writing teacher, novelist Dan Chaon. When A Long Way Gone was published, in 2007, he was only twenty-six.
After they sampled the four books, and talked them over a bit, most wanted to read A Long Way Gone. Miss Zelenski was eager for the kids to read it, but the school didn’t have additional copies, so she went to the Yale Book Store and bought all they had with her own money. In the end, after some changed minds and swapping around (Anika switched to Beah), nine students read Wiesel, six read Beah, four read Amy Tan, and two read books not included in the original quartet, Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (2003) and A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007).
On May 9, two weeks after the Read Around, Miss Zelenski tried to start a class discussion of the books’ common themes. But Anika, the girl with the quickest responses in class, suddenly burst out, “I want to read!” A little startled, Miss Zelenski asked how many students would rather read than talk; most of them raised their hands. That’s when the silent reading period began, and it lasted for twenty minutes; it would have lasted longer, but Miss Zelenski finally broke it off and began a discussion. The silent reading of a book they had chosen was the students’ victory, and it was hard-won. School had started in September. It was now May. It had taken eight months, five classes a week with Miss Zelenski, eighty minutes a class, for the students to get to this point. At the beginning of the year, most of the class had been unwilling to read at all.
* * *
They came into class with elaborate handshakes, hilarity, mimicry, hugs, studied rebuffs, then mock-accusations, quarrels over small things. Lost pencils, lost assignment sheets, who sits where. Meeting at 10:40 in Miss Zelenski’s room, the students, back in September, took a considerable time to get ready. “Miss, I almost got arrested yesterday,” said one boy to Miss Zelenski as he came in. A girl who had received a good grade on a class essay, asked, “Are you proud of me, a little proud?” “Yes, I’m very proud,” Miss Zelenski said. A few were prepared for class, but many others were entertaining the room, and some were lost in their cell phones and MP3 players, texting or listening to music. A few sat dead-eyed, half-asleep, and then laid their heads down on the desk and dozed. Some ate candy or cookies, and I wondered if they had eaten much for breakfast. Or if they had gotten up early to get younger brothers and sisters off to school.
Jessica Zelenski started shouting over the noise; she shouted through it, into it, until the students quieted down or woke up. If she were a singer, Zelenski would be called a belter. She was brass-lunged, and she mixed it up with the students, demanding answers, chaffing, taunting, an
d then offering praise, her voice changing from strident to almost caressing as she welcomed something a student said. She was five five, but her boots, her high heels, her big voice, and her way of striding around the room made her seem taller. When students didn’t show up, cutting school, or hanging out in some corner of the vast building, she was angry. They had to be there, in her room.
Her operating method was less about maintaining order than about grabbing the students’ attention and making them engage—“engagement” was a repeated word around Hillhouse—with whatever the class was reading. She rode the wave of noise, and then exercised her powerful voice on it and turned it in the direction she wanted. She asked the students to raise their hands, but at the beginning of the year they mainly burst out with what they wanted to say, often speaking at the same time. She responded to some of the blurters, pulling a single sentence out of the noisy cross talk. If she hadn’t done that, many of the comments would have been lost forever.
The girls wore tight tops and faded jeans and hoop earrings. Some could be combative, as if they had to be that way in order to survive. “I don’t care about your class; I don’t care about you,” one girl told Miss Zelenski. A few minutes later she was happily reading aloud in class. The boys, in hoodies and jeans mostly, were a little abashed. They acted as if they didn’t know what they were doing in English class; it seemed like a joke to them, and many of them clowned around, interrupting whatever was going on.
Miss Zelenski roused the sleepers, razzed the inattentive and the rebellious. “Sweetheart,” she said to one girl, a repeated no-show who was rude when she did show, “I miss you when you’re gone, and sometimes I want to strangle you when you’re here. Leonardo [a boy who slumped and drifted], I’m disappointed. You’re doing that laziness thing again. Honey [to another boy], ‘douche bag’ is the wrong thing to call your teacher. It’s not school-appropriate language. But yes, being a douche bag is bad.” They would take the rebuke with an outraged look, and then a few seconds later, they would grin. They liked the roughhouse style, and they would come back at her (“You’re mean today”) and sometimes flirt (“Take the bun out, Miss, we like you with your hair long”). As often as not, she would praise the kid she had scorched a few minutes earlier.