KalahariLog

When is "stay the course" the right thing to do? There is a series of stories and movies about dedicated teachers working with kids from the "wrong" side of town. It's often the same set-up. The teacher shows up in class ready to change the world and finds resistance with his students disinterested, unmotivated, and with serious problems at home. The crisis usually takes a few days or weeks, and then the teacher says to himself or some convenient friend: Why am I doing this? It is hopeless trying to change things, they don't won't education, they don't want me to teach them anything, i can't teach them anything... There is always a precocious kid and a hopeless kid that helps the teacher through the crisis and, wouldn't you know it, the teacher ends up making a difference. He stuck with it, he stayed the course and he wasn't swayed by the nay-sayers.

I can think of several movies that are all variation on this theme: the recent "Half Nelson" with Ryan Gosling nominated for an Oscar, "The Ron Clark Story" with Matthew Perry, "Knights of the South Bronx" with Ted Danson and many others.

John Gatto, a "teacher of the year" for three years in a row in New York, had this to say about his students in one of his speeches accepting the award, which summarizes most of my experiences with University students.

1. The children I teach are indifferent to the adult world. This defies the experience of thousands of years. A close study of what big people were up to was always the most exciting occupation of youth, but nobody wants to grow up these days and who can blame them? Toys are us.
2. The children I teach have almost no curiosity and what they do have is transitory; they cannot concentrate for very long, even on things they choose to do. Can you see a connection between the bells ringing again and again to change classes and this phenomenon of evanescent attention?
3. The children I teach have a poor sense of the future, of how tomorrow is inextricably linked to today. As I said before, they have a continuous present, the exact moment they are at is the boundary of their consciousness.
4. The children I teach are ahistorical, they have no sense of how past has predestined their own present, limiting their choices, shaping their values and lives.
5. The children I teach are cruel to each other, they lack compassion for misfortune, they laugh at weakness, and they have contempt for people whose need for help shows too plainly.
6. The children I teach are uneasy with intimacy or candor. My guess is that they are like many adopted people I've known in this respect - they cannot deal with genuine intimacy because of a lifelong habit of preserving a secret inner self inside a larger outer personality made up of artificial bits and pieces of behavior borrowed from television or acquired to manipulate teachers. Because they are not who they represent themselves to be the disguise wears thin in the presence of intimacy so intimate relationships have to be avoided.
7. The children I teach are materialistic, following the lead of schoolteachers who materialistically "grade" everything - and television mentors who offer everything in the world for free.
8. The children I teach are dependent, passive, and timid in the presence of new challenges. This is frequently masked by surface bravado, or by anger or aggressiveness but underneath is a vacuum without fortitude.


Going back the issue of sticking things through and staying the course. When is staying the course a good thing and when is it stupid stubbornness? When is changing directions a good thing and when is it flip-flopping?