The Lilypad Chronicles -- Dedicated to Happiness

“Man Up” - a reflective essay on To Sir With Love

31. August, 2007


To Sir With Love

lyrics by Don Black & Mark London


Those schoolgirl days of telling tales
and biting nails
are gone --
but in my mind,
I know they will still live on and on.

But how do you thank someone
who has taken you from crayons to perfume?

(It isn't easy, but I'll try)

If you wanted the sky
I would write across the sky in letters
that would soar a thousand feet high,
To Sir, with Love.

The time has come
for closing books,
and long last looks
must end...
and as I leave,
I know that I am leaving my best friend --
A friend who taught me right from wrong,
and weak from strong;
That's a lot to learn,

What, what can I give you in return?

If you wanted the moon
I would try to make a start,
But I, would rather you let me give my heart,
To Sir, with Love


(poetic lay-out, taken with liberty, by author of this essay)
email received 31. August, 2007, while proofreading my essay response on To Sir With Love:

B.

I had to write because I was walking through the parking lot today and saw a truck exactly like yours with an Indiana license plate and it reminded me of you.

I am a sophomore at this little school in the mountains of east Tennessee where everyone hates blacks, mexicans, "rich people", and so on...I never knew. I love my school but we only have 4 black people out of 1000 students and one asian kid who was adopted by an American family at the age of 1. Other then that we are limited to white people, redneck and otherwise. Every time I go off campus I see anywhere from 12-50 confederate flag bumper stickers/flags/window decals/ripped t-shirts and although I'm used to it now I had previously thought that people like that were only in the movies, guess not. Although I swore at the time I would never say that Brown School was an amazing place I didn't realize until it was gone that it truly was. I try to explain to my friends here about Brown but no one believes me. They usually say that it wasn't a real school, which...haha...it wasn't. I guess more of my real reason for writing you was to say "thanks" as a post-brown, current real-world liver. I knew at the time Brown was a special place and you were a special teacher (more ways than one) but only now, after I've truly seen how ridiculous and silly the real-world is do I fully recognize that. I can't tell you how many times both last year and this year I'll be with my friends here and they are still trying to figure out things that you taught us since day one. I say to myself at least several times a day, "play the game" which as you had always said is the only way to be successful. Over the course of my time in your class you said so many things that you claimed to be true but no one believed at the time, you were right. Looking back on it, I can't believe how lucky I was to have you as my teacher. Thanks so much for teaching the way you did and what you did.

I know that you have moved back up to the North, to home. I hope that you are loving what you do and why you do it, I would love to hear how it's going and how the fam is. Once again, thanks for you.

Love,

Becca Bolten
Class of 2006






“Man up,” Suzannah B., a.k.a. MoSkeeto, scolded while looking into my eyes, “Man up.” It was May 24th, 2007, and the junior class was packing up to leave for the summer. The day was about over and I had one hour to pick up flowers for senior graduation and to finish my commencement speech. It was 2:40 p.m. and it took everything in my being to fight back the surge of emotions I was feeling. After ten years of classroom teaching, I decided to leave the J. Graham Brown School and accept a graduate fellowship at Syracuse Univesity. I chose to leave the 24/7 responsibility of my urban, public school job to selfishly earn a Ph.D degree in English Education. The decision to leave the classroom was and is killing me. I have never loved anything more than my experience in the classroom. The two of us complimented one another nicely, but at a high price. There was no “B.R.C.” in my B.S. reality.

Three months later, I found myself sitting in a plush chair behind a large screen in the School of Management enrolled in a class called EDUCATION 781: Institutions and Processes of Education with Dr. Kal Alston and Mark Stern. The room was air conditioned and the class was offered a screening of J. Clavell’s To Sir With Love. A movie. The first day of class. The first experience in the School of Education. Choose an argument to apply to the film. My instinct was to argue against the viewing, at all, because showing films in school is frowned upon by many administrators -- “films take up instructional time which would better be served through reading and writing lessons aimed at improving test scores .” Yet, experiencing To Sir With Love is exactly what I needed to see as a fledgling doctorate student, not because it was valuable for me to sit still for three hours actually watching a movie -- I’m not a cinematic guru nor habitual critic of such a medium --, but because the story of Mark Thackeray’s teaching experience is relevant for 2007 educators. I argue this for two reasons:

Reason #1. “Manning up”. When my student, Suzannah, told me to “Man up” on my last day of school, she did so for a reason. As a student, she didn’t need to see my emotional side of leaving a classroom, nor did she feel comfortable recognizing that her teacher was a human being. All around her, classmates were crying, giving one another hugs and lining up to say their last good-byes. I was quiet all day and the students knew why -- I would not be returning in the fall. When the appreciation and support came to me from many angles that afternoon, I choked up. The kids knew my decision was killing me and Suzannah’s advice is what I needed to hear. “Man up.” Life is hard and sometimes taking the stoic approach is the best approach.

I am not like the character of Mark Thackeray. He was able to tear up his invitation to move towards another phase of his life, whereas I used mine to move in a different direction. I am like Mark Thackeray in that I would not settle for less from my students in my classroom and I took the challenges of everyday school life as a personal quest to make a difference. Not only was I commissioned to deliver state assessed curriculum, but I recognized my role as a mentor, human being, professional and man, too. With Thackeray’s approach, actions spoke louder than words and his actions were an orchestration of positive classroom management.

There is plenty of room to argue against what it means to “man up” and to make a discussion of the sexism, connotation, denotation, and history of what, exactly, “man up” is supposed to mean, but that is not what I wish to discuss here.

In 1998, when I first entered as a teacher, it quickly occurred to me how rare it was for my students to have male educators in their life. For some of my students, I was the first male teacher they ever had. On a staff of sixty two teachers, only six were male (this number would decrease over the years). Scarier, of the 52 freshmen, 51 sophomores and 24 seniors enrolled in my courses that year, only a third of them lived and/or knew their biological father. I recognized very soon that my “male” role was going to be important, because positive male role models are rare in the lives of many students. For what it’s worth, the National Education Association reported in 2003:

•The teaching corps in public schools does not reflect the diversity of the student population.  Our students need role models of both sexes and all races, yet the teaching profession is overwhelmingly white (90 percent) and female (79 percent).  The percentage of African-American teachers is at an all-time low (6 percent).  The numbers remain flat for Hispanics, Asians and teachers from other ethnic groups.     

•Male teachers are a dwindling breed.  Since 1981, the ratio of male to female teachers has steadily declined, and it now stands at a 40-year low (21 percent).  Similarly, the proportion of male elementary teachers (9 percent) and male secondary teachers (35 percent) has fallen gradually since 1961 and now is at the lowest level in four decades.
(from Status Of the American Public School Teacher, 2000-2001)

Immediate to my teaching initiation, I felt a responsibility for my “male” actions because I realized several eyes were on me documenting my every move and word. One particular incident stands out more than others. A young, African American male followed me around like a shadow before and after school. When asked if he needed anything, he would always stay quiet and respond he was okay. An experienced colleague of mine advised me to be patient, and said the student was testing me for trust-worthiness. I was new at the teaching game. There was a night, though, after a sporting event when the shadow showed up in my room, hovering behind every paper I was filing, until I finally asked, “Are you ready to talk?” He was. I got the story of a boy whose father was an “alcoholic” and then a more serious question. He wondered if I thought he should begin having sex with his girlfriend -- if it was time and morally okay.. The conversation threw me upside down. I didn’t expect such a role with my job, but somehow, intrinsically, accepted it. Whether controvertial or not, the presence of a male teacher in the classroom does have a responsibility for being male. Sure, there is a time for male teachers to “Man up” but I argue it is extremely powerful, at times, for a male teacher to “Man down,” too --- to be real, tears and all.

Reason #2. The second reason I argue for screening To Sir With Love in 2007 has a more robust response. The most successful short story I taught to my students at the Brown School was Poe Ballantine’s The Blue Devils of Blue River Avenue from the 1998 Best American Short Stories series. The story is narrated by a young man who grows up in a working class neighborhood but with liberally educated, socially conscious parents. He accounts his relationship to the neighborhood and befriends nine-year old “Lucky Strike” smokers and girls who “rub” against him simulating the words they hear their mothers say when they return late at night with some random man. The narrator grows up with these kids, does well in school, is supported by his parents, and eventually moves on with his life. The story’s punch, however, arrives when the narrator’s childhood friend, Roland Sambeaux, a boy who dropped out of school, contacts him:
Much later, Roland and I got to be something of friends again, though it was never the same. There would always be that wound of resentment, those long months of insurmountable shame. And even when he was married and I was his best man he was happy for a few days and thanked me for being someone who had never turned on him, it didn’t change. I was simply too lucky to be forgiven (25).

It is lucky to gain an education and to trust the educational system as a vehicle for economic and social promotion in American society. Trusting education is not the norm of working class and poor communities; status arrives, usually, outside of school. When such children enter the classroom they often are turned off by the people who aren’t like them. My students used to discuss a teacher they had in elementary school who wore fur coats and bragged about her European vacations. They said she’d often tell them that if they were “lucky” they too could have the life she had. They despised this woman and how she treated them, but placed her sub/consciously in their brains for future reference. Her “air” was a put-off to them, but I’d argue such teaching is more common than not. Education remains the key for upward mobility, and in Ballantine’s story the narrator is unforgiveable in the eyes of those from the neighborhood who didn’t have the same support, resources and trust in and from the community that he had. Those disillusioned by the educational system, unfortunately, are the very ones who need to learn how to use it the most (if they do, indeed, wish to be upwardly mobile -- which I could also argue is not worthy goal on my most cynical days).

To Sir With Love is relevant to educators, like Ballantine’s short story, for the ways it challenges class and race ideologies. I asked myself, “Would this film work if it was an all white, working class school in America? If an African teacher came into an American world? How about if an all white class in the suburbs was presented an urban, out-of-the-hood African American teacher? What would that story look like?” The fact that North Quay is a British school relieves some of the race/class pressure American educators face (where race/class continue to be taboo conversations) (In 1992, when I went to London on an exchange program, I enrolled in classes on Literature of Exile and the Black British experience. There, the instructor, Carole Boyce Davies and several other African Americans on the program, found relief, at times, by how the British society embraced them. They didn’t feel as outsiders like they did in America and we spent a lot of time questioning why. I mention this because it is important to note how racial identities are subjective to the cultures making a discussion about them. Because Thackeray is British-black, he would be seen by American audiences through the lens of American history, which has a Civil Rights history different from Great Britain. He wouldn’t be American-black, which frees his character from the stigmatation popularized by America’s media, pop culture and promoted stereotypes).

It is important to note that class is usually the foundation of social inequities and inequalities. Class and race are often stigmatized together in American Schools(Kozol, 2005), but To Sir With Love turns some of these issues on its head. America follows the British tradition. In both countries, there are “private” schools and “public” schools, where acknowledgement of “private” carries with it a notion of superiority (England has its Cambridge and Oxford, while the Unites States has its Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc.). How the “privates” do things trickles down to the “publics” and because of economic superiority, the “privates” tend to have access to superior resources (this same mechanism works between primary and secondary schools, too. My academic work with The Bread Loaf School of English offered me lessons on private school/public school dynamics I never contemplated before). In To Sir With Love, a British New Guinean, black teacher is assigned to a cockney-class secondary public school in North Quay (by the docks). Thackeray comes not from New Guinea, but British New Guinea which draws out the historical implications of the globe’s period of imperialism, colonialism and even today’s idea of globalization. As many colonial writers note, it is a matter of conforming to those who control the language of power to have any sort of power in a new system once the colonial/imperial country arrives. The point here is that education offers individuals the opportunity to empower themselves, which Thackeray did for himself through a University education and with an engineering degree. Unable to find work in his field, he ‘settles’ for a classroom -- something seen as “inferior” for intelligent, educated people to do.

Thackeray’s classroom is a stereotypical mess: paper airplanes, bawdy language and unruliness. Yet, here the students are white (and it should be pointed out, they listen to music together, as a community, instead of internally, as individual selves, like today’s iPod, individualistic generation and are completely unsupervised when they do so. Today’s public school children are seldom left alone to monitor themselves in schools. Instead, big brother watches from every angle keeping a semblance of control -- post Columbine, it is necessary, or is it?). Thackeray, as a teacher, appeals to the kids because like them, he comes from a class of people outside the ones who control the language of power. He is black/other, while they are cockney/other. Yet, he is also educated/conformed unlike their ignorant/nonconformity (it is okay to be ignorant because being ignorant means one doesn’t know any better. Yet, once one knows they are ignorant, it is “stupid” to continue being ignorant. Being “stupid” is the crime. I learned from Dr. Christopher Bristow at Cambridge University an interesting lesson on this subject as he deconstructed the word “pathos” in his Greek tragedy lecture. Apathy, pathos and pathetic all share the same root: not caring about the world around us should arouse sadness within, and such sadness should be seen as pathetic. He acknowledged apathy as a sin).

The character of Weston, the apathetic Eeyore in To Sir With Love, represents much in the social mechanism of the film, too. Weston, obviously educated and with proper British English, is indicative of many teachers I’ve worked with. They perceive themselves as extremely smart, but fall into the Chicken Little disorder of apocolyptic arrogance. At one point Weston remarks, “they’ll earn more than us: illiterate, smelly and discontent” and he holds an “air of superiority” to everyone he meets (an egotistical air which can be found from Holden Caufield in Catcher in the Rye and Marlowe in Heart of Darkness. The tradition of the “educated” white perspective making judgement on the uneducated masses is not foreign to classic texts. The power to perceive others as being ‘less than’ and ‘inferior’ arrives from positions of narcissistic hubris, “the horror! the horror!” Such disillusionment with society does not filter up from members of society born into disillusionment. Instead, it filters down from those who actually think they ARE better than others because they come from traditions where “superior” educations are promoted and supported. When “superior” educators can’t prove their superiority to others, they grow frustrated, bitter and arrogant -- very adolescent behavior. (In Jefferson County Public Schools, where I taught, there was one school billed as the district’s center for the “best” and “brightest” of Louisville. I always wondered if it made the rest of us in the district the “least” and “dimmest.” Such labeling of schools and the Mt. Olympuses of knowledge is extremely destructive and silly, yet it does promote a competitive model which is not always bad. Competition drives individuals to do better). Thackeray, unlike Weston, navigated out of a disillusioned position as a colonial young man, into the world where education pays off. By virtue of being in the classroom and holding high expectations over his students’ heads, he exemplifies what good teaching, though exhausting, should be.

I am always amazed by the statistics and percentages of American schools, and the conversations “educated” people have about them. Numbers report three out of every ten ninth graders will never make it to their senior year (Swanson, 2004). High School counselors have told me that across America six out of every ten high school graduates never attempt a college education. It seems to me, if one third of the two thirds who graduate from high school choose to gain further education, then the majority of Americans choose a different path. Being educated in the way colleges and Universities define “education,” then, is an experience only a minority of Americans get. From this education, economic and social power arrives, not to mention the permission to be the researchers, deconstuctionists, politicians, buisnessmen,lawyers, doctors and teachers with the power of being “knowledgeable superiors”(like Weston) of “uneducated inferiors.” It is the minority, the educated, who do the majority of discussing of what “truth” actually is -- because they have the power to do so (It is one of the reasons I readily admit that being educated is a privilege and why returning to University life has me in a quandary of emotions: Guilt being at the top. It is also a reason why I’ve enjoyed S.U’s recommendation of reading about Dr. Paul Farmer’s life in Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains). What makes Thackeray unique as a professional in the classroom is that he allows the “truth” of his students to morph into his pedagogy of how to best reach kids. He learns from them, too, which has always been best practice. Instead of being a professional who can’t communicate in a language others can understand, he can and he does. I sometimes wonder what it would be like if more educated professionals left their isolated professional sects and dipped into public school settings to communicate what they know to members of society not privy to their world. I also wonder how they’d be received when they learn that the majority of people aren’t interested in high-brow, isolated language and the superiority it encourages. I find that the majority of everyone I meet wants to learn something new(Thackeray’s classroom is an example of this on a very small scale), but as numbers show, the majority choose not to learn in the way schools currently dispell information to the world. I think educators need to be asking themselves, “why?”

Since I left the classroom, Suzannah B. has contacted me about her advice to “Man up” and we’ve continued a conversation of what that’s supposed to mean. I’ve been able to be more honest with her now that I’m gone and I’ve told her that much of my last-day emotion came from the fact I knew I was leaving a place where I had an amazing influece on many kids. As I challenged myself to become a better teacher every year, I learned tricks of the trade that seemed to work and which became synonymous with my reputation. Leaving urban, public school kids to earn a doctorate at a private university opened a can of worms inside my intellect and heart that I couldn’t have predicted. I’m now at a place where intense, brilliant and sometimes exhausting conversation about learning are at the forefront, and where individuals make a career out of producing the language of “truth” in academic journals that no one, but other academics interested in such work, reads. This is extremely different than the work I, like Thackeray, did in the classroom and I’m wondering how I can best make a career for myself that bridges the conversations only the few are entitled to, with the reality of the public world, which I’ve always found to more real and honest than academic settings. As I’ve told Suzannah, such an intellectual challenge will be a place for me to “Man up” again and again, as my heart wants to “Man down.”

The time has come
for closing books,
and long last looks
must end...
and as I leave,
I know that I am leaving my best friend --
A friend who taught me right from wrong,
and weak from strong;
That's a lot to learn,

What, what can I give you in return?

referenced work:

Ballantine, P.(1997).”The Blue devils of Blue River Avenue” in Best American Short Stories
1998 (ed. Garrison Keillor). New York. Houghton Mifflin Press.

Conrad. C. (1902). Heart of Darkness. New York. Bantam Books. (1981)

Kozol. J (2005). The Shame of the Nation; The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in
America. Three Rivers Press. New York

National Educationa Association. (2003) “Status of the Public School Teacher 2000-2001”.
Washington, D.C. (retrieved online on 31. August, 2007 at http://www.nea.org/ edstats/images/status.pdf)

Salinger, J.D. (1951) The Catcher in the Rye. New York. Little, Brown and Company. (1991)

Swanson, C.B. (2004). “Who Graduates? Who Doesn’t? A Statistical Portrait of Public
High School Graduation, Class of 2001” . The Urban Institute Education
Policy Center (retrieved online as a .pdf file/ http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF /410934_WhoGraduates.pdf)

To Sir, With Love (Dir. J. Clavell, Columbia British Productions, 1967)#