'A trip to hell'

NEA Today, Nov 1994 by McNergney, Robert

The scene: a pull-out Spanish bilingual class of 13 Latino fifth graders in an inner-city school where the main cultural group is Asian. The classroom's in chaos; some kids are screaming obscenities at each other over the dull roar of talking. A couple more are crying. All refuse to speak Spanish.

What would you do?

The teacher depicted in the case entitled "A Trip to Hell," responded by muddling through a game of 20 questions and giving what he thought was exciting homework based on students' own experiences. The students weren't buying.

As the days passed, the teacher was continually disappointed by the reaction to what he considered creative academic instruction, so he resorted to dittos, basal readers, and heavy doses of counseling (for the students).

He encouraged individuals to help him plan the lessons. He "gently but firmly" restated his expectations, sent "validation letters" to students, and told them how intelligent they were.

Maybe the teacher really improved classroom life; maybe he only succeeded in making it look better by establishing order and watering down the curriculum. But let's set that issue aside and explore why the students were so angry and hostile in the first place.

Richard Piper, director of California Learning Designs, Inc., says the case is an example of Paulo Freire's "horizontal violence," or the violence of oppressed people against one another.

He sees in the children the classic characteristics of the oppressed: fatalistic attitudes, self-depreciation, self-distrust, and magical belief in the power of the oppressor. These students are simply acting a script society has written.

Maybe, but there could be other reasons this situation occurred. The beauty of cases is that no one has proprietary rights to the "correct" interpretation.

Amado Padilla of Stanford contends that the underlying cause is one of failing to recognize differences among individuals. "I also worry about the lack of attention to the vast heterogeneity that exists among Hispanics. To be informed that the students are all Latino is, I suppose, better than not knowing anything about the students, but just barely."

Indeed, educators know that students who share a certain characteristic such as ethnicity are still different from one another in important ways.

Sometimes within-group variation is expressed as a statistic called the "standard deviation" (s.d.), or the average difference from the group mean. When the s.d. is large, group members differ considerably on that measure, and probably differ in other important ways too.

If we read the case carefully, we see that some of the students in the class weren't out of control. If we were to measure student involvement or inappropriate behavior carefully in this situation, the s.d, would probably be large.

Padilla wants to know how proficient the students were in English, about the educational level of their parents, and where in Latin America they came from. Why would anyone think all Latino students, or students of any other ethnic group for that matter, would get along with each other?

What attitudes do students' families have about speaking Spanish? Why might some students be unwilling to try more academically challenging work? Why are some students so angry and hostile, while others are eager and open?

Answers to such questions would begin to allow the teacher to make some justifiably discriminating decisions about instructional needs.

As I imagine myself standing before those students, I can define the reasons for their anger and hostility any way I choose. But I'm mindful of Judge Learned Hand's observation that the spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not too sure of itself. I'm not going to understand students until I listen to them.

Robert McNergney is a professor of education at the University of Virginia. His e-mail address is rfm(at)virginia.edu.