Sit Down and Shut Up: How Discipline Can Set Students Free - Hardcover

Henderson, Cinque

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1250101883 ISBN 13: 9781250101884

Verlag: St. Martin's Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

On his very first day of school as a substitute teacher, Cinque Henderson was cursed at and openly threatened by one of his students. Not wanting trouble or any broken bones, Henderson called the hall monitor, who escorted the student to the office. But five minutes later the office sent him back with a note that read, “Ok to return to class.” That was it: no suspension, no detention, no phone call home, nothing.

Sit Down and Shut Up: How Discipline Can Set Students Free is a passionate and personal analysis of Henderson's year as substitute teacher in some of America’s toughest schools. Students disrespected, yelled at, and threatened teachers, abetted by a school system and political culture that turned a willfully blind eye to the economic and social decline that created the problem.

Henderson concludes that the failures of our worst schools are the result of a population in crisis: classrooms are microcosms of all our nation’s most vexing issues of race and class. The legacy and stain of race—the price of generational trauma, the cost of fatherlessness, the failures of capitalism, the false promise of meritocracy—played itself out in every single interaction Henderson had with an aggressive student, an unengaged parent, or a failed administrator.

In response to the chaos he found in the classroom, Henderson proposes a recommitment to the notion that discipline—wisely and properly understood, patiently and justly administered—is the only proper route to freedom and opportunity for generations of poor youth. With applications far beyond the classroom, Henderson’s experiences offer novel insights into the pressing racial, social, and economic issues that have shaped America’s cultural landscape.

Sure to ignite discussion and controversy, Sit Down and Shut Up provides a frank evaluation of the broken classrooms of America and offers a bold strategy for fixing them.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Cinque Henderson is a graduate of Harvard University. He has written for HBO's The Newsroom and is currently a writer for Showtimes, The Chi. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the LA Review of Books, Newsweek and newyorker.com. Sit Down and Shut Up is his first book.

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Sit Down And Shut Up

How Discipline Can Set Students Free

By Cinque Henderson

St. Martin's Press

Copyright © 2018 Cinque Henderson
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-250-10188-4

Contents

Title Page, 
Copyright Notice, 
Dedication, 
Acknowledgments, 
Introduction, 
1. Kids' Rights, or by All Means Vote for That Idiot!, 
2. Broken Windows, 
3. Gems, Knuckleheads, and Assholes, 
4. A Candid World, 
5. Stamped from the Beginning, 
6. The Child Is Father to the Man, 
7. Less Than Zero Tolerance, 
8. Follow the Money, 
9. What It Means to Be Distracted, 
10. Forget It, Jake. It's Chinatown., 
11. Super Sub, 
12. Final Days, 
What Can We Do Now?, 
Notes, 
Index, 
About the Author, 
Copyright, 

CHAPTER 1

Kids' Rights, or by All Means Vote for That Idiot!

It was 7:00 a.m. and I was on my way to work. This time I was heading to City High, a traditional public school in midcity LA. My radio was tuned to NPR and someone was yelling about "kids' rights." The yeller was running for school board. I turned it off. I'd be yelled at soon enough. Truth was, I was still reeling. Not just because that kid at Countee Cullen High School had threatened me a few days earlier but because they sent him back to my class five minutes later with a note saying "OK to return to class." I complained to the office after school, but I may as well have been speaking Greek. I followed Wilton Boulevard South from Hollywood to Koreatown and turned right to head toward the Mid-Wilshire neighborhood, a stone's throw from La Brea Avenue. I pulled up at the school on time. City High is mixed — white, black, Latino, Jewish, Armenian — and one of the oldest high schools in Southern California, one of those schools to which ambitious kids from tough neighborhoods are bused or that bright local kids attend because their parents can't afford private school.

As I walked the halls, I heard what felt like a hum — the normal sounds of teenage chaos but something else too — both similar to, and quite different from, Countee Cullen — though I couldn't yet recognize it. For a sub, every day is the first day of school. You're the new kid and you've got no friends. Every student is a potential ally or a potential adversary you've got to defuse. And you've got to size them up quickly. I had been told to (1) scout my building for the nearest guard; (2) ask if the phone in the room was working; and (3) if students say yes, I was to assume they were wrong and ask for the office number anyway. I'd need to call if the shit hit the fan.

Most resident teachers and administrators view subs sympathetically and are eager to help you out because you're a guest in their house. Others are more suspicious. One teacher used to push her desk up against the wall and remove her chair when she had to book a sub. She regarded subs as lazy, and she never wanted them to have even a place to sit down.

But that day I was lucky. The teacher next to me was Leah Ibrahim. She introduced herself right away, then broke off to yell at a kid for throwing his football in the hall, and he had nothing to say. "We had a rough day yesterday," she told me. "A big fight on campus. The Latino and Armenian kids got into it. First one in a long time." Then, as the bell rang for class, she added: "If you need to send a student to me, feel free. They're terrified of me." With that assurance I closed my door and started my class. My day passed largely without incident.

After school I walked with Ibrahim to the faculty meeting (yeah, they make subs go to those). I told her about my experience at Countee Cullen. She said she was not surprised but that Cullen hadn't always been like that. "It used to be a great school." At the meeting she ignored everything that was being said and graded papers until the union rep got up to talk about the upcoming school board election. She looked up sharply at the mention of one candidate. "That's the one who keeps talking about kids' rights?!" Everyone turned her way. (It wasn't only the kids who were terrified of her.) "If we want what happened yesterday to keep happening, then by all means vote for that idiot." Scattered laughter, nods of agreement. "These kids have a right to shut up and sit down," she mumbled in a stage whisper and went back to grading.

In fact, she loved this school. She had left for a few years to teach at a prestigious public school nearby, but she didn't like it. "I like regular kids, Henderson. And the ones we have here are every bit as bright as they were." I agreed with her. Even though I'd been at this for just a few days at that point, I'd already met a genius or two. One kid at Cullen laughed at me when I tried to do a massive cross-multiplication problem on the board, carrying the one and all that. He looked at it and in three seconds spat out the right answer. I was in awe.

But, like a lot of veterans, Ibrahim no longer was so hopeful. "This is the worst time ever to be a teacher, son. These kids —" she said, breaking off her thought. "It was never this rough before." As the faculty meeting at City High let out, I saw her picture on the wall of the library. She had been voted teacher of the year by students a few times. We walked out of the meeting together. She was still grousing. She told me how much rougher the school had gotten lately, the increasing frequency of fights between the Armenian kids and the Mexican kids. One kid, she said, was a constant bully. After his umpteenth fight the school managed to get him kicked out, and he transferred to a charter school. But he returned with a lawyer who claimed the boy was being denied his right to an education because the charter school was not within walking distance of his home. "This kid fought every day. He even went after the assistant principal once. And we're denying him an education?" She asked if I would be going back to Countee Cullen. I said that, despite the craziness, I kind of liked it. She asked for my substitute number in case she had to be absent one day. I responded by saying I had a feeling she was never out. She said, "I've missed one day in thirty years, and that's because my plane got delayed on my way back from a friend's daughter's weekend wedding. I'm never doing that again. If the wedding's out of town and not during summer break, I send gifts. I'm still mad at Delta for it." Just as we were passing the parking lot, several students approached her, anxious about an upcoming test. My day was done. Hers still wasn't over. Speaking to her students, she had clicked fully into teacher mode. Not wanting to disturb her, I headed toward my car without a word. A few seconds later she yelled after me, "Good luck this week!" I said "thanks" and held up a playful Huey Newton fist. "Kids' rights!" She waved at me with a grimace and walked toward her class, students in tow.

The notion of kids' rights isn't an idle one in education. During my year I often found myself teaching a class of absolutely rowdy middle schoolers, threatening to keep them in for recess if they didn't stop cutting up. They would turn to me indignantly and say I couldn't take recess away because they had "a right to play." Then they'd promptly go back to ignoring everything else I had to say and goof off for the remainder of class. And they were absolutely right. Tons of schools, charter and public, won't allow a teacher to deny a student recess for misbehaving because doing so, in the schools' eyes, violates their rights. When I...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: St. Martin's Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1250101883
• ISBN 13: 9781250101884
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland