February 6, 2008–Schaenen

February 6, 2008

Fourth grade, first hour

We began with a long, heated, lively talk about the primary election. Many strong opinions. I brought in the morning paper, reviewed the two-party system, how it leads up to the general election in November. I also brought a print-out bio of Obama. More than one student was VERY concerned about Obama’s safety as an African American in the public eye. Talk of Malcolm’s fate, and Dr. King’s.

“They gonna shoot him up as soon as he step outside ‘caus they don’t want no black man runnin the country.”
“I want him to be president but I don’t want him to die. I don’t want to help kill him.”

Then we settled down and wrote out these opinions on paper. One student had an interesting solution:

“I think there should be two presidents because Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are trying their best to help the world …It wouldn’t be fair to vote for just one person who is trying hard to fix our world…”

Another one:

I want to vote for Barach Obama because I think we should have an African American president because we never had a black president. I won’t vote for Hillary Clinton because she don’t have the strength to be the president. Another reason I want Obama to be president because it was too many white presidents and now we need an African American president. I think Obama have the strength to be president, and the reason I say that is because us African American people is strong and we have the power to say what we think is right. My opinion about Obama is he went to college, he passed his grades, he got his education he went through some bad things and some good things through his life but he still stayed strong aas he moved on with his life. He married a wonderful wife had great kids. Hillary Clinton married a fool she gone turn out to follow his footsteps one day.

Now of course a reader can see all kinds of borrowed thoughts and phrases in this text—a fourth grader talking about “wonderful wife and great kids?” Or calling WJC a fool? Not to mention all that race-centered stuff about white and black presidents. But there’s also that business about being strong, having power, having a voice – all that being connected somehow. It was really a whole hour of exploring and questioning the connections here. The notion of “race,” of being black OR white, plays HUGELY in the way these kids view the world. Obama’s presence in the public landscape is enormously charged. One girl said she was very worried when she saw “all those white people standing behind him” on TV. She was worried that THEY might be the ones to kill him. I walk a fine line at these moments: dismantling certain assumptions without discrediting the logic that puts them in place, allowing for genuine feeling while settling expression into civil public discourse. It’s all very challenging and interesting. When the conversation got very black/white, and someone said something too extreme, which I would have to question, one student said:
“But Ms. Schaenen…”
“Ms. Schaenen ain’t white. She mixed.”
Somehow, for this one child, I had to stop being White for the moment. My own identiy, in the heat of the conversation, perhaps had to pass into a more amorphous place so that they could feel there were no “outsiders” present. This is just a guess.
What I honestly believe is that we’re all mixed, but are socialized to believe in a mythical notion of “race” that we “belong to.” After all, Italians and Jews were once considered non-White. Who’s white and who’s not has always been a social construction. This is not a fourth grade thought, but it crossed my mind yesterday. At that moment, my students – who have always in the past considered me white (often adding “no offense, Ms. Schaenen,” when discussing some aspect of racial/judicial injustice they traced to white oppression—aired the possibility (for a particular purpose) that I am “mixed.”

Another thing about the batch of papers: even the students who often write in nearly 100 percent standard English, when riled up about the election, “let themselves go” and created texts in pretty thorough AAE. With no comment or anything, they were simply getting words down hastily and unguardedly.

Fourth grade, second hour

Instead of beginning with conversation, with this class I started with writing. “ If you were 18 and could vote, who would you have voted for yesterday?” Again, these kids are 9 and 10: what we are reading are probably distillations of what they are picking up from news and community before being flavored by their own young perspectives.

“I would vote for Barack Obama because I never want a girl to be president because she will get us shot up by the people who we are at war with so when I turn 18 I will vote for a man instead of a woman who can get me shot up.”

“If I had a chance to vote I would vote for Hillary Clinton. I would vote for Hillary Clinton because she would be the first white lady to become president. I would vote for Hillary Clinton because if she is going to clean up America and she will keep the soldiers in war and not take them out of the war because they will come out of nowhere and come and kill us. I would vote for her.”

“If I was 18 years old and I was allowed to vote I would vote for Barack Obama. I would vote for Barack Obama because he is trying to stop the war and bring our people home. Also, he is trying to help the elementary school in St. Louis. Finally, Barack Obama made a commercial telling all of St. Louis that he is trying his best to become our president so he can help our community.”

Second and Third Grades

What a fun day with these guys!
We played a superfun game. I wrote a sentence, not quite complete, on the board. We all wrote it down:
“Once upon a time there was a mouse who lived……”
I left it open and everyone completed the sentence however they wanted to, Then we passed our papers to the person on our left in the circle. I was playing, too, which was really fun for everyone (especially me). We took two or three minutes to read what was written and then add to the story “so that it made sense.” Eventually the stories got back to the original person and we got to read them aloud, which was always fun. Some comments along the way:

“Oooh, I can’t wait to see what y’all wrote on mine.”
“Thank you, Ms. Schaenen. Somebody finally wrote something good like Eric Carle who inspired me in my writing,”

As we read aloud people smiled and couldn’t help calling out “I wrote that” when the story contained the sentence or two that they contributed. The stories got nice and long, which they also loved. Interestingly, as the stories moved around the circle certain themes emerged – the mouse getting fat and needing exercise, a witch doing bad stuff, and a few other things cropped up in more than one story. Another funny thing: someone erased the name I gave the mouse on my turn and changed it to another name. Not exactly according to rules, but there you go! They’re all cute, but here’s just one:

“Once upon a time there was a mouse who lived in a mouse house. And he always ate cheese. He would crawl out his hole at night. And one day the mouse went out of his house and went out of the house to move the mouse said that he will come back some day. And so he traveled very, very far, over the ocean – the Pacific Ocean – all the way to China, where people do not eat so much cheese.
“What is all this little white stuff,” he said.
“Why, that’s called rice,” said a small voice.
“Who are you?”
“I am a mouse,” said the little mouse. “I had ran away from the evil witch,’ he said. And he said, “Can I live here and she said yes and she put cheddar cheese and pineapple, and juice. Then Oreal fed themouse. And then the mouse got exercise.”

I changed the starter sentence for third grade:
“Once upon a time there was a cat who lived…”
The whole process was just as enjoyable for all of us. There came to be an insider joke among us, too, because whenever I saw the plot taking a turn toward the violent or gangstery, I changed it drastically into something humorous, not scary and goody-goodyish. Then the boy who went after me (on my left) laughed uproariously at my attempt and re-tweaked it to make it the way he and the other boys wanted. It was a playful sense of knowing what was “OK” and not “OK.” For example, when one cat shot another cat, I wrote “But, ha-ha, the gun was just a toy gun so the other cat ran away. The house cat got a band-aid for his bite and decided to go for a walk.” Then the boy on my left wrote, “The cat met the other cat again then pulled out a real gun and killed the other cat…” It’s almost like they’re saying to me, ‘this is the stuff in our imagination. You can try to get it gone, but it’s there no matter what you say.’” And yet there was a distanced, fictive freedom in this whole game that felt very mutually appreciated. One boy actually said, “Awright, awright, you want me to write white style?” I asked him what he meant, and he said, “All proper, like yes, ma’am, no ma’am.”

So here’s one full example from this hour, Can you guess where the author is a boy, a girl, or me?

Once upon a time there was a cat who lived in a castle. The cat was lonely until it met a female cat too. Her name was Ariel. And had a cat fight and pulled out a gun, three knives and [?] hammers. No, sorry, I was wrong. There were no knives, guns, and hammers in the castle. Instead of fighting, the two cats ate a huge pile of fish until they were very full. After they ate one of the cats pulled out a gun and shot the other one. It was sad and everyone got shot even everybody in the world. And popped back up and lived happily ever after, The End.

It felt so nice to be on a fully fictional, playful footing, all of us engaged in a shared process.

-Inda