The work of teaching writing - Joseph Harris 2020

Jetsam
Beginnings

Robert Mulligan’s 1967 film version of Up the Down Staircase is a remarkable, gritty depiction of teaching in an urban public school. Shot in East Harlem in a semi-documentary style, with many students played by non-actors, the film follows the struggles of a first-year teacher, Sylvia Barrett, portrayed with an unkempt intensity by Sandy Dennis, as she confronts both an underachieving class of eleventh graders and an indifferent public school bureaucracy. For the most part, the film follows what I’ve called the dead poets narrative—as Sylvia slowly connects with students, forms allies with sympathetic teachers, and learns to live with the obduracies of the administration. But the student she cares about most eludes her, the colleague she thinks might be a beau proves instead a cad, and a girl she might have helped injures herself leaping from a window in a moment of lovesick adolescent folly. In the end, Sylvia does not triumph so much as endure. Offered the chance to transfer to a swank suburban private school, she opts to return for a second term teaching in Harlem.

And yet, as powerful as this film is, it actually obscures what is most striking about the novel on which it is based: Bel Kaufman’s 1964 Up the Down Staircase. For while Mulligan’s film follows a coherent narrative arc, Kaufman’s novel is fragmented, diffuse, epistolary. While the movie centers solidly on Sylvia Barrett, the novel continually spins out and away from her, consisting almost entirely of quotidian and often anonymous texts—memos, notes, forms, circulars, minutes, flyers, news articles, homework, suggestion box comments—produced by students, teachers, and administrators over the course of a term. (The novel had its beginnings as a short story Kaufman published in 1962 in the Saturday Review, titled “From a Teacher’s Wastebasket.”) More than any other book I’ve ever read, Up the Down Staircase represents a class as a collective project, an amalgamation of voices—students, teacher, librarian, school psychologist, department chair, vice principal, and others.

Several story lines emerge out of this jumble of texts: Sylvia grows more confident in meeting the needs of her students and the demands of her superiors; she starts but then backs away from a romance with a colleague; she tries but fails to connect with a smart but disaffected student. While Sylvia narrates parts of these stories in letters to friends and notes to fellow teachers, we need to construct most of them from scraps written by students and memos posted by administrators. Indeed, the key incident in the novel does not directly involve Sylvia. Kaufman reproduces the notebook of Alice Blake, a girl in Sylvia’s homeroom who has formed a crush on her English teacher, the handsome and urbane Paul Barringer, a poet manqué who is teaching high school “while waiting to be published” (58). (He is also the colleague Sylvia nearly falls for.) We read along as Alice uses her notebook to compose drafts of a love letter to Barringer, speculates on his possible romance with Sylvia, and practices signing her new married name (“Alice Barringer”)—all of this interspersed with homework for French, English, and math. The notebook ends with a copy of a handwritten letter Alice finally works up the courage to leave on Barringer’s desk, in which she declares how she alone among her classmates feels “the Beauty and the Truth of the poetry you read” and offering “if you ever need me to die for you I gladly will” (232). In a moment of stunning cruelty, Barringer corrects a number of mistakes in spelling, clichés, and punctuation in her prose and returns her heartfelt if naive letter to Alice. (We are shown his corrections penned in the margins of Alice’s letter.) Devastated, Alice decides that like the Lady of Shalott (one of Barringer’s favorite poems), she will kill herself for love. Fortunately, she only breaks a few bones in a leap from a second-story classroom window, as we learn in the next chapter though a series of frantic memoranda from administrators managing the incident.

Sylvia shares a love of reading with Barringer and admires his easy wit and poise. But this incident reveals him to be everything she wants not to become as a teacher. As she writes to a friend: “Paul asks how I would have handled a love letter from a student. I don’t know—by talking, maybe, by listening. I don’t know” (240, original emphasis). And indeed, listening rather than correcting turns out to describe her best work as a teacher. Looking for ways to engage her class of “slow non-readers,” Sylvia starts a suggestion box and we read the entries—some signed and some pseudonymous—at three points during the novel. A few are heartbreaking—an anonymous student (“Me”) wishes himself a happy birthday, since no one else knows—and many others are irreverent and funny: “You’re a good teacher except for the rotten books you have to assign like The Oddissy. I wouldn’t give it to a dog to read” (113). The main thing is that they keep coming—even from “The Hawk,” whose comments all end with some version of “from now on I’m not writing any more for you” (76)—and by the end of the semester, most of the entries are signed. (The Hawk turns out to be Lennie Neumark, a boy embarrassed by having fallen out of his seat on the first day of class.) A sense of trust and respect is achieved. Sylvia also asks students to comment anonymously on what they learned in English during their first two years in high school and gets a series of ungrammatical but astute critiques. For example, “Dribs & Drabs. McBeth one week Moby Dick next, a quotation mark, and oral debates on Should Parents be Strict? Should Girls Wear Jeans” (81). And there is a remarkable chapter, “From Miss Barrett’s Wastebasket” (92—105), in which we read the “scrap paper” drafts of student essays tossed among Sylvia’s own (and equally unsuccessful) attempts to begin a letter applying for a new job.

The point, made over and over and in ways too comic, astute, and varied for me to summarize here, is that there is a difference between being smart and being educated. John gestures toward this distinction in Oleanna when he assures the failing Carol that “you’re an incredibly bright girl” (7), but he clearly doesn’t believe it. But Up the Down Staircase documents Sylvia’s real and growing appreciation of the intelligence of her charges. Indeed, she begins to see how her eagerness to instruct can impede her efforts to understand. This is illustrated in a hilarious account of a class discussion of Macbeth in which Sylvia’s students continually ignore her attempts to correct their speech:

I: I understand Macbeth was taught in English 2 last term. You were supposed to report on a supplementary book. That means, in addition to the required—

Lou: I ain’t never read it before.

I: I never read it.

Lou: Me neither.

/. . . . /

I: Rusty, you wanted to say something?

Rusty: Mrs. Macbeth noodges him.

I: You mean nudges?

Rusty: Noodges. Being a female, she spurns him on. (191—93)

Here Lou shows the timing of a borsch-belt comedian, and Rusty is right twice-over: Lady Macbeth is a noodge, and her egging on of her husband combines a disdain and ambition that are precisely caught in spurn. As Sylvia learns to listen, her students grow more confident in what they have to say and write. She teaches through offering them her attention.

We don’t often see Sylvia respond to student writing, though, and her one sustained effort to do so marks perhaps her biggest failure as a teacher. Sylvia is immediately drawn to an outsider in her class, Joe Ferone, a tough kid who seems in almost constant trouble with the vice principal and other teachers. When Joe writes a dismissive response to her question about what he’s learned in prior English classes (“You teachers are all alike dishing out crap and expecting us to eat it”), Sylvia responds with a kind of forced interest, praising his “vivid” writing but noting “though your vocabulary is colorful, certain words would be more effective if used sparingly.” Joe’s response is “I don’t understand them big words you use” (82—83). Undaunted, Sylvia continues to push for Joe, defending him against accusations of cheating, excusing class cuts and other misdemeanors, and even giving him a second chance when he brings a knife to school. However, Joe misunderstands the nature of her interest and, in a tense scene, makes a rough pass at Sylvia when the two of them are alone in a classroom. When Sylvia tells him no, gently, he bolts from the room, possibly crying, and is pretty much lost to her as a student for the rest of the semester (300—303).

Sylvia fails with Joe Ferone because she is drawn not to who he is but to who she would like him to be. “I dimly sense a rebelliousness in him, like mine” (59), she says. She begins by over-praising his writing, much as she starts by over-admiring the supercilious Paul Barringer. Neither boy nor man quite turns out to be the sensitive rebel she hopes for. In contrast, one of Sylvia’s triumphs comes when she asks Jose Rodriguez—who we learn was the quiet boy who wished himself a happy birthday in the suggestion box—to serve as the judge in a classroom mock trial (136—37). Jose brings an unexpected authority to the role—drawing on his own experiences in juvenile court to keep strict order over his classmates, as though he had simply been waiting all that time for the right occasion to speak. Later, he writes to Sylvia in the suggestion box that “ever since you elected me judge . . . You made me feel real” (180).

My complaint about most dead poet movies has been that they glamorize the work of teachers, of inspiring and assigning, but show much less interest in the work of students. This emphasis is turned on its head in Up the Down Staircase. Sylvia’s assignments and lessons are actually pretty routine: “Why do we study myths?” “What are your views on integration?” and so on. The energy of the novel comes less from her than from the comic, intelligent, and unpredictable responses of her students.