CHANGING TIMES, CHANGING KIDS

Tim’s aunt, who had been an English teacher, has just died. She was born in 1923, which makes her approximately the same age as my younger English teachers, women who had perfect confidence in the order of the world, though they had gone through the Depression as adolescents which convinced most of them that education and hard work were what the world was about. They were admirers of geniuses, like the major male writers of the post-WWII period. Like Hemingway (1899-1961) whose books she bought for Tim. I suggested that as a Michigan boy who did a lot of fishing, for Tim it was “The Big Two-Hearted River” that might have been a good fit, but he says “The Sun Also Rises” is sublime. Though she was his mother’s older sister and his mother thought bookstores were dangerous places where bad people hung out, his aunt took him into those sacred precincts. Gradually, his mother was persuaded that bookstores were safe, but by then Tim had adopted the idea that dangerous places and “bad” people were irresistible.

Being an English teacher on the reservation never meant having to render an opinion on bookstores, since there weren’t any. Nor did I ever dare suggest that the students read Edith Wharton novels, as Tim had to. (Actually, some of the stories about his mother make me think of Wharton and her miserable trapped women, often Dutch.) My problem was socioeconomic at first (make their English usage conform so they’ll be respectable) and then political. But many students didn’t really know how to read because of absenteeism, changing schools, and no one being able to capture their attention. I had no training at all in how to teach reading because it was assumed that high school students would know. They were far from stupid and some read all the time, like Tim. They loved comics enough to (ahem) liberate them from the candy and photo store. No one sold magazines like the ones I had been used to reading and I couldn’t afford subscriptions.

After the post-modern revolution began, every day meant trying to convince NA students that I had any right to teach them, regardless of content. I never did come to terms with those politically motivated Indian students beyond just closing the door and trying to argue it out with them. We became close in the process, but I was always in danger of being fired and possibly punched out by a parent. All of us had the feeling in the Seventies, that the world was plunging into revolution so a lot of people tried hard to keep order, meaning the status quo.

The same problem surfaced in 2003 in a different way. The small-town Cut Bank kids just off the rez felt that no outsider had a right to teach them or any notion of how to do it right. Merely being white meant nothing in an oil town where floating roughnecks and outside franchise managers brought along their kids. You had to have grown up in the town. The fact of long history with the rez kids was just added evidence of my despicable outsiderhood. They weren’t racist so much as they were xenophobic.

There was an exception. I had been hired in the belief that if I had taught on the rez successfully, I must have been a master of adversarial teaching. The white admin thought that the kids on the rez must be defiant demons. Actually, they were pretty cooperative so long as they understood the point of what we were doing. The Cut Bank administration thought a powerful teacher was required because they had created a group of male renegades, otherwise known as “gifted athletes,” who had covert permission to do anything they wanted to do so long as they won games. The boys themselves informed me of this. Their arrogance was only tempered slightly by their suspicion that somehow they were being used.

Indeed they were. Knocked unconscious on the football field. Knees destroyed on the basketball floor. Excused from class far more than they could ever make up. Riding buses across below zero Montana all day and all night to get to adversaries, eating in fast food joints. Not just that. Beer blasts enabled by adults who wanted to control them. “Extreme” fighting in back alleys, also enabled by adults: dog fights, cock fights, boy fights -- made no difference to them so long as there was violence and gambling. Girls were hurt in the byplay of something close to trauma-syndrome-triggered abuse, pregnancy and VD -- to say nothing of the emotional debris. Parents wanted them to entrap big shot athletes. And so on. Eventually I’ll work the indignation out of my system in a YA novel. The “nice” people in the town operated on denial.

I keep wondering how I would have reacted if I’d been Tim’s English teacher. Hemingway seems right. Certainly I wouldn’t have made him read Edith Wharton. Walt Whitman, Robinson Jeffers -- okay, Jack Kerouac and even the Beats. But I’d have been totally overmatched by Rimbaud or Henry Miller, even if I’m smuggled them past the admin. I did know Beckett and Brecht because my undergrad work was mostly theatre.

But kids like Tim need to write more than to read. One girl forced to sit in a Cut Bank English class refused to join in. She sat by the door and kept her book closed, her jaw set. I gave her a spiral notebook and asked her to write me a letter in it. Before the next session I wrote a letter back to her -- not as though she were a student, but like a friend. She wrote me another letter and I responded again. In a couple of weeks she was participating in discussion and reading the assignments.

Tim and I are corresponding this same way except that it turned into a book: “Orpheus Pressed Up Against the Windows of the Catacombs,” and by now it’s developing into a Vook ("The Fallen and the Flight") with video that Tim and the Cinematheque boys do. Even in the midst of his surgeries, he continued to correspond with his students via Internet. They send assignments, reports, complaints, enthusiasms. Their trauma and xenophobia is far beyond anything I ever imagined, but then today’s world is also beyond anything any of us expected.