It’s been a week since school let out for the summer, and I’ve been been thinking about what happened in the classroom this year. Decompression - it happens every May. Long bike rides are key: 30 miles yesterday, 20 today, 50 miles tomorrow, if it doesn’t look too much like rain. Two-lane country blacktop with nobody talking at me helps clear the slate. I’ve also been preparing the garden for planting.

And I’ve been working on my summer reading list - more on that, below.

It’s been over five years since I worked with sixth-graders, when I was in grad school, which is when I got hooked on reading education research. The academic reading colored my outlook on what, this year, turned out to be a difficult teaching assignment. Sometimes it only takes one or two “problem” children to derail a group, but when half the class is ’special’, then everyone is at risk of getting pulled off track.

Too much of the time, it felt like I was the only person not-drinking at a party. About half way through the year I realized that I was putting more time into teaching School (with a capital S) than I remembered from previous years. Spending too much energy maintaining order saps the enthusiasm. For me, anyway.

I was reminded of Paul Willis’s Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs, a book about counter-school culture and ’style’ in an English boys’ school, and it’s connection to the larger world of working class culture. Willis said, “In particular, counter-school culture has many profound similarities with the culture its members are mostly destined for - shopfloor culture,” which he calls, “…the zone where strategies for wresting control of symbolic and real space from official authority are generated and disseminated.” It’s a zone where people are not serious about work; it’s about resistance - joking around, goofing off, wasting time, disrupting and subverting the “boss’s authority and status.”

In this case, it just means ’sixth-grade,’ and I’m not complaining about it. Just noting that there was a lot more screwing around than I remembered from my previous experiences with the age group. Not everyone joins the game, of course. Some are more resistant to authority, or peer pressure on the other side of the coin. I don’t want to go into too much detail on this. It’s mostly just shop-talk. (See how the metaphor works?)

I ended up thinking of the class as essentially two groups, even though they were never formally distinguished from one another. The achievers were the kids who did their homework, finished their assignments, and managed their time without too much oversight from me. The shirkers sharpened pencils, joked and laughed when they should’ve been busy, read or talked while the teacher was talking, visited the bathroom, fiddled around with stuff in their desks, lost and forgot things, and rarely asked for help. Projecting a few years down the line, I believed I could reasonably predict who would be working for who.

The theory that cultural practices are sustained across generations is called cultural reproduction. Schooling is one of the main mechanisms for this phenomena, and one of the ironies of formal education is that it works at cross-purposes to itself. On the one hand, we see education as a gateway to social mobility, while it also acts as a mechanism for sorting children into the roles they’re destined to play in the adult world. People are advantaged by different sorts of knowledge, which they develop both formally and informally, depending on how they see themselves and how they want other people to see them. This knowledge is expressed in not only what they do, but in the countless ways they express who they are. Not everyone willingly buys into the official program because it may not necessarily further their personal ambitions or reflect their values.

One of the main issues in the school reform discourse is how to help kids from low socioeconomic backgrounds become achievers. If you watch them in action, though, you notice wide variability in their attitudes toward these good-intentioned efforts to promote their success and happiness in life. Some seem to want little to do with it. Why? Dina Strasser, a blogger I encourage everyone to read, asks a great question when she wonders if maybe they are being resistant, and suggests that we might want to look at why, and whether they may be justified.

I wonder if the deeper question is this: whether the students and/or the communities who might take such anti-school attitudes are doing so by choice— and if so, whether that choice is justified.

The axis of that question, of course, being one of responsibility. And isn’t that the heart of hearts of any question of social injustice? Who is responsible?

This question about responsibility and justice has been rolling around with me for a long time. Responsibility gets carved up and shared, as I see it, among people all down the line. Looking through a cultural lens we tend to focus on the surfaces of things without getting into the deeper structures that may help us understand why they’ve turned out a certain way. But if we shift the lens a bit, and point it in an inconveniently uncomfortable direction, we get into an area that may expose some closeted skeletons. And that would be to look at social class, and to notice how it colors our interests and values. In a society with democratic ideals, class distinctions are generally discounted as non-existent or irrelevant, since everyone is supposed to have a shot at making something of themselves. But I couldn’t overlook what was there in front of me all this year.

As Eduwonkette pointed out back in November, structural issues are problematic for practitioners because we can’t tell kids, “Forget it. The deck is stacked against you. Give up.” But if we simply tell them, “Work hard. Be nice,” we risk losing credibility and setting them up for disappointment when things don’t work out as well as we’d like, even if they did work hard and act nice. However, since we know it’s their best option, that’s what we tell them to do. We teach compliance with a system structured to favor some over others.

How, then, to navigate this chasm that is also called the “achievement gap?” It becomes a fascinating issue in diplomacy, psychology, politics, and strategy, and it holds promise for new areas of teacher inquiry.

Without any formal training in sociology, I’ve been doing a lot of background reading. But I want to point to an especially entertaining and informative source, brought to my attention recently by Dave Pollard. It’s a book by gonzo journalist Joe Bageant called Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War. You can download and excerpt from the first chapter, American Serfs.

This may be the germinal phase of the book I’ve been thinking I need to write. At any rate, it’s too big to squeeze into a single blog entry, so I won’t go too much farther with it right now. I’m going to begin reviewing the literature, and introduce some characters. I have plenty more to say on the subject.