America Behind the Color Line (56 page)

What I’m saying is that they must let nature take its course. Let old age catch up with you, ’cause once old age sets in, you’re too old to do anything. You can’t fight, and there ain’t nobody here that’s gonna listen to you. At least with the younger guys you can scare them straight. You can set up things for them and you tell them like to make certain things, make learning fun to them. Too many times they’ll be involved with things that they feel is boring. It’s designed to help them, but they can’t see themselves take a part in it. But when it becomes fun and they’re learning more too, then they want to do it. I would keep the food the same, the TV the same, the phone the same, ’cause that’s designed to keep you from not coming back. Every time you go to that phone you have to make a collect call.

So if you take some guys out of here that use drugs, man, and not give them some kind of program, you know, man, you’ve got a problem. Now, this is what you need to do to fix that problem. You ask, do you want help with this problem? And if they say no, then okay, well, okay, you want to come back? All right; go. That’s the thing about it: they want help, give them help, but if you just let them go, know that they’ll be back. If you was to let at least 95 percent of the people out of this jail at a quarter to three, at about five o’clock they all be back. You’ve got to know that to be true. They’ll be back ’cause they have nothing else to do. They have no means of being satisfied or fixing their problems, so they just wallow in stuff that they’re already in, the mess that they’re already in. That’s basically what happens, how they’ve got themselves into everything.

You have to watch what you say in here. Certain things you can say out there in the street, you can’t say here. I don’t like saying them, but they use words like that. Like if you call a guy a bitch, man, them are grounds for getting beat up. You call a guy a whore, them grounds of getting beat up. If you call him a punk, them’s grounds of getting beat up. So you have to really watch what you say. So a guy like me, you see, I know that respect is not something you demand, it’s something you share, so I share with them. That way, I deter any of that. And then I’m kind of like a fairly big guy too, so that helps, ’cause people don’t want to mess with me. But it’s really hard; it is. You have to watch what you say, even when you get angry. You have to be careful of what you say to another inmate. You can’t just say anything that comes to your mind. You have to pick your words, because what you might say from minute to minute might cause a fight, a very, very, very, very, very dangerous fight. And then it depends on who you’re saying this to. If you’re saying it to the wrong guy, it’s gonna cost you your life. Yeah. It will cost you your life. You will die in jail, yes, you will. It will happen; it will. You will lose your life by what you say out your mouth to one of these guys that’s in these places. So you really have to be careful about that, you know what I mean? It’s not normal.

DR. EMIEL HAMBERLIN
Ticket to Success

For people of my generation, education was part of the Civil Rights Movement. We were taught that even in a racist system, we would succeed and be okay if we worked hard. I was born in Fayette, Mississippi, and it was terrible, in terms of what blacks went through. I grew up during the time of Emmett Till, and I know what people in the United States must feel when they think about terrorists. I lived among terrorists, and we could identify them, but nothing was ever done to them. The Klansmen were terrorists.

When I was attending Alcorn State University in Mississippi, my brothers and my sister were living in Chicago. I used to visit them and work in Chicago during the summer months, and then go back to school to study. I didn’t like Chicago, and after finishing at the university, I planned to join the Peace Corps. I was waiting for an assignment and my brother said, why don’t you come and substitute-teach until you get the assignment from the Peace Corps? And I did. I went to the Chicago Board of Education and they sent me to Du Sable High School as a substitute teacher. And I never stopped teaching.

It wasn’t love at first sight. I didn’t like the Chicago weather; it was kind of cloudy, and I expected it to be more sunny. There was smog, and the streets were not as clean as where I was coming from. But after about two or three weeks, I said, gee, this is what I like doing. As I continued to teach and to find satisfaction in teaching, that somehow gave me the desire to stay. And now I wouldn’t want to live in any other place but Chicago. Kids come out to my house all the time on 85th and Winchester. They landscaped my house. Some of the students are members of the church I belong to.

Being average frightens me. Students realize they don’t have an average teacher when they walk into my classroom. If you don’t have an average teacher, you’re not going to have average students. You’re going to have above-average students. Each one of my students also realizes that he or she was born an original; there’s no need to dye a copy. You’re what you ought to be when you want to be it. And when people misunderstand you, it’s because you’re great. You’re not supposed to be understood; you’re not that simple. You’re good, you’re bad, you’re great. You’re anything you want to be.

For most of my thirty-six years of teaching at Du Sable High School, my day has started at seven and ended at seven. In the evenings we work in the lab. I get to know more about the children at that time, and I teach more then than I do the rest of the day. The children are relaxed, and I sneak the information in on them. They are in a learning environment, but the structure is such that they don’t know I’m evaluating them while they are going through the subject matter—photosynthesis, respiration, adsorption, development, animal behavior, and so on. We have a lot of fun.

Part of my philosophy is, I never fail a child in class. If he comes 80 percent of the time, he’s going to pass. It’s never his fault that he has not learned. It just so happens that I may not be the right teacher for him, so there’s another doctor in the house for him. I would not let a child sit there for ten weeks and then fail. We don’t live long enough to fail. It’s not human to fail. There’s another problem going on, and it’s not the child’s problem. It’s beyond the child, so let’s find out what it is. It’s not you, I tell them; there’s nothing wrong with you. It’s I who was not able to teach you, so let’s go to another teacher.

The kids are in school about six hours a day, and they have eighteen hours out there in a difficult world, sometimes a nightmare world. But that’s the hand we’re dealt. And since I’m an educational physician, it’s my job to make the students become educationally aware. I’m not worried about where they’re coming from; I’m worried about how well I can make them. And if they keep taking my assignments, which are a prescription, they’re going to become educationally well. If a student does not get completely well, I’m going to at least make him feel better. This is my charge. This is my duty. This is my passion.

Of course, I am concerned with bolstering the children’s self-esteem in the classroom setting. I tell them, do you know how great you are, how wonderful you are? You’re an original—don’t you feel it, can’t you see it, don’t you see what I see? Can’t you feel what I see? There’s the inner part of you, I tell them, that must say yes to what I’m trying to get into you. Once I get your mind and change your attitude, I’ll change your behavior, because you can be anything you want to be. It’s your mind—it’s your attitude—that limits you. And when there’s no limit to it, what do you want to be?

So when a child walks into the classroom, it is up to me to hype him up, to pick him up, to energize him, to bring happiness into his life, to enter his morning. And you get the very best you can out of the moments you have.

Many of the children are not being nurtured and praised and prepared for school at home. Where a home is not as happy as it possibly could be, and parents are scrambling and scraping and trying to make ends meet, it stresses the children, even though the parents are doing all they possibly can. The children’s attention span is limited, and they’re easily annoyed even by someone touching them; they’re ready to almost go off. They’re constantly under stress and in one or another of these emotional states.

Another thing that happens with the central city children is that when their friends are murdered or killed—and that happens often—they do not know how to grieve. There’s no way to grieve. They come right back to school. This is where they find the best possible sanctuary. So not knowing how to grieve, these children many times will hurt another child to get over the grief. They think, I must hurt somebody else. And that is not a positive way of grieving.

The parents are doing all they can do, and many times their spirit is broken because their income is fixed and they wonder, how do I get out of this hole? I’m in a trench; I’m pulling up, trying to get out. At the end of the month you can barely make it out, and by the time you get out and the money comes in, you’ve become a part of the negativity; you’ve slipped back into it again.

I involve the family, even where family support is difficult to obtain. I never dwell on negatives and on what can’t be done, but seek to discover new ways to do the most difficult tasks. I start where the student is, and in urban areas such as where I teach, it’s not always on page one of the biology or horticulture textbook.

One thing I want in my classroom is to surround the students with their subject matter. I have many animals and many plants in the classroom, so once you walk in, it takes your mind completely away from where you’re coming from, into another world. And I want to give you something to talk about when you go home other than negativity. I want you to be able to go home and say, this is what happened in the classroom—the alligator was eating, and we fed the piranhas today. The macaws were talking; they have speech teachers. There are many activities that we have in the classroom, and the aim is to overpower the negativity that the students are walking through in terms of getting to school; to counteract the crises that they’re going through.

One of the most popular programs I implemented with my students is the Urban Ecology Sanctuary, an indoor-outdoor laboratory where students grew and cared for a large variety of plants and maintained a habitat or ecosystem for peacocks, pheasants, and other exotic birds. The sanctuary won national acclaim as an innovative idea generated by students with school support, and was highlighted in the
New York Times
and other publications around the country. The project was open to the entire community and required many hours of professional consultation, workshops, and seminars for the students as well as collaborations with teachers and community leaders.

Students involved in the sanctuary, along with other teachers and myself, were invited to Cornell University’s School of Architecture to share with its students the origin and significance of the project. The Du Sable students also explored the possibility of the sanctuary being duplicated by other urban high schools, and discussed the impact this would have on urban environmental education. All of the students who participated in the project have since gone on to colleges and universities around the United States.

The city of Chicago’s Parks Department routinely works with my students when developing wetlands, growing wild grasses, and establishing ecological parks around the city. For many years, my students have worked with the city aldermen in developing abandoned lots into resourceful green areas and community gardens. My classroom’s Turn a Vacant Lot Around project was so successful that seniors in our community helped us to continue the program for four years.

Students also went into public housing complexes and decorated the porches with live plants and flowers. They earned many hours of Service Learning credits toward graduation requirements while helping to make life a little better for their families and others. Our Botanical Club earned the highest award of any such group of environmental education students exhibiting in the Chicago Flower Show over a five-year period. All these programs required tremendous student discipline, dedication, and scholarship.

When students discover the amazing interdependence of people, animals, and nature, they develop a connection to the environment. Conservation, health issues, extinction of species, world pollution, rain forests, food sources, trees, and recycling become as much a part of their daily lives as McDonald’s and video games. I want students to know that I can give them some knowledge and skills to protect our global environment, but what they do with their own lives is the real answer. I want students to know that I care what they do with their lives.

The reason our kids do not value education in the same way we did is that we almost teach them how to be helpless. We give them whatever they need, or what we think they need. And that is not their fault. We even supply them with more paper and pencils than they need. We think we’re helping them when we do not allow them to attach themselves to some degree of responsibility, and that’s what I try to bring out in my classroom.

Teachers lost their authority with kids when parents lost their authority. When children don’t come home on time, they don’t necessarily come to your class on time. Single mothers try to do most of it by themselves, and they need a helpmate. They’re struggling, they’re doing it; they’re doing the best they can with what they have. I’m not bashing them. If the fathers were not there, it was overwhelming for the mothers to do it all by themselves. So when the family structure fell apart, so did order in the schools.

If the middle class moved back to this area, it would of course help. When you have a heterogeneous grouping of people, economically and educationally, it does help. There are examples to see. There are examples of mothers going to work, of fathers going to work.

I suppose I could get very upset about finding out that a student has dropped out because she’s pregnant or another is in the Cook County Jail because he’s busted for selling drugs. But then I look at the students as they’re walking through the hall, as they’re sitting in the cafeteria and in my classroom, and I wonder, if I was in this community, which one of them would I be? Just which one would I be? If I was dealt a hand of an environment that is so negative, that draws so much energy away, that actually reinforces their negativity so well, and they are successful being negative, then how can I offset it with being positive? That’s difficult to do, yet it can be done by repeating it over and over again—not bashing a student because of where he’s coming from, but helping him to get where he ought to be.

A child who goes to prison, or has to drop out because she’s pregnant, or succumbs to drugs, is a lost child. I feel very uneasy about it. I feel for that child with a great deal of compassion, but what I rely upon is what I gave that child while he or she was here with me. I gave him all or gave her all I possibly could give of myself and all the training I could, and tried to guide their life through what they were enduring. So the satisfaction goes with the belief that I did as much as I possibly could do, that I knew how to do—and that if I can’t do it, there’s another teacher in the house.

Many of the students are in transit when they leave Du Sable High; they’re moving to another school in another area of the city. They just don’t drop out and that’s the end of their career. Where we are is not accepted, and I wouldn’t want them to remain here when they can get out. So we don’t really lose a lot of students; they transfer to other schools.

Of course, if I see bad behavior in a child, I don’t blame that on the child. Children are the reflection of the society in which they live. What they see on television, what they’re allowed to hear on radios and CDs, is what they reflect back into the schools. They keep it real.

If I had been born in the Robert Taylor Homes, perhaps I might not be where I am today. That’s a real possibility. I said that to a judge when I was being a character witness for a student. I asked him, if you were born where he was born, would you be sitting there or would you be sitting where the young man is sitting? It gave him something to think about. And the young man got probation instead of jail time.

As a black man and as a teacher, I attempt to change lives and mend broken spirits through the power of education. It was not long ago, during my childhood, that my family made its living on the farm. From that humble American beginning, my blackness, my appreciation for nature, and my respect for family and others have given me the power to teach with conviction.