Teaching on the South Side: Cultural Capital

I’ve been keeping a journal regularly since 1988, but it is filled with stream-of-conscious ramblings that I would never show anyone else. It’s too personal, too disorganized, too raw. It’s been good for keeping me in touch with myself and with the act of writing, but it hasn’t gotten me any closer to my childhood goal of writing best-selling novels.

So I started this blog, this record of my move to Chicago and my experiences teaching on the South Side, not just as a record, but also as a way to force me to keep an audience in mind as I write, and audience that I can hopefully connect with, an audience I can manipulate into feeling something when they read my writings, an audience I can convince to keep coming back for more, an audience I can turn into a nascent fan base.

My father is probably my biggest fan. I emailed him last night to let him know about my latest updates. He called me this morning to let me know I had let a typo slip through (don’t bother hunting for it, I fixed it right away). He also said, in that paternally-impressed kind of way, “You’ve become quite a theater-goer.” Understandable, since most of my last post detailed the many theatrical amusements Lisa has treated me to since I moved here. I also thought I detected a hint of surprise in Dad’s voice, so my reply was: “I always have been.”

Then I got to thinking: how would Dad have known that? I haven’t lived at home since the summer of 1992. I’ve been home on vacations and holidays (and to help Mom and Dad move from Sawyer to Paw Paw on the day Star Wars: Special Edition opened in theaters). I’ve changed in those years away. I’m not the same kid they sent to Central Michigan University in the fall of 1991.

And yet.

My earliest memory is of seeing Star Wars with my father when I was four (Mom didn’t want to go, so he took me). When I was a kid, Mom and I would spend Sunday afternoons watching old movies on TV.

My first exposure to live theater (at lest the first I remember) was seeing a high school production of South Pacific. Mom (and maybe Dad, I’m not sure) took my sister and I because one of our babysitters, the daughter of a friend of Mom’s, was in the chorus. The next year, Mom took us to see Guys and Dolls. The friend’s daughter had the lead that year.

When I was 12 or 13, Mom and Dad dragged Anne and me to see the traveling company of Cats in South Bend, Indiana. I hated it. It was bad enough that I had to get all dressed up, but then I spent and hour and a half trying to puzzle out the plot before I realized there wasn’t any. Anne, on the other hand, loved it. She loved it so much that, well, if I wanted to embarrass her on line with a more vivid description of her enthusiasm for the show, I could.

The next year, it was Big River, the musical version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. At that point in my life, I hadn’t yet read the book, so I wasn’t as appreciative as I could have been, but at least this musical had a plot. It was better than Cats.

I could go on cataloging the various shows I’ve seen over the years, both because Mom and Dad took me and later, when I would go to shows in college, or when I did a little acting and stage hand work myself during my graduate school summers, but my point isn’t that I’ve always enjoyed theater.

My point is that I haven’t. I had to be taught to enjoy live theater. And the people who taught me were my parents.

And this brings me to the reason I have logged this entry under the heading of “Teaching on the South Side” and why I have titled it “Cultural Capital.” But before that explanation, I need to show off some of that fancy learnin’ I got from my teacher education classes.

Cultural capital is “the general cultural background, knowledge, disposition, and skills that are passed on from one generation to the next” (MacLeod, 13). It is a theory very heavily entrenched on the nurture side of the “nature or nurture” debate: human beings become who they are not mainly because of genetic predisposition, but because of the environment(s) in which they grow up and continue to live in. Genetics are certainly a factor, as studies of alcoholism and other such phenomena have shown, but environment, parenting, social exposure and the like have a tremendous impact on how a child will develop. This is part of the reason I like theater. It’s the reason my father shouldn’t be surprised to read the list of shows I’ve been to since moving to Chicago. It’s why I shouldn’t think he would be surprised.

It’s also what makes teaching on the South Side so difficult, frustrating, and exhausting for me. My students literally come from a different world. They speak a different dialect of English than I do (which means their speech patterns and pronunciations of “standard” words are often just as confusing to me as their slang-heavy vocabulary), they have different standards of value, they have backgrounds and experiences that I can’t begin to fathom.

I haven’t compared notes with my friend Nate, who recently returned from teaching English in Nepal for the Peace Corps, but I would think that teaching English to a completely different population would be easier than teaching it to a population that has some elements in common with yours, elements that are mostly superficial.

It is my job to teach these students of mine, to give them the tools with which they can choose their own paths in life, make their own destinies.

But then I remember another term I learned in teacher education: social reproduction.

“Several decades of quantitative sociological research have demonstrated that the social class into which one is born has a massive influence on where one will end up. Although mobility between classes does take place, the overall structure for class relations from one generation to the next remains largely unchanged” (MacLeod 4).

I was taken to live theater shows as a child; therefore I still enjoy them as an adult. Some of my students talk with a certain pride about owning a bootlegged copy of the latest theatrical movie release. To say we have different values is a bit of an understatement.

As a teacher on the South Side of Chicago, I am fighting against massive social forces that conspire to keep my students in exactly the same social place their parents occupy and which they currently occupy themselves. And perhaps the most disheartening thing about this is that my students aren’t aware of the forces arrayed against them, and resist the notion that they can do anything to change their circumstances, e.g. get an education. Part of this is typical teenaged fatalism, egocentrism, and naïveté. The other part is social, monolithically, oppressively so. I’d like to think that one person (i.e. me) could make a difference, but it’s hard to maintain that optimism when the societal wheel is crushing you beneath it on a daily basis.

Thank goodness for the escape of live theater.


NOTE: the references to MacLeod refer to Jay MacLeod’s fascinating and insightful study of social forces at work on two different groups of students, growing up in the same disadvantaged urban neighborhood, Ain’t No Makin’ It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood (Westview Press, 1995). It was required reading in one of my teacher education classes. It challenged and changed my perception of the idea that anything is possible for he or she who works hard enough (what sociologists call the achievement ideology). MacLeod’s findings surprised me, as I think they would surprise most people.

Life in the Windy City: My Kind of Town

Student teaching was, to put it bluntly, hell. The program at Michigan State University, which is one of the top teacher education programs in the nation, by the way, lasts for a full school year. For most of that year, the student teacher is solely responsible for teaching almost an entire load of classes, responsible for taking a full load of classes through MSU related to the student teaching experience, and, although it is officially verboten by the program, many student teachers are also responsible for whatever evening or weekend job they have to pay for college.

And during all of this, the student teachers are often told that their first year of teaching will be worse. Worse because, as unprepared as we might feel as mere student teachers, at least there is a safety net of mentor teacher, field instructor, classroom instructors, and the collective weight of Michigan State University. As a first-year teacher, you’re flying solo. Performing without a net. Sure, at least you’re getting paid, something student teachers don’t get and often complain about, but that paycheck comes with more responsibility, more stress.

I wouldn’t say my first year of teaching has been worse, stress-wise, than my year of student teaching. In some ways, such as the aforementioned paycheck, it is much better. But, like any first-year teacher, I have often wanted to pull all of my hair out in frustration: with my students, with other teachers, with administrators, with the bureaucracy, with myself.

Thankfully, I live in Chicago. As stressful as teaching, especially the first year, often is, as often as I fantasize about quitting my job and living the Bohemian life of a writer (that’s what summer is for, I tell myself), I only stress about actually living in Chicago when I’m stuck in traffic. Other than the inevitable traffic jams, life in Chicago has treated me very well so far.

If I were a more disciplined writer, a more timely reporter, a less-stressed teacher, I would have written about the following things months ago:

Flanagan’s Wake

Lisa and I hadn’t been dating very long, but her best friend, Naomi, wanted to check me out, make sure I was OK and all that. Naomi also happened to be acting in Flanagan’s Wake, a mostly-improvised comedy playing at the Pheasant Run resort outside of Chicago. So we killed two birds with one stone: we spent an afternoon laughing ourselves senseless, and then went out to dinner with Naomi.

Since the audience is integral to the performance of the play—the idea is that the American cousins have come to the recently deceased Irish man’s funeral to pay their respects, and they often have to remind their forgetful (or simply drunk) Irish hosts about vital information concerning Flanagan’s life—my favorite part of the play was when I was asked to remind everyone what Flanagan thought the afterlife would be like. I knew the word “bidet” would come in handy sooner or later.

The Credeaux Canvas

One of the benefits of dating someone who is a company member of a theater group is the free tickets she can get to shows. This wasn’t the main reason I started dating Lisa, but it is a nice perk. The first such show she took me to was the Circle Theater (www.circle-theater.org) production of The Credeaux Canvas, by Keith Bunin. The play uses the plot of three twentysomethings who plan to forge a “lost masterpiece” and sell it to an unsuspecting collector to examine the rules we set for ourselves and the roles we choose to play for each other. It was, in short, fantastic: the intimate set (and setting—Circle’s small theater seats fewer than fifty people), the razor-sharp dialogue, the perceptive themes all added up to a top-notch theater experience.

And, as an added bonus, I got to watch an actor I hadn’t seen since my graduate days at Central Michigan University: Jason Powers. In fact, we’d been in the same summer theater group together. Now he’s doing a lot of acting in Chicago.

Pilobolus Dance Company:

Yes, “pilobolus” is a real word. No, it’s not dirty. Well, not metaphorically, anyway. “Pilobolus (crystallinus) is a phototropic zygomycete - a sun-loving fungus that grows in barnyards and pastures,” says the official website of the company, www.pilobolus.com. “Pilobolus, the arts organism, germinated in the fertile soil of a Dartmouth College dance class in 1971. What emerged was a collaborative choreographic process and a unique weight-sharing approach to partnering that gave the young company a non-traditional but powerful new set of skills with which to make dances,” which is the website’s fancy way of saying what you see at a pilobolus concert looks something like a cross between modern dance and partner yoga—and it’s mouth-agape-awesome.

This was the second formal “date” Lisa and I went on, if you can count Credeaux as the first. We’d been out to dinner many times between the end of August and the middle of October, which is when we saw Pilobolus at the historic Chicago Theater, but we’d never actually gone out together, couple-wise, until Pilobolus. (Yes, you’d think seeing a movie together would have been simple enough, but for us, it wasn’t. Trust me. To date, we’ve only seen one movie together: The Incredibles. And that was just before Christmas.)

Shakespeare Kung Fu

It sounded so promising, a surreal melding of two of my favorite things: the immortal poetry of Shakespearean dialogue and the cheesy camp of bad kung-fu movies. Shakespeare Kung Fu turned out to be a disappointment; its main redeeming feature, however, is that it gave both Lisa and I something to laugh about on the train back to my place.

When Lisa first told me about this new play by “award-winning Chicago playwright Will Kern, best known for his popular and critically acclaimed long-running play Hellcab” (so sayeth The Store Front Theater) my first thought was “Damn! Why didn’t I think of that?

After we suppressed our laughter for the hour that the show ran, my thoughts ran more toward debating with Lisa whether the show would have been better if the actors had played the Shakespearean stuff more seriously or if they had hammed it up more. As it was, everything—the language, the cheesy combat (and not martial-artist-skillful, I might add, only stage-combat-skillful)—was so over the top that it was hard to take the whole thing seriously. At least the costumes and the set were nice to look at.

Off the Page with Keith Bunin at Circle Theater

Another perk that comes with dating a member of a theater company is the inside track I get on events at the theater. Not only am I privy to whatever Lisa tells me about the inner political workings of Circle Theater, more importantly, she keeps me updated on other cool events, like this one, when playwright Keith Bunin came to Circle Theater for a moderated discussion about his play, and about the life of a playwright. As a theater junkie, as a teacher of English, as a wannabe writer myself, these two hours were mana from heaven.

Jane Eyre: The Musical

Nothing Emily or Charlotte Bronte published could ever be considered cheerful and sunny. The same goes for this musical adaptation of Charlotte’s Jane Eyre. In high school, I was seized by the desire to read Wuthering Heights. It had something to do with a girl. I later found out that the girl wasn’t worth the effort. Neither was Wuthering Heights. I had never read Jane Eyre, but all you really need to know about the story is wonderfully summed up in this doggerel parody published in Maurice Sagoff’s Shrinklits: Seventy of the world’s towering classics cut down to size.

My love behaved
A bit erratic:
Our nuptial day
Brought truth dramatic:
He HAD a wife,
Mad, in an attic.

I fled! I roamed
O'er moor and ditch.
When life had struck
Its lowest pitch,
And uncle died
And left me rich.

I sought my love
Again, to find
And awful fire
His home had mined,
Kippered his wife
And left him blind.

Reader, guess what?
I married him.
My cup is filled
Up to the brim:
Now we are one,
We play, we swim,

The power we share
Defies all pain;
We soar above
Life's tangled plain--
He Mr. Rochester,
Me Jane!

The poem, at least, is entertaining. The same can’t be said of the musical.

It’s not that the actors were bad or that the set was poorly designed or that everyone was off key. On the contrary, the actors did a wonderful job, the set was solidly put together and no one’s voice was terribly irritating. But none of that could overcome a blasé script, inane music and the inherent downfalls of the period: poor English people in the Victorian period dressed in drab colors. It was, at times, like watching a funeral.

About half an hour into the show, I leaned over to Lisa and whispered: “Shakespeare Kung Fu was better.” We both had a good (although silent) laugh.

* * *

Yes, there is certainly much to do in Chicago. I definitely like it here.

Teaching on the South Side: Winter Break at Last

I have been remiss in my postings—even tardy, truant, and just plain lazy. As a reader, I would be shocked and dismayed that one of my favorite web loggers (and I'm sure one of yours, too) hasn't posted anything since—October 26?!?!?! I would want that author dragged into the street, beaten savagely, shot, drawn and quartered, and his remains posted high above the town gates as a warning to all who would dare keep a breathless audience waiting over two months for another scintillating symphony of sentences such as these.

Of course, such rash action would rather defeat the purpose of getting said author to produce any more coruscating compositions, so let’s just settle for metaphoric self-flagellation, shall we? I will consider myself chastened, and you can all enjoy the bevy of belated essays that, in my guilt (and/or desire to put off getting back to school work for as long as possible) I am going to crank out over the next few days—maybe even hours!

I will, however, keep in mind my originally-suggested punishment, as a warning to myself of what happens to writers who fail to produce for their ravenous audiences. (About the only worse punishment I can think of would consist of being forced to watch, Clockwork Orange-style, hour upon hour of reality television—the thought alone gives me goosebumps. I am penitent. It won’t happen again. Much).

As the title of this posting (not to mention the date, I’m sure) indicates, I have made it to the first major oasis of the school year—Winter Break! (Of course, everyone at school still calls it Christmas Break, but I’ll deal with that morass of political incorrectness in another post—maybe the very next one!)

No, the point if this post isn’t going to be how irksome I find the narrow holiday appellation of “Christmas Break” (not to mention the very non-inclusive holiday atmosphere around school). The point of this posting is simple—I survived! I survived the first three-and-a-half-months of the school year!

I survived.

Now for the rest of the school year.