thedrifter
08-02-06, 02:11 PM
08/02/2006
From the Marines to education wars
By Len Rosen lrosen@newsofdelawarecounty.com , SPORTS EDITOR
Former Drexel Hill resident writes the hard to accept 'Chalk it Up'
So there he was, Bob Concordia the passenger, the former St. Bernadette's star athlete, the future Mr. C who would, in 16 years, become a first-year high school English teacher in Philadelphia.
But currently it's 1956 and he's aboard a train screeching into Yemmasee Station and Marine basic training. And screech, which foreshadows and rhymes with teach, forms the music that pulses in his ears. In a couple days, Concordia finds himself comprised of blood, screech and hard-to-reach fears, dangling from basic training pull-up bars; sky above, who knows what below.
Another singular feature of the 1956 Marine dangle: Lumps of fright and similar freight in his throat are replacing the screech as the primary feeling. An X-ray probably would deny the lump and certainly omit the nearby drill instructor in the same throat, but both were present and accounted for.
If additional proof of expanding lump and fright is needed, the drill instructor was shouting obscenities, invasive in nature and tone, as if the DI never quite meant them before, but he does now.
"Pleases" in boot camp are as rare as the future enemy's sympathy cards. So the drill instructor's demands lack wiggle room: Just one more impossible repetition for the DI, for yourself just in case you live, and, most importantly, for the Fifth Battalion of the United States Marines, who appear desperate for that one last repetition precisely because it appears absent without permission.
It's the last repetition, the Pain is Gain brand, that will help sear Bob Concordia into the Corps; it's the repetition that will play a key role in keeping him emotionally attached to semper fi, Latin for "always faithful," Marine for "we're in this together, in or out of the Corps, till death do us part."
Bob Concordia may never get to Paris, but he'll always have Parris Island.
"It's amazing how much inner strength one gets from having gone through the Marine experience. It's the real soul food of life. Every school teacher in America should have Marine Corps training," Concordia writes in "Chalk It Up," his book, published last year, that starts with a dangling man in the military before advancing to a kind of urban warfare that occurs on the ground, in spectacularly ungrounded classrooms, in situations often in a state of oh-no and unhinge.
He didn't exactly go from the Marines to the School Halls of Montezuma, but the image has more pizzazz and boisterous life than he wants.
Much of Delaware County is less than an hour's drive from the Philadelphia high school where Concordia taught English starting in 1972. In 1993, he retired from teaching and felt not so much joy as liberation provided by the school district buyout. No, not the confinement of sheer joy: more like a stretch of heaven before death - were the liberating angels really imaginary? - perhaps the better of two heavens.
The "East High School" of "Chalk It Up" is less than 25 miles from here, but light years away from a suburban mentality that stays comfortable in its cocoon. The screech of the 69th Street El hints at what's over there. Hints are enough. "The average suburban teacher," Concordia writes, "has no idea that they have bouncers in the hallways of city schools. The bouncers are technically 'non-teaching assistants' to give it a professional appearance.
"The average suburban school teacher would find it difficult to walk through our schoolyard in the morning, let alone try to teach, without being struck with fear, as though they were going into a deadly war zone. It takes a certain breed of cat to deal with the wild emotional dynamics, the whole thing with the male students trying to show off for the girls, trying to impress them with their newly acquired sudden wealth from dealing drugs.
"How can you possibly get the attention of these kids, trying to educate them with the importance of spiritual values who come from abject poverty...and they are able to deal drugs and make more money than people who have spent their entire lives killing themselves for next to nothing?"
Early on, Concordia concludes that "it isn't a joke and it isn't a walk through the pearly gates." You sometimes get the impression that if teachers in the tougher-than-tough schools were purified by suffering, they'd be the cleanest souls on earth.
Concordia faces a formidable dilemma as the author of "Chalk it Up." How can a white teacher put all the cards - and they are sizzling, combustible cards - on the table without getting smashed by race cards, and maybe the table, in return? Here's one way:
"You take large numbers of black kids throughout the United States," he writes, "and there is a tremendous amount of untapped, creative talent. You can see it in the artwork, the music and in the language.
"The language is very symbolic, and anyone who has worked with large numbers of students over a long period of time knows that one of the saddest problems connected with the ghetto is the fact that all the undirected creative energy, when it's not channeled or expressed in a positive manner, becomes very dangerous.
"Many crimes that are committed are from very frustrated, creative people who were talented in many ways, but no one ever directed it. One might even say, 'They are God's misguided children.' "
Trying to plant the seeds of education in the reduced male attention spans left by Game Boy and its go-go brethren is another hurdle to clear, but hardly the highest in many city high schools.
The Bob Concordia in "Chalk it Up" is the fictional Mr. DeAngelis, shortened to Mr. D. One day a student, Sonia, more eyes-open asleep than conscious, is awakened by a sexual remark in class. She agrees with the teacher: If the subject's not sex, she's not that interested. "You right, Mr. D. Practically everyone in this school, all they want to talk about is sex. Anything else ain't going to cut it; it's too boring. Nobody want to talk about what they pose to be learning in school. Mr. D., you think people really gonna be talking about history, algebra and all that boring junk?"
Concordia had an intriguing reason for becoming a teacher. He hated them. "I became one," he writes, "so that I could save my students from exploitation, treat them as I always wanted to be treated."
But teachers who feel compelled to change the more challenging parts of world, even a nearby one, traditionally are shook - incremental melancholia may be the first side effect - to discover that the world weighs far more than they do. One, even a dynamic Marine-infused one, doesn't outnumber much. And one gets tired, more emotionally and physically drained than most taxpayers who think "wish I had summers off, too" could ever imagine.
Concordia often alludes to the secret that only teachers in the rougher urban schools know to the bone and marrow: The hundreds of daily interactions - with students, staff, administrators and parents - are cumulatively exhausting in a way that spare, say, business people or who think they work hard and are zapped by the end of the day. But there are degrees and different species of zapped. The daily crush of tough-school interactions, many of them challenging, generates a multi-layered fatigue that just plain zapped folks happily escape, although they don't know it.
Someone who has never taught can barely imagine the drain of the following incident from "Chalk It Up" because the images are compelling and an entertainment value is present. Two groups of boys were gambling in back of the room. Mr. D's warning to stop meant nothing. "Both groups continued to carry on as though I wasn't even there," he writes. "They were continually dealing cards and talking about the game." An airborne Mr. D trumped the next card: "I automatically dove of top of the cards and money like Bat Man, my arms flailing wildly like a crazy person, which I was."
Such direct actions generally prompt decisive student responses at East High. The first one: "You's going to jail Mr. D. for attacking us." Keith, the leader of the card group, added, "I'll kill you. You mess with my money and my cards." Mr. D's Clint Eastwood-ish reply? "Well, start killing. I haven't died all day."
The expression of raw emotion is both tiring and practically inevitable in a setting such as East High - if the teacher cares, if he's actually trying to educate. And not just tiring in the ordinary sense: Zombie-inducing fatigue is the order and the conclusion of many a day.
"With all my talents, abilities and energy," he writes, "I am more and more feeling the inability to rise above the realities of all the negativism. A lot of teachers I have observed through the years have succumbed to 'quiet resignation' and they withered into a state of apathy and despair, and eventually they became clinically depressed and seriously sick."
Concordia recounts so many educationally disturbing incidents in "Chalk it Up" that they soon become the day's, the year's, the career's norm. The danger is that the extraordinary and the unexpected soon look ordinary and arriving on time. It's another educational country - and no fence, no border patrol - can keep it out. Teachers in most parts of Delaware County, even those who would easily pass a lie detector while claiming to have it rough, enter, by comparison, Paradise Found each day with precise schedules, curriculum to be taken seriously and hope on the agenda.
One "Chalk it Up" incident jumps to the front doing double dutch and triple somersaults. The Superintendent of Philadelphia Schools, not named Constance Clayton in the book but it is Constance Clayton, visits "East" High School. Her impressive entourage includes school board brass and City Council members. More suits than you'd find buttoned in a corporate fashion show. On the surface, enough intimidation to change who you are, even if you are somebody, for the moment. An unusual rollout of power sources is occurring at East High.
Clayton, who is black, summons a black student lingering in the hall for no discernible purpose. The girl responds, walks past the suits like she's instantaneously divesting them of power. She then regards the superintendent of schools with what today might be called an arrogance disorder. Clayton is greeted by a "bleep you, ***** ."
Whoa and woe, that's substantial fare, but a multi-faceted addendum follows. "Who da hell you think you is, waving me over dare like that? I'm your slave or something?" the girl asks. Her language is unchained and unchanged for this moment. "You nobody special. You ain't never put wine on my ma' table."
The student goes on to tell the Superintendent of Schools a few more reasons for the unexpected hallway greeting. Those reasons are far more graphic than the lack of wine on a table.
The book is often an emotional tug of war between Mr. D wanting to surrender and returning to the instinct - to the Marine understanding - that surrender is not an option. I will not leave you here no matter how tempting that it. Love and the urgent need to bail compete for his soul. To his female love interest and sounding board in the book, Darla, he says: "I really have a secret love affair with the students I teach. There is something about the inner city kid that is truly authentic. They are raw and spontaneous, basically more honest in their expression. You always know where you stand with them. They are not placating you with middle class psychological games like the kids in the 'burbs.
"But you have to be a rhino to survive the pressure. These kids will eat you alive if they sense any kind of weakness. You have to know yourself and be in touch with yourself to be effective and gain their respect. Their whole quest is to 'gang bang' you, in a figurative sense. They are trying to force you to play the game under their rules, not yours. They are so undisciplined, from breaking down so many people in their lives, that they haven't achieved any kind of mental discipline or endurance related to learning."
The term "Chalk it Up" refers to the unofficial recording of life experiences that come and go. Wow, there goes another series of East High incidents foreign to the suburbs; is that a possible novel on the loose or what? Squandered potential is rampant as the book bristles with brace-yourself truths that most readers would need another face, a braver one, to face.
But Concordia can never let everything go, can't chalk it all up, no more than a Marine could ignore an unlikely terrorist plot, which inner city education, from a certain viewpoint, resembles. "The students," he writes, "are in control and they allow teachers to have a certain amount of power over them. Students come to school for sexual contact, using connections related to the street for drug deals, athletics, athletic events, to get warm, staying out of their parents' way, distractions from the worries of home and, last on the list, education."
Concordia writes that surviving East High intact was something not only on his to-do list, but survival in superior shape felt inevitable. Tell it to the Marines: He ran and swam like there was an iron man inside him for most of his teaching career. The passion for - the need - for Marine-style running survived his exit from the Corps.
In addition, swimming long distances regularly at the Y provided life, maybe even some hope, when life and hope seemed to ebb during his 21 years of the topsy-turvy love-hate split at East High. He ran eight to 10 miles per day from 1958-75. Stopping for a while didn't work. "When I went back to running again started, it gave me boundless energy," he said.
Good thing. The task was boundless as well. "Too much comfort is death anyway," Concordia, now a healthy 68, writes. You can chalk that up, too.
Concordia, incidentally, sent a copy of the book to Philadelphia Superintendent of Schools Paul XXXX earlier this year. Left several messages with his secretary, too.
Ellie
From the Marines to education wars
By Len Rosen lrosen@newsofdelawarecounty.com , SPORTS EDITOR
Former Drexel Hill resident writes the hard to accept 'Chalk it Up'
So there he was, Bob Concordia the passenger, the former St. Bernadette's star athlete, the future Mr. C who would, in 16 years, become a first-year high school English teacher in Philadelphia.
But currently it's 1956 and he's aboard a train screeching into Yemmasee Station and Marine basic training. And screech, which foreshadows and rhymes with teach, forms the music that pulses in his ears. In a couple days, Concordia finds himself comprised of blood, screech and hard-to-reach fears, dangling from basic training pull-up bars; sky above, who knows what below.
Another singular feature of the 1956 Marine dangle: Lumps of fright and similar freight in his throat are replacing the screech as the primary feeling. An X-ray probably would deny the lump and certainly omit the nearby drill instructor in the same throat, but both were present and accounted for.
If additional proof of expanding lump and fright is needed, the drill instructor was shouting obscenities, invasive in nature and tone, as if the DI never quite meant them before, but he does now.
"Pleases" in boot camp are as rare as the future enemy's sympathy cards. So the drill instructor's demands lack wiggle room: Just one more impossible repetition for the DI, for yourself just in case you live, and, most importantly, for the Fifth Battalion of the United States Marines, who appear desperate for that one last repetition precisely because it appears absent without permission.
It's the last repetition, the Pain is Gain brand, that will help sear Bob Concordia into the Corps; it's the repetition that will play a key role in keeping him emotionally attached to semper fi, Latin for "always faithful," Marine for "we're in this together, in or out of the Corps, till death do us part."
Bob Concordia may never get to Paris, but he'll always have Parris Island.
"It's amazing how much inner strength one gets from having gone through the Marine experience. It's the real soul food of life. Every school teacher in America should have Marine Corps training," Concordia writes in "Chalk It Up," his book, published last year, that starts with a dangling man in the military before advancing to a kind of urban warfare that occurs on the ground, in spectacularly ungrounded classrooms, in situations often in a state of oh-no and unhinge.
He didn't exactly go from the Marines to the School Halls of Montezuma, but the image has more pizzazz and boisterous life than he wants.
Much of Delaware County is less than an hour's drive from the Philadelphia high school where Concordia taught English starting in 1972. In 1993, he retired from teaching and felt not so much joy as liberation provided by the school district buyout. No, not the confinement of sheer joy: more like a stretch of heaven before death - were the liberating angels really imaginary? - perhaps the better of two heavens.
The "East High School" of "Chalk It Up" is less than 25 miles from here, but light years away from a suburban mentality that stays comfortable in its cocoon. The screech of the 69th Street El hints at what's over there. Hints are enough. "The average suburban teacher," Concordia writes, "has no idea that they have bouncers in the hallways of city schools. The bouncers are technically 'non-teaching assistants' to give it a professional appearance.
"The average suburban school teacher would find it difficult to walk through our schoolyard in the morning, let alone try to teach, without being struck with fear, as though they were going into a deadly war zone. It takes a certain breed of cat to deal with the wild emotional dynamics, the whole thing with the male students trying to show off for the girls, trying to impress them with their newly acquired sudden wealth from dealing drugs.
"How can you possibly get the attention of these kids, trying to educate them with the importance of spiritual values who come from abject poverty...and they are able to deal drugs and make more money than people who have spent their entire lives killing themselves for next to nothing?"
Early on, Concordia concludes that "it isn't a joke and it isn't a walk through the pearly gates." You sometimes get the impression that if teachers in the tougher-than-tough schools were purified by suffering, they'd be the cleanest souls on earth.
Concordia faces a formidable dilemma as the author of "Chalk it Up." How can a white teacher put all the cards - and they are sizzling, combustible cards - on the table without getting smashed by race cards, and maybe the table, in return? Here's one way:
"You take large numbers of black kids throughout the United States," he writes, "and there is a tremendous amount of untapped, creative talent. You can see it in the artwork, the music and in the language.
"The language is very symbolic, and anyone who has worked with large numbers of students over a long period of time knows that one of the saddest problems connected with the ghetto is the fact that all the undirected creative energy, when it's not channeled or expressed in a positive manner, becomes very dangerous.
"Many crimes that are committed are from very frustrated, creative people who were talented in many ways, but no one ever directed it. One might even say, 'They are God's misguided children.' "
Trying to plant the seeds of education in the reduced male attention spans left by Game Boy and its go-go brethren is another hurdle to clear, but hardly the highest in many city high schools.
The Bob Concordia in "Chalk it Up" is the fictional Mr. DeAngelis, shortened to Mr. D. One day a student, Sonia, more eyes-open asleep than conscious, is awakened by a sexual remark in class. She agrees with the teacher: If the subject's not sex, she's not that interested. "You right, Mr. D. Practically everyone in this school, all they want to talk about is sex. Anything else ain't going to cut it; it's too boring. Nobody want to talk about what they pose to be learning in school. Mr. D., you think people really gonna be talking about history, algebra and all that boring junk?"
Concordia had an intriguing reason for becoming a teacher. He hated them. "I became one," he writes, "so that I could save my students from exploitation, treat them as I always wanted to be treated."
But teachers who feel compelled to change the more challenging parts of world, even a nearby one, traditionally are shook - incremental melancholia may be the first side effect - to discover that the world weighs far more than they do. One, even a dynamic Marine-infused one, doesn't outnumber much. And one gets tired, more emotionally and physically drained than most taxpayers who think "wish I had summers off, too" could ever imagine.
Concordia often alludes to the secret that only teachers in the rougher urban schools know to the bone and marrow: The hundreds of daily interactions - with students, staff, administrators and parents - are cumulatively exhausting in a way that spare, say, business people or who think they work hard and are zapped by the end of the day. But there are degrees and different species of zapped. The daily crush of tough-school interactions, many of them challenging, generates a multi-layered fatigue that just plain zapped folks happily escape, although they don't know it.
Someone who has never taught can barely imagine the drain of the following incident from "Chalk It Up" because the images are compelling and an entertainment value is present. Two groups of boys were gambling in back of the room. Mr. D's warning to stop meant nothing. "Both groups continued to carry on as though I wasn't even there," he writes. "They were continually dealing cards and talking about the game." An airborne Mr. D trumped the next card: "I automatically dove of top of the cards and money like Bat Man, my arms flailing wildly like a crazy person, which I was."
Such direct actions generally prompt decisive student responses at East High. The first one: "You's going to jail Mr. D. for attacking us." Keith, the leader of the card group, added, "I'll kill you. You mess with my money and my cards." Mr. D's Clint Eastwood-ish reply? "Well, start killing. I haven't died all day."
The expression of raw emotion is both tiring and practically inevitable in a setting such as East High - if the teacher cares, if he's actually trying to educate. And not just tiring in the ordinary sense: Zombie-inducing fatigue is the order and the conclusion of many a day.
"With all my talents, abilities and energy," he writes, "I am more and more feeling the inability to rise above the realities of all the negativism. A lot of teachers I have observed through the years have succumbed to 'quiet resignation' and they withered into a state of apathy and despair, and eventually they became clinically depressed and seriously sick."
Concordia recounts so many educationally disturbing incidents in "Chalk it Up" that they soon become the day's, the year's, the career's norm. The danger is that the extraordinary and the unexpected soon look ordinary and arriving on time. It's another educational country - and no fence, no border patrol - can keep it out. Teachers in most parts of Delaware County, even those who would easily pass a lie detector while claiming to have it rough, enter, by comparison, Paradise Found each day with precise schedules, curriculum to be taken seriously and hope on the agenda.
One "Chalk it Up" incident jumps to the front doing double dutch and triple somersaults. The Superintendent of Philadelphia Schools, not named Constance Clayton in the book but it is Constance Clayton, visits "East" High School. Her impressive entourage includes school board brass and City Council members. More suits than you'd find buttoned in a corporate fashion show. On the surface, enough intimidation to change who you are, even if you are somebody, for the moment. An unusual rollout of power sources is occurring at East High.
Clayton, who is black, summons a black student lingering in the hall for no discernible purpose. The girl responds, walks past the suits like she's instantaneously divesting them of power. She then regards the superintendent of schools with what today might be called an arrogance disorder. Clayton is greeted by a "bleep you, ***** ."
Whoa and woe, that's substantial fare, but a multi-faceted addendum follows. "Who da hell you think you is, waving me over dare like that? I'm your slave or something?" the girl asks. Her language is unchained and unchanged for this moment. "You nobody special. You ain't never put wine on my ma' table."
The student goes on to tell the Superintendent of Schools a few more reasons for the unexpected hallway greeting. Those reasons are far more graphic than the lack of wine on a table.
The book is often an emotional tug of war between Mr. D wanting to surrender and returning to the instinct - to the Marine understanding - that surrender is not an option. I will not leave you here no matter how tempting that it. Love and the urgent need to bail compete for his soul. To his female love interest and sounding board in the book, Darla, he says: "I really have a secret love affair with the students I teach. There is something about the inner city kid that is truly authentic. They are raw and spontaneous, basically more honest in their expression. You always know where you stand with them. They are not placating you with middle class psychological games like the kids in the 'burbs.
"But you have to be a rhino to survive the pressure. These kids will eat you alive if they sense any kind of weakness. You have to know yourself and be in touch with yourself to be effective and gain their respect. Their whole quest is to 'gang bang' you, in a figurative sense. They are trying to force you to play the game under their rules, not yours. They are so undisciplined, from breaking down so many people in their lives, that they haven't achieved any kind of mental discipline or endurance related to learning."
The term "Chalk it Up" refers to the unofficial recording of life experiences that come and go. Wow, there goes another series of East High incidents foreign to the suburbs; is that a possible novel on the loose or what? Squandered potential is rampant as the book bristles with brace-yourself truths that most readers would need another face, a braver one, to face.
But Concordia can never let everything go, can't chalk it all up, no more than a Marine could ignore an unlikely terrorist plot, which inner city education, from a certain viewpoint, resembles. "The students," he writes, "are in control and they allow teachers to have a certain amount of power over them. Students come to school for sexual contact, using connections related to the street for drug deals, athletics, athletic events, to get warm, staying out of their parents' way, distractions from the worries of home and, last on the list, education."
Concordia writes that surviving East High intact was something not only on his to-do list, but survival in superior shape felt inevitable. Tell it to the Marines: He ran and swam like there was an iron man inside him for most of his teaching career. The passion for - the need - for Marine-style running survived his exit from the Corps.
In addition, swimming long distances regularly at the Y provided life, maybe even some hope, when life and hope seemed to ebb during his 21 years of the topsy-turvy love-hate split at East High. He ran eight to 10 miles per day from 1958-75. Stopping for a while didn't work. "When I went back to running again started, it gave me boundless energy," he said.
Good thing. The task was boundless as well. "Too much comfort is death anyway," Concordia, now a healthy 68, writes. You can chalk that up, too.
Concordia, incidentally, sent a copy of the book to Philadelphia Superintendent of Schools Paul XXXX earlier this year. Left several messages with his secretary, too.
Ellie