Stepping out of my Classroom (or “Not Saying the F-Word”)
MODERATOR’S NOTE: The author Audrey is an Army veteran, an artist, and a high school teacher.
On November 13th, I abandoned my own classrooms to speak to our government classes as the school’s only veteran - a belated veteran’s day talk, since the government teacher was on a field trip that day. The night before, I was pouring over old words from myself and from friends, trying to figure out what to say.
The week before, I cleaned out my car, a ritual I go through every few years.
I can’t carry a purse; I’m still at mental stage of a twelve year old, carrying a crumpled wad of cash in my pockets instead of using a wallet.
I’ve reconciled myself to the notion that the car has become my version of a giant oversized handbag, one that I can haul everything, including myself, in. I’ve got a tow chain in it that I liberated from the local army base for an art project and need to return soon, video cables and extension cords, spare cameras, photos of all the soldiers killed in Iraq, a few thousand pens (really, not like a couple dozen that have accumulated, but actually several thousand), NBC coveralls, and the oyster shell that Caroline gave me on the gulf march from where her house used to be.
The gulf march was in March 2006. We walked and rode for six days from Mobile Alabama to New Orleans Louisiana*, “we” being veterans mostly. I met Caroline there.
In the way I sometimes have to talk around things to get to them, I felt suddenly like I needed the oyster shell to explain to the students why we started this school year with a drum circle, before I could talk about Veteran’s Day. Caroline and this story about the Singing River, with the people linking arms and singing and wading into the river to drown rather than leaving their land to go on the Trail of Tears; that image still haunts me.
There is a woman who was at our youth conference on Saturday who is helping Iraqi refugees settle in this area. She was telling me some of the stories of the refugees leaving their homes, and how sometimes people hear these stories and think they are lying or exaggerating to make things sound worse than they really are to get sympathy. She said that when she talks to the families, it turns out that’s true, they are lying to officials to get into this country, but they are lying in the wrong direction. So they might tell an official that the mother was raped in front of her sons and that’s what is on their papers, but maybe the mother wasn’t raped at all. When she sits down and talks to them, she finds out that really the sons were raped in front of their mother, but the parents won’t say that in the interview because it’s a bigger shame for the family, and because they are trying to protect their children.
I was trying to sort through what I can tell the kids at our school, what quotes I can use, what they need to be shielded from, and why we need to shield them from stories about the war, when those children and our children are the same age. I found out that our teachers were getting in trouble at the start of the war for letting kids see pictures of things like the Abu Ghraib abuses … they were told they weren’t allowed to show those images to their classes or refer them to those sorts of websites. I can understand that, you know. I don’t think kids should be exposed to that either but that includes the kids in Iraq, so I’m at a loss at the double standard.
Nothing new, I know. I’m just venting a bit here, frustrated at having to alter the words of others so I can quote them in class because it’s okay for an Iraqi child to live through their parents being blown away at their side, but it’s not okay for an American teen to hear the F word from a teacher.
It was a sobering experience to talk to my own students about these things. I don’t always reveal that much of myself to them; in some ways it’s easier to do that to a room of strangers I’ll never see again. I have a pretty small comfort zone, and sometimes when it’s being pressed at from all sides at once, I lapse into full retreat mode. Sometimes painting fills that function. That’s where I’ve been lately, not writing or talking, just staying at school - often the last one in the building, painting on the walls of my classroom until it’s dark out.
I talked a lot about dehumanization in the government classes, and that’s where the words of combat veterans are better than mine, particular with this group of kids. The combat vets can talk about racial slurs and can bring that back to lynchings, which puts it in terms my students get.
Charlie Anderson, one of the Iraq Veterans Against the War, sings an old running cadence during a scene in Particia Foulkrod’s film, The Ground Truth. Charlie sang other songs during the gulf march, but for the film there was this cadence he was remembering.
We sang this cadence when I was in Basic Training; it’s called Napalm sticks to kids.
Very strange for me to sing, first off, in front of people, because I only do that in front of my daughter Claire, nobody else, not even the husband. And it was surreal as a teacher to be singing about mowing down school children, singing that to my students, and telling them that’s what I sang in basic training. It was one of those moments where I had trouble making eye contact with them.
This was the sanitized version I sang:
Grab your bombs and kill some people
Throw some napalm on the square
Do it on a Sunday morning
Kill them on their way to prayerAim some missiles at the schoolyard
As the teacher rings the bell
Look at all those kiddies cryin’
As the schoolhouse burns to hellThrow some candy in the schoolyard
Watch those kiddies gather ’round
Lock and load with my M-240
Mow those little [fuckers] dirtbags down.
Some of the classes reacted in total silence. Some had nervous laughing afterwards, which their teacher asked them about, and we talked through that.
I told them I cleaned up the words, because we didn’t sing about mowing down the little “dirtbags”. One boy asked what I changed it from, and I said the F word, and he asked “fuckers?” And I said yes.
The teacher jumped in to correct him for using that word in the classroom, saying it was inappropriate, nobody asked him to guess the word, and so on. So I talked about what we shield our kids from, and the contrast between that and what we do to other people’s kids. At one point the teacher asked me if two wrongs make a right, and I wasn’t going to argue with her in front of her kids, but I’m hoping the kids understood that saying a curse word is not comparable to committing crimes against humanity, we are talking about two entirely different scales, and saying “fuckers” in that context in the way he did, which was just innocently asking if that was what the lyrics were, was not something they needed to be protected from.
So I stood there and I talked, and at the end, I didn’t know, did I just make a fool of myself, or did any of it sink in. One hour there was a girl who said she wanted to join the air force, I noticed her with her head in her hands. I didn’t have my glasses on, I thought she was maybe just bored. The teacher said afterwards that she’d been crying.
The next day, the teacher said that they had a sort of debrief in their classes; she said that it had a big impact on them, but beyond that, they talked about how the day was a coming of age thing for them, that they maybe lost some of their childhood innocence during that hour. That’s an unsettling thing to hear, I don’t know if it’s good or if it’s bad. It feels like too much responsibility to put on me.
They didn’t know, though, about My Lai, they hadn’t heard any of the quotes from people who were involved in that, they’d never heard about Hugh Thompson. One student asked me, if Hugh Thompson had shot the US soldiers involved in My Lai, would that have been treason? They hadn’t thought about what happens if one soldier sees another one committing a crime; what happens then, what are the options?
_________
*For a video doc of the Gulf March go to http://www.jamesminton.com/, then click “film editing,” then click “Mile in Their Shoes.”
G.:
“The next day, the teacher said that they had a sort of debrief in their classes; she said that it had a big impact on them, but beyond that, they talked about how the day was a coming of age thing for them, that they maybe lost some of their childhood innocence during that hour. That’s an unsettling thing to hear, I don’t know if it’s good or if it’s bad. It feels like too much responsibility to put on me.”
If you’re reading this, Audrey, if you ask me, their innocence was robbed long before you set foot into their classroom; you merely brought this theft to their attention.
17 November 2007, 10:53 pmskol:
I wish I had that sort of coming of age, or a teacher who knew that this was wrong and knew that everyone else would know that this was wrong. I think it’s hard to tell what happens to that innocence, and I wouldn’t want it to combine with all the muck so you couldn’t tell what’s muck or what’s just a naturally occurring progression in life, y’know? It stopped right where it needed to be stopped. At least I wish I’d had that happen. Well, sort of… Then and there it’d be uncomfortable, but I’d get over that… and I wish wish wish for too many people that that truth had hit them before they couldn’t tell anymore if what they were or could be doing was in anyway right or good or bad or wrong, and not some hazy shit stuck in the middle. I dunno…
18 November 2007, 3:04 amCuz I imagine you have a lot of sensitive students who want to join the army or the marines or whatever to feel they aren’t weak or actually can accomplish something. I considered it… but look at that! THAT’S what you’d be accomplishing? That’s what they want you to think? I don’t know how the army really works, or basic training, but we’re always told that they’re trying to “break you down”, or mold you like clay. But like THAT?! Noooo… Not for me not ever.
What you did was awesome, both ways.
stacia:
I think in talking to young people about war, there are two important things to keep in mind: One—did they ask to be there? if it’s in a school setting and therefore involuntary, there’s a coercive element to it that anything but a light touch might make counter-productive. Sometimes wishing to shock American young people out of their materialistic apathy is about our own sense of impotence.
18 November 2007, 10:39 amSecond: who is then going to listen to them? If they get a load of information about their country’s crimes accompanied by graphic images, what are they expected to do with it? Cry or rage or shake with fear on the spot, against massive messages (and threats) not to? Numb out? Withdraw into cynicism? Join an anti-war movement? What anti-war movement? Behavior that a generation ago ended a war today gets you locked up, medicated, or sent off to rehab. Those rehabs are no picnic. Middle-class white teen-agers (it’s bloody expensive) get taken away from their homes in the middle of the night, often in handcuffs, by burly strangers, put into the back of a car, and wake up in the middle of a desert to endure a term of deprivation, humiliation, and other abuses. Those that go through that serve as examples to others. Some die. Argentina’s dirty war of the ‘70s? No, just another day in suburbia, 2007. Mom and Dad mortgage the house for this for-profit service. My point isn’t that it’s exceptionally bad because this is happening to white middle class teen-agers, as opposed to any other demographic; my point is that 40 years ago white middle-class teen-agers were organizing strikes, sit-ins, protests, and demonstrations. Not any more, and there’s a reason for that.
Just listening with no agenda to young people is deceptively (and subversively) powerful. There’s not as much of it going around as you might think. We need to make sure we do at least as much listening as talking.
The fact that Iraqi children don’t have options regarding avoidance of violence is not the fault of young Americans. That’s our (assuming we’re adults) responsibility, not theirs. After all, we’re paying for the war.
I think there exists today what amounts to a pre-emptive campaign against young people in the US, forces that wish to eliminate or neutralize them as a potential political force. We need to be sensitive to what they’re up against. It’s very different than it was a generation or more ago.
Legume Sam:
I thought I should share this quote, from Ursula K. LeGuin’s novel The Dispossessed:
18 November 2007, 12:42 pmaudrey:
I read the first comment here this morning and thought about that off and on during the day, particularly that last line: “their innocence was robbed long before you set foot into their classroom; you merely brought this theft to their attention.”
That was why I didn’t realize anything I was saying was so strong. I’ve had homeless students, students that have had good friends shot and killed, kids from abusive homes, and if they aren’t personally dealing with trauma, they for sure can see what’s going on in the area. We can’t hide the entire city of Detroit from the people that live in it. Their innocence was absolutely robbed long ago, and they know that. The missing part for them maybe was understanding how and why the government has an interest in training us to be able to treat people as something less than people.
It’s one thing to think it’s a whole bunch of individuals being hateful idiots and to experience that in your life first-hand. It’s another to get a glimpse into the role the government plays in perpetuating some of those attitudes. That song I sang for them, it has one meaning if it’s just some dumb song that I made up and sang because I’m a jerk. It has an entirely different meaning when it’s being sung by 50 women marching in unison, carrying rifles, who are singing about mowing down school children as a job requirement, and you all are paying for that with your taxes.
Stacia asks a couple of interesting questions. One, is it right to talk to the kids if they are in an involuntary school setting? My answer is that we teach them about the holocaust in an involuntary school setting, we teach them about slavery. This should be no different, except that we’ve got this implied gag rule, stating that we should not ask our students to do any critical thinking concerning events that are still in progress. If they are only allowed to do critical thinking about events that happened in the past, and if we only teach the critical thoughts we’ve determined they are supposed to have (the sort of critical thinking we test on standardized multiple choice tests), well, that’s not critical thinking at all - it’s training them not to be critical.
So, I went and I told stories. I did not say “the war is bad” or “the war is good.” I said “here is what I did in the military, here is what my friends did. And here is how we train, and here is why we train in this way. And this is how it has affected the people I know.” It’s their job to measure that against their visions of right and wrong, and figure out what they would do.
The other question from Stacia is: If they get a load of information about their country’s crimes accompanied by graphic images, what are they expected to do with it? I didn’t provide graphic images, in case I wasn’t clear about that. But the question of what to do with the information is a good one. In part I was there talking about why I became “an activist” - and I’m not comfortable with that label, because in truth I don’t think I’ve done enough to earn it, but I understand the teacher set me up not only as the school’s token veteran, but also as a token activist. So we talked about the types of work VFP does, what an NGO is and what humanitarian groups are in general, as well as the counter-recruitment group that I’m with, and why I am involved in that.
I was writing about one experience above, in an email originally. The back story, not contained in that, is that I also work with my kids outside of school both locally and in efforts on the other side of the country, and they know me in that context as well. They’ve slept next to me on mattresses on the floor in places with no running water or televisions, working for free for strangers - and didn’t want to come home.
Part of the youth conference I casually mentioned above was for them to brainstorm what they think needs to happen in this area, a time for them to meet with other students in the city and the suburbs and figure out for themselves what do they want to do (beyond shake with rage or withdraw into cynicism). Some will end up working with the woman I talked about who is helping Iraqi refugees settle into this area. When they move out of their sponsors’ houses, they need furniture and household goods, and we can help deliver the donated items. Some will work on fixing up the neighborhoods. Some of the kids will decide to do nothing, and some may decide to enlist, but they may think differently - because they’ve been asked to think about it at all - about any training that requires them to dehumanize others.
19 November 2007, 1:28 amDennis:
In response to stacia: true, it is different than it was back in the day, but don’t be too quick to conclude the system’s success in dampening or marginalizing the activism of youth. To stick just to the war (and that leaves out last year’s immigrant upsurge and the recent walkouts in support of the Jena 6), the Iraq Moratorium is picking up a startling amount of support in high schools and colleges. Scroll through the reports on Moratorium Day #3 at the Iraq Moratorium website–iraqmoratorium(dot)org. My current favorite is the 150 HS kids who staged a blowout in Brattleboro, VT against the war, but there are plenty more.
21 November 2007, 12:47 amStan:
Good to see you, Dennis. (:
21 November 2007, 6:42 amjimi 45:
…they were told they weren’t allowed to show those images to their classes or refer them to those sorts of websites. I can understand that, you know. I don’t think kids should be exposed to that either but that includes the kids in Iraq, so I’m at a loss at the double standard.
You’ve summed up quite succinctly the dilemma. Thanks for sharing your experiences “in the trenches,” so to speak. Since I teach at a university I am more free to expose students to graphic, disturbing imagery and information, yet most of them come to us pre-jaded, which is potentially worse. One reaches a few, and perhaps that’s all one can ask.
21 November 2007, 11:46 amaudrey:
This article does a better job than I did of illustrating the disconnect between the experiences we inflict on others, and the way we shield the rest of the population from what we inflicted on those others:
“Wounded Iraq veterans driven out of public pool when told they might scare children.
… During a weekly rehabilitation class at a council leisure centre, 15 servicemen – including several who have lost limbs or suffered severe burns – were heckled and jeered by members of the public.
…The soldiers, who use the pool as part of a water therapy course, were quickly ordered out by their instructor to avoid further embarrassment.”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=495910&in_page_id=1770
From the article, this was a combination of anger that wounded vets got to use the pool for rehab without a membership fee (jealousy that they were getting rehab without paying for it after being disfigured in combat), and anger because disabled vets don’t understand our polite society demands that they no longer inflict their presence upon the general public. Ugh.
25 November 2007, 1:27 pm