Tales of the Invisible Ben

Last week, I traveled north to see my family and celebrate the Invisible Sister's graduation from medical school. Yes, there is another doctor in the family, and this one can actually save lives and make a positive contribution to society, unlike certain other academics I could mention.

As one might expect, with the exception of the ceremony itself and the requisite fancy dinner afterward, the majority of my time was spent around the house with my parents, grandparents, and the lady of the hour. But the graduation was on a Sunday and I decided to arrive before the weekend in hopes of visiting my old high school and congratulate one of my teachers upon the occasion of her retirement. After more than forty years teaching American literature to sarcastic suburbanites, she had finally decided to step aside and let the curtain fall on a career which can, without hyperbole, be referred to as legendary. No other adjective seems appropriate for a teacher who forced unsuspecting students to practice the pronunciation of "Goethe" and "Yoknapatawpha," inflicted a three day long essay exam on Hawthorne's most famous vowel-related novel, or assigned a single 250-word sentence summarizing our research paper books. When I was her student, I used to joke with friends that she was immortal and would only retire when the school itself closed...possibly due to Y2K, because that was the apocalypse of choice back then.

What a difference a decade makes. Upon arrival at the school I learned that my visit would have to be indefinitely postponed because the teacher in question only taught once a week...and not on Fridays. I had never heard of this sort of an arrangement, but who was I to question the all-powerful office staff, still as stern and intimidating as they had been when I was a freshman. The office itself may have moved to a new location following architectural renovations, but the staff remained and they could hardly let an outsider interrupt class during last period on a sunny afternoon. The visit would not be a complete loss; a few of my other teachers were still around, but I would have to wait until the final bell rang about 40 minutes later.

After a serendipitous conversation with my former AP European history teacher, who happened to be in the office for a meeting with the principal, I wandered back to my car and waited for the swarms of students to emerge. I wandered the halls in a bit of a daze. So many unfamiliar names flanking classroom doors...so many chattering students making plans for the weekend...so many hallways that simply did not exist prior to the architectural expansion a few years after my class graduated. The library had moved. The various departmental offices seemed to have been shuffled into new locations. Even instructional technologies had changed with chalk and overhead projectors having been replaced by whiteboards and interactive computer projections.

Expecting my alma mater to remain in a hermetic bubble was both naive and unrealistic, but I had hoped that most of these changes were superficial in nature. Alas, a chat with my American history teacher confirmed that this was not the case. From where she sat, the very quality of education was undergoing a steady decline. The nationwide emphasis on test scores had hit my old high school as hard as Underwood, and as a result the critical thinking which administrators claimed to value was suffering. When I was a student, research papers were a typical assignment in both English and history classes, but now such assignments are in the minority. Hence the complaint of my U.S. History teacher that many students who took the AP English exam did not even recognize the term "ibid" when it appeared on the essays.

And according to her it only gets worse. The number of academic levels into which students are divided (honors, semihonors, etc.) has been reduced with students of various abilities being combined together, and although theoretically the logic of such heterogeneous grouping makes sense (i.e. more gifted students helping the rest achieve), the results have been decidedly mixed. Vocational education appears to moving to the backburner. My teacher worried that a pedagogical system which has proven only marginally effective in the inner city is being exported to the suburbs. We both could only wonder what changes such initiatives would bring.

We had a good conversation, my teacher and I. I thanked her for forcing us to write research papers, and particularly for one that introduced me to the challenges of using oral history interviews. Then she got called down to a meeting with the principal--probably for maintaining the wrong type of high standards, she told me--and I was left to my own devices. As I walked out of the room, I looked on the wall and saw a mission statement posted. As I looked out on the courtyard where I had played ultimate frisbee, now long since walled in and inaccessible to students, I could only wonder how many afternoons worth of professional development time had been put into composing that poster only for it to be ignored by hundreds of students who might see it any given day up on the walls.

And with that, I left my old high school, wondering how much things would change the next time I decided to visit. Would any of my former teachers still be there? Will the office staff be the same? What about the building itself? As a student, I assumed that the high school experience remained consistent over time. My younger sister would have the same teachers, the same classes, the same overall experience with only minor variations. Strange how after this visit, a decade away felt like a lifetime and the academic idea of change over time, supposedly my bread and butter as a historian, felt more real than ever before, leaving me both stunned and puzzled as I drove back to my childhood home and my semi-abandoned bedroom.