“David” stands in the door trying to decide between his “boring” English class and the hallway culture? Lynn H. Fox, a retired teacher in Maryland, describes the challenge:
Hallways are this tribe’s turf, the meeting and greeting ground where young people play out popular fantasies of violence, sexuality, and, especially, consumerism. The hallway rules are easy, the rewards immediate, and the rituals provide culturally approved media roles young people have been fed since birth. In school hallways almost everyone can be ‘‘someone,†even, or especially, if that someone is a wannabe thug, pimp, player, roller or top ‘‘dawg.â€
If you were to spend five minutes in my school’s hallways at class change or at the end of day, you would despair for our country’s future. Students screaming obscenities at each other, male students bullying and degrading, in the most graphic and unmistakable ways, female students (and the females usually laughing hysterically at each insult), fights between residents of one neighborhood vs. another, and enough anger to blow up a city block or, for that matter, a city.
Students see classrooms as places of “crushing boredom.” The payoffs are so far away they seem unreal. As a result, David is prepared only to become a consumer.
Some of this article I find devastatingly true- she describes my hallway to a T.
But if I look closely at the chaos of our passing periods, I notice that it is not the majority of students that are to the level she describes. Most are just trying to get by, not doing more than the minimum , but not
seething, defiant and dangerous either.
I am also in the hallway- we are required to be- to keep order and push kids into class.
I try to dominate there with my voice at all times. I am across the hall from a veteran war-horse who gets respect from everybody, and I imitate her.
I talk to everyone I can. I chase them down sometimes.
And I don’t despair at the jungle law of their world. I watch with interest. They will have their emotions and energy dulled soon enough by the world after high school.
“Much to our sorrow, we’ve allowed our young people to create their own subculture.”
This quote is from the article by Lynn Fox, which is very interesting and well written. However the quote makes it sound like the idea of young people creating their own subculture is something new. My perspective is that that is always the case. But whether this subculture is a very minor variant of the older culture, and a healthy and productive subculture, or whether it is a virulent subculture at odds with the older culture, depends on a lot of things. It happens both ways. The hallway culture Fox describes seems very remote from what I remember in high school, and I think from anything experienced by my children. Yet, from what I read, it is not at all uncommon. I can’t imagine trying to teach in such an environment.
My interest is in the alternative perspectives of youth culture taken by different people. Is it to be celebrated? Accepted as desirable as well as inevitable? Or is it something to be guarded against and controlled as much as possible? I elaborate a bit on these two perspectives in my article, “Let’s Do It Together” on my website. (Actually it’s way at the end, about raising children and generations, and the article is long.) Here’s a link: http://www.brianrude.com/let’s-do.htm
One of the largest factors I see contributing to this hallway culture is an increase in passing times since I went to school. I attended a 400+ student high school that contained two sprawling floors, and we were only given 3 minutes to go from class to class. You had no choice but to move directly from one class to another to be on time.
I currently work in a school with around 200 students and they have 4 minutes, and I’ve seen schools with 5 minutes passing time. This encourages students to hang out in the hallway.
Ah, but SuperSub — reduce the amount of class time and the phone calls from parents will flood in: “Why was my [angel] written up for being late? Three minutes isn’t NEARLY enough time to get from class to class!”
My school has four minutes travel time, and a late policy whereby if one is late 4 times per semester (and every other late after that), it’s a detention. I usually cut students a break, too, not writing anyone up until lateness #5, but that still doesn’t deter parent complaints, to me or to the administration. “Amazingly”, of course, the good students always seem to make it to class on time …
Hube,
I’ve found that no matter the passing time, the same students will always be late.
The ONLY benefit to teachers that I can see is if a teacher travels. Otherwise, admins and faculties need to grow a pair and tell parents to deal with it.
Joanne:
Thank you for posting this brilliant article. It was mesmerizing.
Public education in the country’s inner-city urban high schools is a process of triage, i.e. save the rescueable and let the others slide into oblivion. It has always been that way, it is that way today and will remain that way in the future. It may be a cold and brutal way to put it, but unfortunately it is the truth. No amount of hand wringing will ever undo it.
The nation would have been better served with a Leave Fewer Children Behind law rather than the one with that outrageous title, Leave No Child Behind.
I cringe when I read that all kids will be reading and doing math at grade level by 2014. That poppycock is usually espoused by those who never stepped foot inside an inner-city school other than for a photo-op or a dog-and-pony presentation. Pounds of reports and endless tables of mind-numbing statistics will never tell what the inner-city teaching experience is really like. Only those who live it every day of every week know the truth of what Mr. Fox has written.
My Glaswegian secondary school (equivalent to 7th through 9th grade) only gave us a very short hall time–there were no lockers, you had all your books in your bag, so in theory you could just go straight to your next class. But the central stairs were for boys only, while the girls had to use stairs at one far end of the building. The idea was to prevent boys from looking up the stairwell under the girls’ skirts, but since girls weren’t given any more time than boys to get to class, we all had to sprint and occasionally be punished for not being in our seats at the bell. Some boys added to the fun by deliberately blocking unpopular girls who were trying desperately to get down the hallway before the bell rang.
Ah, the wonders of traditional schooling.
I teach in a high school of just over 2,900 students. The length of the school is just shy of a quarter of a mile, and the hallways and staircases in particular are a nightmare, never mind stopping at your locker when a surge of pedestrians is shuffling and elbowing its way down crowded corridors negotiating travel lanes. Our students have 7 minutes to get to classes, and there are cases where it isn’t unusual to have students truly unable to get to class due to the distance between rooms and the traffic they encounter on the way there. (Getting to the outside of the school, and clearer pathways, isn’t always an option.) I sometimes have trouble getting to the bathroom in 7 minutes between classes, and it’s only about 30 feet away down two hallways. (Part of that is because the bathroom just isn’t large enough for all the teachers and students who need to use it at the same time – the queu can be murder on a full bladder.)
I do run into a lot of hallway culture. To me, it seems almost frantic, maybe even manic sometimes. Definitely a lot of blowing off of steam while waiting in line to get down the stairs. I try to think about it in terms of what students are experiencing at my school – pinched into overcrowded classrooms for 90 minutes at a time, except for the occasional bathroom break, then forced into a hallway where every day is like holiday mall traffic, then back into a small classroom, many of which don’t have windows, and neither do the hallways.
Some of that hallway culture is, for our students I suspect, simply survival. If you’re shoved into a crowd with a bunch of people you don’t really know, but with whom you must spend every day in class, you tend to try and find common interests and language, at least for the duration of the wait.
RedKudu -
I’d like to hear your opinion on the matter, but I think having a school with over 600 students is ridiculous. I’d fear that with so many students (and faculty) that it must be an administrative nightmare, resulting in the teachers being isolated in the crowd. But hey, you must have a killer athletic program…
Let me fix one mistake (that occured twice) – I meant 600 per grade, not 600 in the school. Also, going back to my HS experience, we had 1600 in our school with a 3 minute passing time.
Supersub -
I’d like to give my opinion on the matter, but I’ve never taught at a school with so few as 600 students. (My smallest was 1,100). That having been said I have seen large schools done well, and done poorly. Done well, they maintain an effective admin/teacher/student ratio which, in effect, creates smaller subcultures within schools (including not only students, but teachers and admin as well), which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It is when large schools are mismanaged, numbers become uneven, and subcultures are unable to evolve and take root that students, faculty, and admin become disconnected, cohesion never occurs among students and adults, and trust is lost between teachers/admin, teachers/students, students/admin, and etc.
It’s a bit absurd for Fox to present that portrait as typical of all students, when it’s clearly not.
I also find it hard to imagine a teacher–particularly a male teacher–exhorting a student who is standing in the doorway. “Come on, make up your mind”? Good lord. How incredibly ineffectual.
Why is this teacher assigning five paragraph essays when he already expects that few of his high school students could produce five paragraphs? (Note the word “couldn’t” as opposed to “wouldn’t”). Let me guess, the teacher is assigning five paragraph essays because the school district demands that kids in that grade write five paragraph essays independently of any evidence as to whether those kids have the necessary skills to learn that?
Is this the fault of the hallway culture, or of the kids’ elementary schools that produced kids that couldn’t learn how to write a five paragraph essay?
It’s student apathy.
Sorry – haven’t read the article yet (BOOK DEADLINE!) but I do want to mention Karen Pryor’s brilliant book, Don’t Shoot the Dog, which all teachers and parents would profit from reading. A behaviorist will tell you, I think, that behaviors have to be seen in context; behaviors are “maintained” by “contingencies”….
(I don’t really grasp the concept of a “contingency” at this point.)
Pryor’s book is enormously helpful in terms of understanding why behaviors you don’t want are happening and how you might elicit behaviors you do want. Although I haven’t read the article, from the excerpt it sounds as if this teacher has attributed wild-in-the-hall behaviors to everything but the school environment inside which these behaviors are occurring.
Having spent over two years dealing with a public middle school I can tell you that kids’ behavior at school can be very different from their behavior at home or with friends.
“Different” meaning, in some cases, far worse.
When I see kids who are well-behaved at home and in the community “act out” at school, I have to ask what’s going on at the school. That’s the first place I look for an explanation, not “the culture.”
Shit like this drives me nuts. If the hallways of your school look like that, it’s because the adults at your school have ALLOWED them to look like that. You all created the conditions in which those behaviors are condoned, and therefore, thrive. Six years ago, while in the process of reforming and reinvesting our school, the principal took the staff into the quad, spread his arms and said, “If we can’t control this space, it’s on us. It’s our fault.”
No doubt some of this is easier to say than do, but seriously, we’re the adults, if in no other sense than chronological order. Can we stop being sad, and weak, and tentative, and hopeless for like five minutes?
My city has two high schools–one at about 1,400 students, the other about 1,700. I was thrilled to hear they are building a third. Even 1,400 is too many students in one building, in my opinion. You’re just begging for the inmates to rule the asylum.
A 2,900 student school is insanity. The entire town where I grew up didn’t have that many residents. I think my alma mater of approximately 500 students was perfection.
This conversation has touched on culture, passing time between classes, apathy, the size of schools, and perhaps a few other things. However there is one thing that hasn’t had the explicit attention I think it deserves. That is discipline. Discipline is implicit in practically all of this conversation, but I don’t believe the word itself has been used even once (unless I missed it.) TMAO talked about “control”, which certainly is about discipline, but that seems about as direct as this conversation has gotten.
As a young teacher I was occasionally made to feel inadequate by even mentioning discipline. Certainly my ed school training was no help. “Be firm but fair” was all they told us, and probably all they knew. But after a few years I began to realize that I’m not alone. I was never very good at discipline, but over time I concluded the same could be said of many, many educators who thought it beneath their dignity to talk about it. I observed that those who actually were good at discipline, both teachers and administrators, were quite willing to talk about it.
Education is in the national consciousness. NCLB has seen to that. I think it fair to say that we are having a national conversation on education. National conversations are sometimes, though not always, good. I think our national conversation on education has been pretty mediocre. There is a lot of discussion about good teaching practices, but I don’t think it’s been particularly productive. And I don’t think it will be so long as the educational establishment clings to its ideology instead of being practical. There is a lot of discussion about accountability, but that probably won’t progress very far because it’s more political than educational. There’s lots of talk about money, and about organization and control of schools, and about vouchers and charter schools, but those topics probably won’t progress much. They are administrative, or political, or both, and therefore tend more toward compromise and accommodation than progress. There is talk about quality, but like the talk about teaching practices, probably will remain nebulous.
I am not saying we should not talk about all these things. But I do believe discipline is not getting the attention it warrants. Discipline touches just about everything else that we might talk about in education. Maybe there is no progress possible on discipline. In the last fifty years or so schools have become subject to a lot of constraints on what they can and can’t do with problem students. But shouldn’t those constraints be fair game for criticism?
I’ve formulated my thoughts on discipline. They’re on my website.
Brian,
Was just reading your web page. Did your teaching career begin close to Columbia?
The hallway culture is alive and well at my daughter’s high school. I read your post to her along with the excerpt. She said it describes her hallways to a “T”.
TMAO makes a vaid point. If our hallways in middle and high school have gotten to that point we’ve allowed it happen.
The hallway culture has been alive and well for many years. I graduated 30 years ago from a high school in NY with 4000 students (1000 in my graduating class). Last year, the high school in SC where I taught had 2300 students. There was a hallway culture when I was growing up and there is one now. Even though the violence and profanity wasn’t as prevalent back then (I agree that teachers should not tolerate this and administrators should take consistent action on the ones who do this), I remember being horribly teased and I hated the break between class times. Being the only Asian in the high school meant I was different and the teasing was usually not done in the presence of any teacher. I think as teachers, we need to be vigilant to watch out for the underdog in these situations.