To Create the World That Ought to Be: Memoirs of a Radical Educator

By Arnie Langberg

To Create the World That Ought to Be explores enticing possibilities and proven solutions for transforming our society and ourselves, as viewed through the lens of the life and work of a celebrated visionary educator. The book gathers insight distilled from the author's 50-year career making change and empowering other

• Language: English
• Publisher: Earthville Press
• Release date: Jul 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9798987537367

Arnie Langberg

After graduating from MIT in 1955, Arnie Langberg began his 50-year career in public education by teaching mathematics at the New York high school from which he had graduated. In 1957, Arnie collaborated with students and a colleague to create the Iota Society, which for ten years offered seminars, concerts and trips to cultural events in New York for students and their parents. In 1970, Arnie joined students in the creation of the Great Neck Village School, one of the first public alternative high schools in the USA. In 1975, Arnie became the first principal of Mountain Open High School in Colorado, which was praised as "a model for the reform of secondary education." As Administrator of Alternative Education for Denver Public Schools, Arnie received a grant from the US Labor Department in 1988 to develop High School Redirection, an alternative school for at-risk inner-city students, most of whom the conventional school system had abandoned. Arnie discussed HSR in "Empowering Students to Shape Their Own Learning," his chapter in Public Schools That Work, edited by Gregory Smith. He also contributed a chapter entitled "Caring and Engagement" to Restructuring Education, published in 1990 by the Colorado Department of Education. Arnie received the Colorado Governor's Award for Educational Excellence in 1991.

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PREFACE

O

ne Monday morning in the late 1970s, I received a most surprising telephone call.

I'm Rona Wilensky, Governor Lamm's education aide. He asked me to call you to thank you for your interesting and provocative presentation on Friday. He also wondered whether you might have eight or ten more heresies he could borrow?

I was flattered by the Governor's response, but I needed some time to review what I had said that might have been considered heretical, so I suggested to Rona that she and I meet later in the week.

My invitation to make that provocative presentation had been precipitated by a remark the Governor of Colorado had made to a reporter who asked what he thought the possibility of a school voucher amendment being on the ballot via a citizens' initiative, which would have had the potential to destroy the public school system as we know it by siphoning away its funding. Governor Lamm’s pointed reply was, I hope it loses by one vote.

Jim Hennes, a friend of mine who worked in the Colorado Department of Education, understood that this was an expression of the Governor’s unhappiness with the state of public education in Colorado, but that he also did not want to see the system totally destroyed. Jim suggested to Governor Lamm that there were other possibilities besides either vouchers or business as usual. Jim told him of the existence of alternatives within the public school system of which the Governor had been unaware.

As a result of this conversation, Governor Lamm decided to convene a hearing on public alternative schools for his staff and others within the state government. He asked Jim to choose the speakers, and I was one of two invited to present. I had no notes from my presentation, but I was able to reconstruct it well enough to search for the heresies before meeting with Rona.

I had begun my presentation by sharing a brief biography to counter any stereotypes about alternatives such as those I had encountered within my own school district. I think that my MIT degree plus my 19 years as a mathematics teacher in New York, including my part in starting the Great Neck Village School in 1970, established my credibility with the Governor and the audience. I also suggested that because so much of what I‘d be describing about Mountain Open High School (MOHS), where I then served as principal, would differ significantly from their own schooling, they should feel free to interrupt me at any time with questions and comments.

The presentation then went something like this:

There are two factors that immediately differentiate Mountain Open High School from most conventional high schools: We are small — small enough that no one can ever be anonymous; and all of the students are there by their own choice, with parental approval.

The teachers, too, are there by choice, and the students and parents have been involved from the beginning in the process of choosing the faculty.

The heart of the school is our advisory system. Each student has one member of the faculty who is that student's advocate. Each advisor has approximately 16 advisees, and the advisory group is the prime student support structure.

Although the school building is in Evergreen, the 150 students come from all over the county. They are accepted on a first-come, first-served basis. We are currently on the same site as the pre-K through ninth grade Open Living School. About 30% of our students come through that lower school, but the rest come from conventional schools throughout the school district.

The first formal curriculum structure is a two-part disorientation. First, pairs of advisory groups spend a week in the wilderness, camping, bonding, and learning how to learn in an unusual environment. This is followed by a week in inner-city Denver, with similar goals and including a service project as well.

Initially there were as many curricula as students. Advisory groups, as they began the process of sharing their dreams and hopes, brought forth very diverse curriculum ideas, and opened up possibilities for one another. Individual advisory sessions provided further personal information to help the advisors ensure that what works best for most is never allowed to ignore what doesn't work for some.

Weekly faculty meetings (opened to students unless sensitive personal information about a particular student was going to be discussed) became the forum for creating a schedule that weaves together student interests, faculty expertise, and district and state expectations. Classes and seminars are the visible curriculum, but apprenticeships, courses in other institutions, service projects, travel and independent studies are also encouraged. Each student's personal schedule is negotiated with the advisor.

At the conclusion of every learning activity, whether it be a course, an internship or a trip, the student writes an evaluation and shares it with whomever was in charge of the activity. That person writes a response to the student's self-evaluation, and both of these are kept in a portfolio, which in turn will become the basis for the student’s final transcript.

Twice a year, each student is expected to write a reflection on the previous semester and to share that with her advisor, and together they use that as the basis for a parent conference.

Our emphasis on realistic self-evaluation was just one of the factors that led us to question the use of conventional grades and credits in our culture. When halfway through our first year we had a meeting for students, parents, faculty and other interested people, I asked everyone to describe the characteristics of an ideal graduate of an ideal school. I collected 19 pages of notes from that day.

As the year moved forward I had regular meetings with interested staff, some students and a couple of parents, to try to reduce these notes to a coherent and comprehensive set of expectations for graduation. Almost two thirds of the items were non-academic, emphasizing personal and social characteristics, so it was pretty clear that no one method of evaluation would serve all of them equally well.

The result of our work was to create three distinct categories: competence, experience, and exposure.

Competence would include skills that can be evaluated through widely accepted tests and demonstrations:

reading and writing

speaking and listening

mathematics

the scientific method

It would also include knowledge of one's inner resources and the ability to work individually and in groups.

Experience would apply to activities that should continue throughout life:

physical education

personal health and hygiene

service learning

active participation as an informed citizen

Exposure would include the arts and humanities (and for many students these would also be areas of competence and/or experience, but every student would be expected to have at least some acquaintance with each of these areas):

music and the arts

foreign languages and cultures

history and geography

philosophy and psychology

While it might be possible to give a letter grade for some of these items, it would not be appropriate for others. If we gave grades and credits only for some, it would suggest that those were more important, which would violate our own value system.

As far as credit is concerned, we say, credits measure the wrong end of the student,because credits are based upon seat time! We honor the relationship between students and their advisors, who are professional educators, to judge both the quality and quantity of student efforts. The twice-yearly parent conferences provide another element of quality control.

* * *

As I write this now, over 40 years later, I hope readers will join me in attempting to explore a few questions:

Which particular statements in my presentation seemed heretical at that time, and why?

Which, if any, are still considered so today?

How did I become a heretic, and how did this play out in my life and career?

FOREWORD

BY MARK MOORE, EDITOR

A

rnie Langberg is revered as a visionary educator, even by other visionary educators. As one example, Herbert Kohl (the esteemed educator and author) wanted so much for Arnie to write about his life’s work that he invited Arnie to spend a year living in his guest room to focus on a book. As it turned out, Arnie managed to compose it all at home in Denver, though in the end the fertile cycles of reflection and writing took closer to ten years than one.

Over half a century, Arnie established or reinvented several alternative schools, serving them as teacher and principal, and consulted for countless others. In New York, he was a part of the creation of some of the earliest alternative school models in the country. In Colorado, he worked with two school districts, two governors and the state Department of Education, and helped shape pioneering charter school legislation to support effective alternatives. He has taught university courses in the US and abroad. And, perhaps most tellingly, he has inspired many of his students to dedicate their lives in the field of education.

And yet Arnie himself was never academically instructed in pedagogy, and he never underwent supervised practice teaching. Though he did eventually take some education-related courses to fulfill requirements, what was taught in those courses was not what he practiced. For all intents and purposes, he was trained by life experience.

What kind of life qualifies an educator to this degree? An examined one, for starters. Arnie has always lived the examined life and has inspired others to do the same, through both his work and his example. This book, incubated lovingly for a decade and completed shortly after Arnie’s 89th birthday, seeks to examine the long arc of a life that has served to bend the arcs of countless other lives for the better.

Editor As Testament?

My own life is one of those whose course and quality were fundamentally and radiantly transformed thanks to Arnie, and I owe the largest share of gratitude for my genesis as an educator and a starter of schools to him.

When first we met, in 1986, Arnie was the outgoing principal of the Jefferson County Open High School in Colorado. I was a high-school student reeling from the whiplash of having been elevated by my conventional public schools as extraordinarily gifted and then denigrated and transferred out for declining to endure what I experienced as a hostile environment unsuitable for genuine learning. The system had told me I was failing it, but I was pretty sure it was the other way around. My caring parents found the Open School and felt so strongly that it would be the perfect support for me that they convinced me to travel to meet with Arnie to see if the school might light me up.

I was immediately impressed with Arnie — his ebullient warmth, his critical intelligence, and most of all his genuine empathetic presence. I felt safe with him. I listened with amazement as he told me of the Open School’s philosophy and practices (which you will have sampled just now in Arnie’s Preface), which sounded too good to be true but clearly were authentic. Still pinching myself, I asked Arnie how the Open School was able to survive in a school district that didn’t understand its principles (or its principal). His answer was long and fascinating, and one part of it was an aside that made my teenaged ears perk up. The district had sent him a form that was created with the district’s conventional schools in mind and wasn’t actually relevant to the Open School. Instead of going through the motions of completing this homework assignment from the district, Arnie had written a note in the margin — I don’t have time for this — and sent it back to them.

This confident rejection of meaningless busy work impressed a 16-year-old who had been punished so many times for responding to the school system in essentially the same way. So, naturally, my teen self heard this on one level as a high-five-worthy tale of rebellion against a system that made no sense, which further amplified my impression of this principal as a hero defending the school as a sanctuary of sensibility where people like me (those who weren’t well served by schools created in the system’s image but who genuinely wanted to learn and grow) could thrive. I was inspired by his noble chutzpah.

But more importantly, I understood that this wasn’t rebellion without a cause: Arnie was simply doing good triage, ensuring that unimportant tasks didn’t steal time from the urgently meaningful and endlessly demanding work of helping students learn and grow — and if Arnie could do that kind of prioritization here, it meant that I could, too. In Open, I had found a school that would support and defend what I understood as my natural right to focus my learning on what was important for me at this moment in my development. After years of feeling stifled by the school system, I was overwhelmed with delighted surprise — and, at long last, hope — to discover that there was actually a school designed to nurture my natural passion to forge for myself a deeply and truly meaningful education! And its principal was on my side.

* * *

Fast-forward a decade. Having graduated from both the Open School and a good, change-the-world liberal arts college, I was then, in 1996, in the process of establishing my first nonprofit educational project, in the Himalayas, with wise guidance and kind encouragement from the Dalai Lama. I went to visit Arnie (with whom I’d maintained a friendship since our first meeting) to ask him to join our board of directors. Shortly thereafter, Arnie invited me to join his new nonprofit endeavor to leverage the power of music and the arts to revitalize the educational experience at inner-city schools in Denver.

These collaborations marked the blossoming of our friendship into a globe-spanning co-conspiratorship that has continued from the previous millennium until now. Throughout my 25+ years of work as an educator and social/ecological entrepreneur, establishing educational programs and learning environments and supporting creative and charitable activities worldwide, Arnie has been a true friend and generous mentor. He has helped to illuminate my path by asking the most fruitful questions, meeting my lofty dreams with encouragement and grounding them with practical wisdom, and offering reflections both affirming and critical, always with love and skill.

It is in part this multi-decade, multi-dimensional friendship and collaboration that has provided me with opportunities to gain insight into Arnie and his life and work that I hope will prove helpful in bringing his story and wisdom to our readers.

Teacher of Teachers

In the public discourse on alternative education in the US, Arnie Langberg is best known as a founder, reformer, and principal of public alternative high schools. In the chapters he has contributed to various books on education, and in the books and articles written about his schools, the focus has been mostly on the bigger picture of changing schools and school systems for the better. As fitting as that is, his story really begins in the classroom (or its equivalent). Arnie is a principal of principals, an organizer of organizers, an instigator of instigators, and one of the great teachers of teachers — but before all that, he was a truly extraordinary teacher of students.

A short personal story to illustrate: When I was still a student at the Open School, many of my schoolmates kept telling me I really should take Arnie’s calculus class. Though Arnie had moved on from the Open School just before I transferred there (to become the Administrator of Alternative Education for Denver Public Schools), he still welcomed Open School students to join his classes at the other schools where he would teach. But for me this meant driving from the mountains to Denver and back, an hour each way, so it took a bit of convincing for me to enroll. At the time, I had no particular interest in calculus, simply because I didn’t imagine I’d ever have much use for it.

But those in the know made it clear: for a math civilian like me, the purpose of taking Arnie’s calculus class wasn’t to learn calculus so much as it was to learn how to learn and, for those so inclined, to learn how to teach. Arnie was celebrated for successfully teaching calculus to students who had never passed algebra, and part of the secret recipe was that he didn’t teach it, but rather he guided students to discover it for themselves. That sold me.

On the first day of class, Arnie divided the students into groups of three and gave each group the same challenge. He set us in the time of Pythagoras and told us the king had commissioned us to build a larger suspension bridge than had ever been built, and to design it we would need to do something no one had ever done before: calculate the area under a curve. What?! We can’t do that. Well, by the end of the first class, every triad in the class had done it. And in that way, Arnie led us step-by-step through the evolution of calculus, and we, the students, discovered every step ourselves. What an extraordinary way to learn, but also to build confidence in oneself as someone capable of learning! I confess that today I can’t recall most of the formulae we worked out, but that hardly matters because there’s an even more valuable lesson I (and others who took the class) still remember clearly decades later: Whatever solutions we might need for a given situation, they’re right here to be discovered, and we have all the resources we need to find them.

Arnie’s brilliance as a teacher is manifold, but one quality that stands out is this gift for creating a learning context and then setting the students free to create their own learning experiences within it. Rather than playing the sage on the stage himself (as often passes for teaching worldwide), Arnie focuses instead on setting the stage and supporting the students to take responsibility for enacting their learning. Arnie tells me this art of educational stagecraft is something that arose in the course of real-world teaching, often more a case of understanding what works in hindsight than of conceiving it in advance. This book gathers some of that time-distilled insight for all of us.

An even more fundamental distinction in Arnie’s approach to education can be found in one of the essential qualities of his character: his informed and unshakable belief in the intrinsic goodness and native wisdom of humans. In one of our innumerable conversations about what makes education work, Arnie put it this way: All students already have within themselves the seed of the best human being they could become, and our job as educators is to nurture that, to help them all discover their unique talents and to help them develop those into their own personal learning plans.

This best human being idea deserves our best attention. It is a curiosity well worth noting that Arnie has been called a heretic, a radical, a loose cannon, and probably some less-flattering terms, only because throughout his life and work he has insisted on doing what is most human. One pattern we witness as his story unfolds is that aspects of the systems ostensibly intended to educate our young humans are prone to be woefully allergic to their humanity, and treating that allergy isn’t as easy as one might imagine.

As you’ll see, Arnie never set out to be a rebel; he only wanted to do whatever was most helpful for student learning, and most human, and he simply wasn’t too concerned about whether that was expected (or allowed) by the system. Thus, if Arnie is a radical, it is in the deepest etymological sense of the word: relating to the root of the thing in question. When we want to change outcomes, we need to examine and understand the causes and conditions that produce those outcomes so we can focus effectively on creating better causes and conditions.

And if, upon examination, we find that a root cause of the failures in our schools lies in the very culture of the schools and the systems that administer them, then that’s what we need to change — to make them more effective in part by making them more human. Change is often uncomfortable, but if we want better schools (let alone a better world), then we need to expand our capacity for discomfort and muster the radical courage to acknowledge the causes within and transform them.

Much of Arnie’s renowned genius is in this insight that penetrates into the causal root of things, and his own learning gleaned as a teacher with an eye for causality formed much of the basis of his approach to creating and transforming schools. And, as the successes of his schools (and, more to the point, their students) testify, there is much we can learn from this application of radical view. It is Arnie’s hope, and mine, that these explorations might be of some benefit to others who, like us, aspire to understand the world that is and create the world that ought to be.

For me, the process of diving into Arnie’s story to help him tell it has expanded and sharpened my own thinking about what it means to be a learner, an educator, and a human. I’ll be forever grateful to Arnie for inviting me to take this journey with him.

A Few Words About Our Choices

in Crafting the Book

On references, footnotes, and follow-up: Everything interesting reminds us of something else we’d like to share, but it quickly became clear that we could easily wind up with more footnotes and references than story. To keep the book readable, we decided trust the reader to find ways to follow up on the bits that might spark such interest. One place to start is the companion website for the book, which you can find at earthville.org/to-create-the-world.

On identity and prejudice: To anyone who pays attention to issues of racialization, ethnicity, gender, and religious identity in the US, it will come as no surprise that these issues are very much at play in the education system and in the lives of students and teachers, parents and community members. Arnie began his career in the 1950s as an outspoken advocate for racial integration in schools, and in the five decades that followed he led the various learning communities under his care to create cultures of harmony in diversity — but not without meeting resistance. In telling Arnie’s story here, we have chosen to deal with these matters of identity and prejudice frankly, for clarity (including a few references to the n-word being used by others, and other examples of speech and actions that we ourselves find offensive and others will, too). Of course the intention in telling these stories is to provide clarity about how things happened — the real issues that arose and the journey of finding human ways to address them at the individual and systemic levels.

In general, when we mention someone’s color, ethnicity, or religion, it is because these may be relevant factors for the reader to be aware of for deeper understanding of someone’s experience or the dynamics of a situation. And of course the same is often true for gender, nationality, and other factors as well. I trust an observant reader will recognize that Arnie has dedicated his life’s work to being an empowering ally for everyone who has been pushed to the margins by the biases, prejudices, and blind spots of the system, and to organizing with people from diverse backgrounds to change the system itself.

On the curvature of space-time: The book is mostly chronological but not strictly so. Some events for which chronology was not so relevant are grouped topically or geographically to aid readability.

On editing: Anyone who knows Arnie knows he loves to tell a good story! Who am I to interfere? My main role was essentially that of a midwife, holding supportive space for Arnie to give birth to his own story. Accordingly, I’ve taken a light approach editorially. With the exception of the Afterword, which was the result of a deeply engaging, months-long process of conversation and reflection for both of us, my contributions have been mostly in the realms of structure and sequence, organizing the narrative to highlight essential threads. The words themselves remain almost entirely Arnie’s, as they should be in the memoir of such an authentic luminary.

Enjoy!

Mark Moore

Windhorse Village, Mancos, Colorado

July 20, 2022

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

FROM THE AUTHOR

I

especially want to thank the lovely Martha Lindsley, my dear friend, neighbor and often traveling companion, for her love and support during this endeavor. Others had urged me to write, but it was with Martha’s persistent prompting that I actually began.

A dozen years ago, in one of our evening chats, I was describing some of my life and career adventures when Martha said, Stop! Where are you now? I had rambled on without any obvious sense of where or when these various events had occurred. As we discussed this, I thought of an idea: Why don’t we invite key people from my past to join us for some of our chats, to piece together the stories?

Martha and I gathered a few friends from various stages of my life. Over several years, we discussed my life and career to identify what seemed most important from each of their perspectives, and from mine. The recordings of these rambles became the starting point for this book.

* * *

I also want to thank Mark Moore, editor par excellence, for his work on this book and his flattering foreword to it. I had been excited first, during those initial rambles, by Mark’s technical skills, essential in gathering and organizing many years’ worth of my articles and speeches, only to discover that our decade of editorial conversations added to and significantly amplified our common education philosophies and brought the story of my life into focus. Mark is literally a co-author of To Create the World That Ought to Be!

* * *

I have been an educator for more than 60 years. I put that word in quotation marks because it suggests a one-way experience, from the teacher to the learner. I believe education is a reciprocal endeavor, with learning taking place among all of the participants, myself included.

I will offer two examples. One is from my first teaching job. As you’ll read in the fifth chapter, I was a math teacher who was assigned to take over a struggling English class. I negotiated with the students to find a mutually agreeable way for us to explore the English language, beginning with spelling (which required some diplomacy!) and then moving into poetry (an even bigger stretch). Through this, the students taught me how to teach, and I taught them how to be literate.

A second example took place in Denver, in a discussion among 20 students of a Hemingway story that had often been described as one of the best short stories ever written. I had told the class that I had not found it quite that good. Our discussion lasted over an hour, and the feeling was so intense that it seemed no one stopped to breathe! The discussion was that good, for all of us! And from my students I gained a deeper appreciation of the story.

This reciprocal learning is my rationale for not selecting single students for acknowledgement but rather thanking all of my students from over the years for being part of my own education.

ACT I:

LEARNING & TEACHING

(MOSTLY) IN NEW YORK

CHAPTER 1:

IN THE BEGINNING

I

was born near the George Washington Bridge in Manhattan on July 15, 1933, during the lowest point of the Great Depression. Or that is what I was told; it was unlikely that I would’ve understood the notion of a great depression then any more than most of us do even now! The phrase I pounded the pavement was the way my father attempted to convey to me, as I grew a bit older, just what our economic situation had been.

Three years later, our situation worsened considerably. I, the only child at the time, contracted strep throat, which developed into double pneumonia. I almost died.

Back in those days, they usually would’ve operated to remove the infected portion of my throat. But because of the pneumonia, they couldn’t do that. The apparent last resort was a new drug called sulfanilamide, and I was an early beneficiary of that wonder drug, which saved my life.

When I was four, my mother brought home my baby sister, Paula, who joined us in our high-rise apartment building in Washington Heights. One year later, we moved to Jackson Heights, in Queens. (I wonder why we always went for the Heights.) A young child couldn’t really get out and play in the Heights, so most of my early childhood was spent either at home with my mother or out somewhere with my mother, while my father was working to support the family.

School Days in Queens

My earliest memories of school, first grade at PS 148, were of Mary E. Steele, the principal. I remember her as a large woman with a booming voice who looked just like Marjorie Main, the film actress who played Ma Kettle. We had occasional assemblies, where we boys had to wear white shirts and either red or blue ties. The highlight of these assemblies was when Miss Steele played us recordings of classical music. We all loved the overture from Rossini’s opera, William Tell, which was the theme song from The Lone Ranger!

I must’ve shared my enthusiastic response to the music because my parents borrowed a small piano from an aunt and hired someone to give me piano lessons. I started at age six, but my sister, Paula, began taking lessons at four and a half. She clearly had more talent than I, and she eventually became a professional musician. I never needed to practice because I had such a good memory that I could play everything back just as it had been taught to me. I was mechanically adept, which is all I desired to be. I had no awareness, at that time, that anything more was necessary, or even possible.

* * *

When I was in third grade, my mother and I had walked from our apartment, taking a shortcut to the stores on the next block, Junction Boulevard. On the way there we passed a man who seemed a bit out of place, but I didn’t think anything of it until we were back at the apartment building and we saw a police car parked in front and, next to it, the car of my principal. We recognized the car because Miss Steele often visited her secretary, who lived in our building.

My mother asked Miss Steele why the police were there, and she replied that someone had broken into her car and stolen a number of things, including a pair of gloves and a silver cigarette case. The police asked my mom if we had seen any strange characters in the neighborhood, and I told them of the man we had passed. The policeman asked if I would recognize him, and when I said I thought so, they asked my mother and me to join them in the police car as they drove through the neighborhood.

Within a couple of blocks I spotted the man. When the police confronted him, he actually showed them the gloves and claimed that he had found them on the street. When they searched him, they found he also had the cigarette case, so they arrested him on the spot.

A couple of weeks later, at one of our assemblies, Miss Steele invited me to the stage and told everyone about my heroism. She gave me a book — Penrod, by Booth Tarkington — as a reward for my help. I never considered myself to be a hero; if anything, I was a wimp. I never learned to swim, and I’m still afraid of the water. Initially I was even afraid of taking a shower! It was only much later that I was able to connect this shortcoming in my character with my mother's overprotective response to my near-death experience with pneumonia.

The Onset of Otherness

I listened to the radio almost every evening: fifteen-minute shows such as The Shadow, The Lone Ranger, and I Love a Mystery. I also listened to a lot of baseball. I followed the Yankees, Dodgers and Giants, and my best friend Hatsy Shevrin and I would play a board game called All-Star Baseball after school in the back room of his father’s drugstore on Junction Boulevard. The soda fountain in Doc Shevrin’s drugstore was an added attraction!

My friend’s unusual name, his father explained, was actually Herzl, a Hebrew word meaning heart. When I shared this with my mother, she reminded me of my own Jewish heritage. I connected this with the fact that my parents, when they had something to say to each other that they didn’t want me to understand, would speak in Yiddish. I was also aware of the fact that my grandparents’ English sounded very different from most of the other adults I had met, further awakening in me the notion of otherness.

I never thought of this in terms of better or worse, but my mother made it clear that I must excel in school because I was Jewish. I think this was in part because she believed that Jews were inherently more intelligent, but also because she saw Jews as a people who had experienced much prejudice so we had to be better than others just to keep even. She didn’t like the fact that my neighborhood friends were mostly Irish — 13 Buckleys and 12 McGuires — but I was quite happy to belong to this large gang.

I never took part in any fighting, nor did I ever hear of any guns or knives in the group, but they did fight gangs in other neighborhoods with fists and rocks. The main enemy was Corona, just the other side of Junction Boulevard. Corona was largely a black neighborhood, and I don’t remember ever hearing race discussed as a reason for the fights at the time: the kids just called them turf wars. But many years later I would learn about the impacts of racism on the residents of Corona, as I will share in another chapter.

* * *

The only other memorable school experience during those years occurred when I was selected to join a fifth/sixth grade combination class called Rapid Advance. I initially resisted because it would separate me from all of my friends, but my mother insisted, telling me that it was an honor to be chosen for this special class. In retrospect, I probably learned more in fifth grade than in any other single year, because the teacher, whom I never cared for personally, was so challenging and demanding of our minds. We studied Greek mythology, and we had spelling words that were multisyllabic and a culture of competition to excel. It was also another experience of otherness.

A Move to the Country

I didn’t complete fifth grade in Queens because my family moved three weeks before school was out, on Memorial Day in 1944. We moved to Lynbrook, a small village on the south shore of Long Island, just outside New York City. With such a short time left in the school year, my transition to West End Elementary School was not as difficult as the receiving school might have anticipated, thanks to the Rapid Advance class I’d taken.

There was no junior high or middle school at that time (at least not where we lived), so I stayed at West End through the eighth grade. My new principal was sort of cold, compared to Miss Steele, but I had two very good teachers. When I think of Miss Murphy, our math teacher, I picture a leprechaun. She was bubbly and enthusiastic and I hope my career as a math teacher has been reflective of her influence on me. Our English teacher, Miss Starbird, had a very different style, more like a favorite aunt, but that worked equally well for me. I actually began to enjoy the process of writing for her.

Unfortunately there were two teachers that were disliked by most of the students, and I think one was a sadist. Harry Hoffman was a student in our class who had reading difficulties, but this teacher would go out of her way to call on him to read aloud, and all of us were made uncomfortable by this. It was hard for me to consider this behavior on her part as teaching!

I had a direct conflict with the other disliked teacher. I was the eighth grade spelling champion, winning every spelling bee, and she would test me using the high school spelling list and even some college material. I was surprised, therefore, when my grade on the midterm spelling test was only 98.

After class, I asked her if she could tell me which word I‘d misspelled, and she took umbrage at my request. She responded insultingly, Aren’t you satisfied with your grade? I told her that I took pride in my spelling, and if I had missed a word, I wanted to learn the correct spelling so I wouldn’t miss it again. She grudgingly brought out my exam paper and, although I don’t remember the word now, it was obvious that she had misspelled it, not I. She never apologized, and continued to hold it against me for the rest of the year.

Life in Lynbrook (Beyond the School)

We had moved to Lynbrook because my father had been able to save enough money that we could afford to buy our own house. He told me that it cost $6,850, and that it was the first private house anyone in either branch of our family had ever owned!

In parallel to the environmental changes — from a large apartment building to a smaller sort of townhouse, but still in the city, and now to our own place in the country with a backyard where we could play safely — my own horizons expanded as well. A neighbor a few doors down had a basketball hoop on his garage, and I hung out there during most of my free time. I’d never played basketball before but I quickly fell in love with it. We would even shovel snow off the driveway to be able to play in the winter.

A wonderful memory from that time was when my father came looking for me there, and the ball rolled over near him. He picked it up and, holding the ball in both hands, launched a moving set shot, which swished perfectly through the net. My father was usually absent, working to support the family, so the fact that he had come looking for me was special in itself. The swish made it almost magical.

* * *

There was an empty lot on the corner of our street, Blossom Heath Avenue, and Merrick Road, a busy east-west thoroughfare. On the opposite corner was a small grocery store, and next to it a candy store/soda fountain. A guy named Mike managed the former, and Marian and Joe owned the latter.

Somehow the word got out that anyone wanting to play baseball after school should show up at the lot on a particular day, and Joe and Mike brought all of the equipment necessary for us to choose up sides and actually play a game. In those days, anyone meant any boy. I found that I was quite capable in the field and, although I never hit for power, I usually could find a way to get on base.

Marian and Joe’s place later became a community center when they purchased the first TV set in the neighborhood. It was quite small, and black-and-white, but it gave us a place for young and old to get together to watch Milton Berle on Saturday nights.

* * *

My family always had books in the house, and I enjoyed reading, but I was most excited to discover that a neighbor across the street, with two kids a bit older than I, was related to the publisher of Classic Comics! I think I read every issue for a few years, and my interest in the French Revolution stemmed from reading their takes on the adventures of The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, and Les Misérables. The names of Danton, Marat, and Robespierre were magic words to me.

Another important part of my education outside of school was thanks to my Aunt Betty, my father’s sister. My father bought me a large stamp album, and Aunt Betty provided me with some wonderful stamps from work-related correspondence she had received from around the world, which ignited my curiosity about cultures and travel. There was monetary value to my collection, but the greater value was what I learned about geography and history, and even other languages (I even learned the Cyrillic alphabet from my stamps). Aunt Betty also introduced me to The New Yorker, which became another source of learning.

On the other side of the family, my Uncle Joe (my mother’s older brother) stepped into the role of mentor for me from the time I was young. Having no kids of his own, he effectively took me on as a kind of surrogate son. Uncle Joe’s biggest influences on me were his intellectual curiosity and broad-minded exploration of ideas (including investigating many religious traditions, though he didn’t adopt one formally). Later, he would also help me to understand the dynamics of my own family.

What Is Required of Thee?

It has been said that whenever more than one Jewish family moves into a town there will be at least two synagogues, and Lynbrook proved the point. My parents had come from somewhat orthodox backgrounds, with my mother trying to keep a kosher home — except, of course, for her personal ration of bacon! I had been taught that a minyan (a quorum of ten good men) was required before services could be held, so there must’ve been at least twenty Jewish families in Lynbrook at that time.

Although my parents' friends attended Temple Emanuel (the Reform temple), out of respect for my grandparents we chose to join Beth David, the more conservative congregation, and that is where I, at the age of thirteen, underwent the initiation rite known as bar mitzvah. I had to chant my Torah portion in Hebrew, but unfortunately my maternal grandmother died the week before the ceremony, so she never got to see and hear my performance.

A quotation from that experience has remained with me ever since. What is required of thee, O man? Only to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your god. I continue to try to live up to at least the first two of these requirements.

CHAPTER 2:

HIGH SCHOOL PRINCIPAL’S HIGH SCHOOL YEARS

I

n 1974, during the time of Watergate, Russell Baker, the humorous political columnist for the New York Times, described a nightmare he had. He dreamed that he had come before Judge Sirica to be sentenced for his participation in the scandal, and the judge sentenced him to ten years in high school.

I never felt that way about my own high school years (between 1947 and 1951), but the school work was seldom challenging or inspiring. I could sum up my memories of high school English in two words: Silas Marner.

What a letdown for someone so enthralled by Dumas and Victor Hugo!

In language arts and social studies (which seem to me to be school terms for real subjects like history, geography, and literature), the books were not real books: they were called textbooks. Class lectures, assignments, and tests all lacked any sense of my being expected to interpret what I had read or heard. I was merely to regurgitate it.

I think the major desire, of whomever was choosing the readings for English and social studies, was to avoid controversy. I don’t remember anyone even considering philosophy, sociology or psychology. I became aware of how pervasive this vanilla curriculum was during my stints with the school newspaper and the yearbook. When I wrote an article critical of the playing of the football team, I was scolded by the athletic director. When we had to choose a theme for the yearbook in 1950-51, I suggested that television would’ve been timely, but the majority wanted The Birth of a Nation. Appalled (because of the blatant racism in the film of that name), I asked sarcastically if they intended to have a pregnant mother on the cover.

I loved doing mathematics, but I don’t remember really reading the math texts. I just used them to find the problem sets that we were to do for homework. Geometry was my favorite because I could do a proof differently from the way the teacher did it, yet still be correct. I preferred taking tests, where I would be involved in the learning, rather than the passivity required of listening to the teacher lecture.

Mr. Carr and physics and chemistry were the highlights of my high school academics. Mr. Carr had a way of connecting whatever we studied to our daily lives. He had a philosophical bent, and I loved his ability to deliver an insightful (and often humorous) aphorism for many of life’s situations. We were always coming home and telling our parents, Mr. Carr says... The most famous example was, You can brush your teeth with ketchup. His point was that it was the brushing itself that was important, not the stuff you brushed with. Though Mr. Carr didn’t make very personal relationships with his students in any obvious way, he was a keen observer and I felt that he knew me. He saw some of my potential, and helped me to see it. This would prove both important and influential in my life — first as a student and later as a teacher.

The class of 1951 was an unusual group: The top five students, according to grades, happened to be male. I was number four of that group, and I think we were a counterforce to the general disdain toward brains, as we were called. For most others, the goal was being popular, with sports for the guys and cheerleading for the girls.

Music Becomes Decidedly Extracurricular

I started to play handball at lunchtime, and when I showed up at a piano lesson with a swollen hand, my piano teacher was convinced that I wasn’t going to continue with the piano. In fact, just the opposite happened: Once I stopped taking lessons, I really began playing for my own enjoyment.

My proudest moment, musically speaking, occurred during my sophomore year when a senior asked me whether I would create and play an accompaniment to a program he wanted to present about George Gershwin. It was very well received.

The moment of which I was least proud grew out of an encounter with the high school music teacher. At the beginning of my senior year, she enrolled me in one of her music classes without consulting with me in any way. When I complained to the principal, who was my guidance counselor, he advised me to attend the first class, and if I still didn’t want to stay he would arrange to have it dropped from my schedule.

When I walked into the class, I immediately told the teacher of my unhappiness with what she had done behind my back, and that I intended to drop the class. She apologized and told me she had hoped my presence in the class could help to inspire the other students, most of whom were freshmen or sophomores. She then introduced me to them and asked me to play something for them.

I, of course, wasn’t prepared for this, so I asked the students to lend me a few pencils, and I prepared the piano (à la John Cage) by placing the pencils on the piano strings (causing them to buzz when played). I played a version of The Old Piano Roll Blues, and then I walked out.

Later that year I was asked to play at my high school graduation ceremony. I offered to play a boogie-woogie version of The Flight of the Bumblebee, but with the agreement of my mother, that was replaced by Chopin’s Revolutionary Etude. I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I really butchered it.

Music would continue to be a major force in in my life, though more despite my early music education than because of it.

The Principal’s Office

The first time I had visited the office of the principal, Mr. Mike Brennan, earlier in my senior year, was when I had been ejected by our English teacher, Miss Caveney, for criticizing the way she dealt with one of the less-motivated students. I told him exactly what had happened and he counseled me just to go back and apologize to her, which I did.

The only other time I was ever invited to his office was to meet with him in his role as the guidance counselor for the boys. (Marge Swarthout, the geometry teacher, served the same function for the girls.) Mike looked at my school records, saw that my math and science grades were very good, and asked me if I had considered a career in engineering. My father was an engineer and we had a small family business, so it seemed like a good idea. He then recommended Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). I had never heard of the school, so he showed me a copy of the catalog, with a beautiful picture of the Charles River on the cover, and I agreed to apply.

What I didn’t think about at the time was that my grades in all subjects were very good, but Mike, who had been a business teacher, had more