40. Teens Tapdancing in the Tidepools of Moral Degeneracy

My students’ test scores go up! I’m more concerned about the holes in their souls. Somebody call David Brooks! I write about 4th grade, The Nickel Boys, Forrest Gump (again!), and MLK...

My 11th grade students were supposed to have read Chapter 15 of The Nickel Boys by early last week. The chapter is five pages long but it became clear to me that the vast majority of students had not done so. The day was April Fool’s, so, fittingly, I made up an alternative series of events: Turner making a mortifying scene at the hipster soul food restaurant, infuriating his spouse, Millie, and being booted from the premises. Students didn’t bite. I even asked my colleague across the hall (who was passing by) if she liked this bit. She tried to play along but students knew it was a gag. The dearth of reading, however, was no joke. I concluded that the brevity of the chapter had actually discouraged students. I’d not given them my customary 15 minutes of class time to at least begin reading. They probably figured it was minimally important and that they could wing it in class—another minuscule equation in the great calculus of our time, as far as teenagers and their most essential role models are concerned: how to efficiently extract as much benefit as possible with as little sincere effort as can be brought to bear. Few want to fail. Few want to truly be students, just to be rewarded (enough, at least) for showing up. As I’ve written before, this is not totally their fault. They are marinated through the soup of their phones in a grotesque capitalistic logic courtesy of scam artists, influencer clowns, and manipulative imagery; one does not succeed on merit but in spite of it, through hacks and dodges, and somehow one ends up feeling more accomplished as a result. A casual diploma trumps the product of care and effort. Ugly business.

So, I announced a performance: I, Simmons, would present a mildly dramatic reading of the five pages, pausing occasionally to solicit perspectives from students, derailing 20 minutes of class for the best possible cause. It’s 2002-ish in the novel’s second-to-last flash-forward and Turner waits for his wife at the hipster soul food place. He reflects on the changing neighborhood. He is an accomplished entrepreneur with a successful small business—moving, he wryly observes, the adult children of suburban families into gentrifying neighborhoods in the supposed cesspool of a city that their parents and grandparents vacated decades earlier. He knows the benefits and headaches that come with being the boss. He’s viewed as a local mentor to disadvantaged youth because of his hiring practices, not that he’s intended to be that, exactly, but he’s still the sort of area winner deserving, as his wife’s friend intends, of a feature in the neighborhood rag. The post-9/11 paranoia about mosques and immigrants wafts in the air but he’s not a taker. His back hurts. He is quitting smoking. He’s largely succeeded in staving off his traumas—memorably compared to fishing gear he’s socked away in a garage or basement. He waits at the restaurant, contemplates buying flowers for the impending date night, and then Millie, his wife, walks in.

A day or so earlier, a student in this class—she shall be known as Kat—submitted a drafty draft of her text entries for the My Education digital essay project I do with this novel. I have written about it—the best project I did last year, essentially a text-and-image presentation (via Google site) of one’s educational autobiography in which students map their accumulation of skills, values, interests, and traits across their 16-17 years of life and various “sectors” of influence, from media to families to texts to teachers and so on. Kat identified me as a positive influence but included a telling observation:

“Although its their job to teach about the history of america, i see that their teaching go further more on a deeper level, they give life advice through their teachings, and i see that they generally want to teach their students, I see how they really get into certain topic and sprinkle life advice through their teachings, and i think this has a great influence in me because they aren't just teachers teaching they are people who also feel and I feel like a lot of students especially in mr. Simmons' class kill the spirit for him to teach because no one is motivated or even dare to talk…”

Thanks, Kat.

I think.

I wrote Kat back saying that my spirit could never be killed by reticent readers, that my life is rich and fulfilling, that I don’t expect effusive enthusiasm for literature, that it’s a game of inches, and…

On April Fool’s Day, during my mildly dramatic reading to the captive audience, Kat and I kept making eye contact. She would start cracking up and I would try not to break character. It was quite apparent that, despite the smile on my face and my drama class voice, I was, contrary to my comments, certainly at least a little bit pissed.

Why was I pissed? It wasn’t about compliance, the idea that the dearth of reading amounted to disrespect for me or even the class. No, it wasn’t a nice thing to do to the book, but Colson Whitehead will be okay. What bothered me most was that those five pages are so sweet and hopeful in a book that contains much pain. It’s the tragedy of a bright and idealistic Black kid (Elwood) who is murdered by agents of a brutal state-enabled organized crime operation masquerading as a reform school. It’s also about the healing and re-education of Turner, who learns from the wise and relentlessly moral MLK-pilled Elwood that one can not always hack and dodge oppression, that sometimes you go through the ugly business in the name of justice. When Elwood’s gambit to defeat Nickel Academy appears to fail, Turner learns to to take a risk for the sake of a brother. Elwood doesn’t make it, but he passes the baton.

So, that’s what I was bummed about, that students were not moved to see who they thought was Elwood in middle-ish age, financially comfortable, giving and receiving love, being more or less healthy in spite of his suffering. He is a Black American Dream hero, a survivor, a testament to the truth that, despite the ills wrought by racism and exploitation, people can survive and thrive—as regular successful folks who, like Turner, peruse restaurant menus and groan about the cost of healthcare plans. And, likewise, his wife, Millie, “chipping away” at that pain, giving him patience and support—what a subtle portrait of how people in relationships can care for one another. In this case, it’s clear that this has happened, that Turner is, in 2002-ish, on the other side of that mountain of ugly business.

I was bummed because students skipped this part.

I’m already teaching them about an ever-receding past from which they feel disconnected. Nearly 95% of my 11th graders are Latino. They often see themselves as fully American but they don’t typically view the civil rights crusades of the 1960s as relevant to their experience. The systemic racism of Jim Crow America feels like a faded fairy tale, not a foundational story of the place they call home. Martin Luther King is an icon but also a vibe detached from deeds, a sort of shallow saint for whom there are safe yearly celebrations. Segregation, bus boycotts, Florida student protests, labor strikes in New York, the Central Park Five, the crack wars—I do want them to take in some of this history as they read the novel. As the character of Yaw in Homegoing (a book I read with seniors) says to his own students in mid-century Ghana, “history is storytelling”—a series of choices about which narratives and characters to pull into the foreground and which to blur, obscure, or ignore.

As we are seeing each day, a country’s government can certainly attempt to warp or erase its history on grand and small scales. Though childless, Turner is a character that this government would approve of in theory—political only in private, self-made, modestly triumphant in business. It’s his personal history and the literal excavation of Nickel Academy’s atrocities that, if highlighted, might prove less than “ennobling,” as one of the recent education-themed executive orders phrases it. American history is supposed to be about sunny progress; the ugly past was either not that ugly, the product of misunderstandings or mischaracterizations, or simply over, and thus no longer of interest. While few would claim that racism or oppression shouldn’t be studied, students really don’t immediately find it weird that, say, one major cable news provider might cease to display a stock ticker during an impending crash while others would center the story of spiraling financial markets. Selective or disingenuous storytelling is just what is done. What would have been a fascinating and disturbing postmodern pattern to me 25 years ago is just life now. Students are used to carving out algorithm-driven keyholes through which to examine culture, politics, and sports. It makes sense to ignore any stories you disdain, to keep the feed clean. When my seniors watch Forrest Gump, they meet a character who was everywhere in America’s checkered past but cannot reflect on its meaning. The reactionary take on the film—quite a common one—is that Forrest’s intellectual limitations protect him because his values are consistent and all-American—mom, church, love, friends, work, loyalty—and he thankfully can't articulate a perspective on the racism, sexism, and injustice ribboning the landscape he traverses. Guy is named after the founder of the Klan and he doesn’t get it. He serves in Vietnam and meets every president but tells his bus stop audience about getting shot in the butt-ocks and gorging on ice cream and Dr. Pepper. That’s ironic to me—the transformation of major historical events into punchlines, truth and meaning melting away under the candy shell of romance and feel-good comedy. I don’t think this is the movie’s message or effect at all but that’s inspiration to the reactionary critic. Forget everything, he says. Don’t dwell or acknowledge or understand. Get gumpified. Skip the parts you don’t like. Stop caring about what you miss—because this ridiculous story, rife with manipulated archival footage, makes more sense to me than any genuine take on the real thing.

So, teaching The Nickel Boys, which shows a small piece of a very large and evil part of American history landing on the lives of boys in Florida, I have had Gump on the brain. On April 3rd, Kat’s comment still reverberating, I asked students why Whitehead chose to add the stunning twist to the story, albeit one that you definitely can see coming. Why does he let Elwood die, have Turner use his name, and reveal this truth close to the end of the book, that the Elwood we’ve seen advance through adulthood in increments of 12 or so years is actually Turner? How did it make students feel to learn this?

I wasn't so sure every one of them read for this class either, but at least I’d mandated 20 minutes of reading time the prior class. I’d wandered the room, noting page numbers, occasionally tapping a desk and quietly asking if they got what was happening. It’s a standing suggestion that my Wednesday and Friday tutorial periods are theoretically dedicated to informal book club circles. But at the debrief, after they’d had a chance to ask questions, after they’d written a discussion forum post of 250-ish words, after they’d had a chance to read classmates’ responses to said forum, they pretty much concluded that the author was trying to teach the reader about racism.

Racism, according to Colson Whitehead, is wrong.

It didn’t even really make sense. It was as if they figured I was looking for such a safe and wanly progressive conclusion: racism is indeed wrong, and there is racism depicted in the book, so therefore the commentary or message (and there has to be an obvious and explicit and simplistic one) is that the (bad) racism in the book (and world) is the reason for the book’s existence. Never mind that the novel shows a teenage character’s intellectual awakening courtesy of Martin Luther King, James Baldwin, the Chicago Defender, and a charismatic and bright high school teacher. It is about waking up to the world, demanding dignity now instead of later, loving yourself and others, recognizing and combating injustice with firm resolve. It’s about how ideas—from King's speech about Funtown or “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” or a pop song or a teacher’s lesson or whatever—translate to action and the construction of a self. Whitehead himself has likened aspects of the novel to a debate within himself. Elwood helps Turner construct his self, and, yes, in adulthood, he symbolically and unknowingly embodies the dream that young Elwood harbored. The Black businessman sitting down for a burger in the hotel restaurant built on top of the hotel restaurant where Elwood worked as a kid, hoping on every shift that he might see a person who looked like him being served instead of serving. But Turner, while a businessman, is in Florida for the sake of truth about the past, for solidarity with fellow survivors of Nickel who have come, like the piles of teenage bones in the secret graveyard, out of darkness and into light to share their experiences.

The beginning of the book depicts the archeological dig, the evil unearthed. It reminds me of the old house analogy that Isabel Wilkerson uses in Caste, an excerpt of which I read with seniors. This is the notion that we Americans are stewards of a promising though battered house that requires upkeep. The flaws in the design are not our doing but, like buried bodies, they can't be ignored. We can keep building new structures over the old ones—a matryoshka doll of stories stacking up like garish condos—but every movie about a haunted house tells us that won’t work. It is maybe a glimpse of the future, in which people will pretend they never knew that the things happening now would happen, that their giddy support of horrific actions was jest or about something different than what they said it was about. The internet isn’t peaches and cream but it’s harder to hide most bad deeds than it used to be. Users can mute but not silence. One can only iron away so much dissonance. Even social media exoskeletons crack.

But, last week, students thought that I just wanted them to say racism is bad. As if that were a reasonable goal for a six-week literature course unit, to herd students towards a vague regurgitation. What about the human experience? Forget learning how to write an essay. What about an empathetic human reaction? Art isn’t a delivery system for vacuous messaging, but students might prefer it to be so: as on a multiple choice math test in which you can likely sweep away at least one of the options as absurd, the answer least likely to be incorrect is that racism is wrong. So say that, save face, take no risk, add another brick to the wall. Education is about guessing what your teacher wants and approximating it with minimal effort. They don’t arrive at these beliefs on their own. You can thank standardized tests and internet culture for the cynicism.

A devout Christian, Kat admitted in another entry of her digital essay that she was captivated by Martin Luther King as a child. Heard about him in class, checked a book out of the library, learned more, and was “moved” by his commitment to others, his application of theology to freedom and justice. Like Elwood’s, her heart was and remains afire. It takes me back to 3rd and 4th grades—nodes on my own timeline of self-creation. I had a great 3rd grade teacher, a lanky sarcastic guy named Larry who gave us tons of homework and showed us the “Thriller” video on Halloween. I learned a lot about reading and writing. In 4th grade, I had Joanna, a civil rights activist who not only gave us lots of homework but also showed us how to treat one another. I have written about her before. She brought the most violent and annoying kid’s mom into class to talk about the challenges they faced at home. She cried when she described losing her 1960s protest memorabilia. She had us watch all of Roots. I remember how she criticized me once for not holding a classmate’s glasses while he swam in a creek. I learned to have convictions and care in her class, to see myself as a member of a community with responsibilities, to be capable of love for strangers.

Certainly abetted by the pandemic and the increased transference of the teenage experience from the physical world to the digital stage, it’s perhaps the most stunning development in education I have witnessed in the past ten years. A decade ago, a kid who didn't read was more likely to feel, especially once I explained something, even a passage from Hamlet. I could say, look at the stepdad situation, think about a young guy with his life turned upside-down, privileged but hopeless, his whole life mapped out but barren-feeling, his kingly compass gone, his mom crazy in love—and students would rise to the occasion, demonstrating empathy, connecting one of the most famous figures in Western literature to their own lives. Who has not felt isolated and paralyzed? Who has not bemoaned the unfairness of the world?

Now, this, once the balm, is another struggle. Thanks to AI, writing and reading are now skills more often subject to teenage skepticism, but this emotional awakening, a maturation of the soul, the capacity to feel connected to other people and the characters who capture their experiences—with racism or school or poor health or triumph or love or anything—is in jeopardy. Sure, it’s all linked—less reading and writing means less critical thinking, the articulation of thought and emotion into language, an atrophied muscle—but I can’t help but think this is maybe the most dire learning loss of all.

Students live in a time of flamboyantly public moral degeneration. On the site formerly known as Twitter, bots and pickled souls, many ostensibly devout, cheer on deportations devoid of due process and the detention and rendition of ideological foes, celebrating indefinite prison sentences, demanding the gulags, shifting beliefs to align with allegiance. God might not be the answer. I’m an April fool to imagine it could be literature. The Kats of class are outliers. Teens bathe in the tidepools of a toxic sea that has soaked the adults. Thanks to teachers like me and my department colleagues, ELA test scores at my school are going up (insert disclaimer about faith in standardized testing data) but my sleep is most besieged by the prospect of an emotional vacuum being dug, maybe permanently, like invasive scarring acne into the hearts of the kids who, without intervention, might not love any better than they write.