Enforcing the rules.

For the past ten years I've been teaching along with other volunteers--college professors like myself, probation officers, judges, and people from the community--in a program called "Changing Lives Through Literature" serving the Dorchester District Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts." Our students are probationers of the Court, and after completing the ten-week course, they receive six months off their probation time.

I work in the men's group (there is a women's group too), which averages twelve or fifteen graduates each semester, the great majority of them people of color, reflecting Dorchester demographics. Our readings have been chosen with their experience in mind. The primary text is Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of an American Slave, which serves as the starting point for discussion of problems faced by the students themselves--poverty and racism, family breakdown, the weakening of community bonds and thinning out of spiritual sustenance, the long struggle for social justice. Short supplementary readings by other authors--black and white, American and foreign, contemporary and classic--clarify issues Douglass raises by putting them in a broader context, and a weekly writing assignment helps us focus on their relevance today. For example, after reading what Douglass recalls of his childhood, juxtaposed against the memories of other fatherless children like Malcolm X, Richard Wright, Maxim Gorky, or Leo Tolstoy, students are asked for their own opinion of what is necessary for a "normal" childhood, and who has the responsibility to provide it. What was your childhood like? What kind of a father do you want to be? Those are the implied questions. We also ask how a man like Frederick Douglass finds himself "Where do people get their courage, self-esteem, and righteousness?"

Changing Lives began as a single experiment in New Bedford in 1991, and has spread entirely by word of mouth to a dozen other jurisdictions in Massachusetts, as well as scattered courts in six other states, in each of which the curriculum and pedagogy vary considerably, though the goals are the same. As with most alternative sentencing experiments, its appeal is strongest for those who know the revolving door of the criminal justice system most intimately--judges, probation officers, and of course offenders themselves. Obviously, for all of them the primary aim is to eliminate recidivism, and partial evidence suggests that the usual high rate of re-arrest may be greatly reduced for our graduates. A rigorous study of the results to date is now under way. In what follows here, however, I want to address another kind of concern and outcome arising in such a program.

Our dilemma is one that faces all teachers in one form or another: how are we to deal with the potential collision between the constraints of format in any classroom undertaking--rules for preparation, attendance, and participation--and our desire to foster a new attitude toward reflection and conversation, in our case with men whose past schooling has never amounted to more than playing the game, or just as likely, defying the rules or refusing to play altogether? If there is potential conflict between these goals and constraints in the ordinary classroom, how much more so in a room full of certified "failures," whose report cards have both "F" and "Felony" inscribed on them!

Our Changing Lives class meets for ninety minutes, one night a week, for ten weeks--not a rigorous schedule, but given our students and their plight, it could be called intensive. How much external structure, and on what models, will allow them to make the best of their experience? Our aim is not to encourage anyone to step back onto the educational ladder--or treadmill--though a few may want to do so. Most of these men are too deeply rooted in complicated lives for that. They would benefit more from job training, apprenticeship programs, or just a decent employment agency helping them find work despite their criminal records. In Changing Lives our task is not really curricular then--learning a discrete body of knowledge or an academic skill--but more attitudinal, or one might say, ethical. We're trying to find the right approach for men reentering society after accusation, trial, and chastisement for serious criminal acts.

The courts have dealt with them forcefully, and we hope justly, but crudely and with little guidance in facing the future built into their sentences--and they are now on probation, to prove themselves obedient if not otherwise changed. Accordingly, it is one of the probation officers who announces our rules at the beginning of every semester:

   attend class on time;
   arrive sober and straight;
   turn off all cell phones;
   respect everyone in the room.

Respect for others has never been in doubt in our classes, though a lively conversation sometimes has so many voices talking at once that it's hard to hear. Usually, though, people are pretty good about listening, giving the other fellow a turn. We've had a few problems with cell phones and substance abuse, have dealt with them straightforwardly, and ultimately solved them. Our guidelines for attendance and homework have been more difficult to administer.

The attendance record is kept by the probation officers, who pass around a sheet for signatures at the end of each class. We warn everyone that more than two absences will get you kicked out, and I've seen our probation officers converge on a student who had missed two classes early in the semester, urging him to shape up. A few weeks later, when an emergency came along, the absentee had to be told he wouldn't graduate. We've lost several of our best students to this automatic expulsion, including men whose presence, however irregular, had clearly been an inspiration to their classmates. We held to the rule because it was our charge from the court, and the bargain we had made with our students.

Aside from being absent, there is really no way to fail our program. In the end there is no grade, not even a pass/fail hurdle. If you attend, you graduate. But what should count as being present or absent? Suppose a man joins the class a week late, because he couldn't find the room the first night, or became he was recruited after the program had already started--should that count against him? We wavered, but ultimately decided to enforce the eight-meeting requirement. It takes at least eight meetings to absorb what the course has to offer, we told ourselves. If a serious student misses a third class, we have sometimes offered a make-up session at the end of the semester, but this feels more like a punishment than a solution, and niggling to boot. It's better to say, Come back next semester.

The more we wag our fingers at absentees, the more likely we are to have people at the opposite extreme, with perfect attendance the first eight meetings, who then skip the last two, keeping careful score. This is rare, but it's happened. Once we put rules like these in place, it becomes a game for some students, just as in most schools. Recently we've found that attendance problems seem to vanish if we begin the semester by asking the students themselves to formulate the rules. They invariably begin by insisting that every class must be attended, and then amend this by allowing for "good excuses," rather than establishing a precise limit. Since we moved to this method of setting the guidelines, many men have never missed a class, and no one has missed more than two.

What about tardiness? For the most part we ignore it, having realized that the ten minutes we spend waiting for latecomers buys us ten minutes of free and easy conversation, leavening in our recipe for the communal loaf. This is a good example of how an old problem can be turned to advantage simply by asking what's really at stake. It's all a matter of attitude. If we made a fuss about it, everyone would end up feeling pissy. Again, recent classes setting their own standards have almost always started on time.

If someone is always twenty minutes late, we look into it. Sometimes there's a good excuse--a job and a long commute--but our probation officers don't like making exceptions. I do remember a night when one of the more dutiful students came rushing into the room at the end of class, five minutes before the attendance sheet went around. He'd been required to work late, knew he couldn't make class, but wanted us to see his face and hear his story. He had his homework with him, and we let him sign in as "present."

Policing homework is much more likely to backfire than any of these other attempts to keep everyone on track, and in my opinion something to be dealt with case by case. Of course teachers meet homework resistance all the time, so often that the chronic problem and the routine solution have long since fused as the core rationale of schooling, whereby means of enforcement determine the entire assignment package--book reports, exams, and recitation--and what you read at home serves as little more than pretext for disciplinary routines that structure the school day. Byproducts include mindless obedience, sneakiness, inability to concentrate, and a scorn for books.

With enforcement come grades, report cards, tracking, and various sanctions, guaranteeing that some students will fail. That's what it means to have a ranking system tied to performance: no matter where you stand on the ladder, if you're not at the top, you've lost the game, whether you're second best or last. Pass/fail options are like showdown poker, played by a loser for double-or-nothing stakes.

In their years of schooling our probationers scored at the bottom so often that most of them stopped trying--thinking of it as their own failure, though of course they hated the regime that put them to the test. The upshot for homework expectations is written on their faces that first night: an assignment of only a few pages of easy reading can stir deep feelings of inadequacy, and reactivate the old choice between defiance and submission. To ask them for homework is like putting them back in Third Grade again, their knees too big for the desks. This is merely to say that the problem is a very thorny one, and deserves lengthy discussion. I will attempt to state here only some of the basic guidelines we've worked out in Dorchester.

First of all, as will become clearer in what follows, our view is that the crucial force for change in our program comes from class discussion, and not the literature that provides its starting point. The reading or writing a student does at home may end up being important, but with us the essential changes grow out of what happens in the classroom, people talking earnestly to one another about their real concerns. We provide a loose framework for these small group conversations in the carefully planned sequence of readings and the questions we pose regarding them, beginning with a focus on childhood, then moving to problems of schooling (including the use of coercion and punishment), considering the plight of the weak or oppressed in today's streets, examining the confusion between manliness and violence, noticing how desperation can lead to despair, and finally questioning the kind of justice dispensed by our society.

Much as we believe that such concerns lie at the heart of our students' predicament, and must be confronted for them to get anything out of their ten weeks, we are also convinced that the homework assignments raising these issues ought never to be treated as imperatives or guarantees of achievement. Over the years we've made many adjustments in the structure of the course and our own expectations, but we started with one fundamental premise, which we've tried to hold to--that Changing Lives, whether or not it actually changes any lives for the better, should not change them for the worse. It might, for instance, be good for a probationer to learn self-discipline through meeting the requirements of a study program that made reasonable and worthy demands on him, but not at the risk of failing to live up to such demands, and not at the expense of others who might also fail to meet them. We resolved that the course should not be another proof of incompetence or incorrigibility, not even for those who couldn't or wouldn't do the work, good reasons or bad.

The important thing is not to set standards and hold people to them, but to be of genuine use to students at whatever level of achievement they may have reached. The lesson we try to pass on is best described as an attitude toward ideas and experience, rather than any particular block of knowledge or degree of skill. Many of our probationers seem to have missed the key discovery that most children make somewhere between age five and age seven, the discovery of what it means to learn something--to find out what reading is, or how to tell a story, make a map, or act in a play. It's not what you learn, but how it feels to discover something really big, opening new possibilities. Once you learn how history makes the past usable, or how a consensus grows out of earnest debate, or how to see yourself as a potential employer might see you, then you have a new relation to all of life. That's a big order, of course, and to foster the kind of attitude I'm talking about obviously requires taking into account the ideals and aspirations of students, not just their SAT scores and deportment quotients; for it is these ideals that students must discover for themselves, and try to live up to, not the performance goals that teachers or curricular models set for them.

Vital language, trustworthy taste, and practical ethics--the ultimate grounds of all such ideals and aspirations--are not simply inherited from the culture you are raised in, nor can they be constituted by flat from above. They must be continually created, negotiated, and revised in the public realm, wherever groups of people come together for serious talk. As it happens, for better or worse, the primary forum for such cultural work has become the modern classroom, just as it once was the market-place or the church, the town-meeting or even the theater, in ancient and medieval times when theater was still a civic event.

Whether or not the classroom is better suited than the barbershop for such cultural creation, it is the actual institution that has taken the place of these other formal settings in today's mass society with its suffocating bureaucratic systems organized from on high.

One of our aims, then, is to demystify the whole realm of social control, schooling, and literacy. All their lives our students have been told they are incompetent readers and writers, and this tends to make them so. But the incompetence is superficial in most cases. Their speech skills are usually more than adequate, and often superb. In fact, their failure in school has protected them from certain kinds of glibness and beating about the bush.

All students, including ours, have the right to success in a truly democratic classroom--not just an opportunity to learn, but active exercise of language, taste, and ethics, in order to explore their own individual powers and ideals in relation to a growing sense of how others speak and judge and evaluate. "Success" means both discovering and making standards, rather than merely living up to them. "Failure" means being left out of the most essential aspects of civic life. Often the schools fail to do this important work, through a misguided notion of what kind of education is appropriate in an egalitarian society. The men we meet in Changing Lives typically think of themselves as failures. From their earliest experiences in schooling to the regimen of incarceration and probation, they have stubbornly resisted demands and admonishments, have been labeled incorrigible, and have little or no sense of what it might mean to be part of a democratic forum deciding matters of concern for their own lives. We want to establish such a classroom, in which no one will be left out.

Homework, insofar as it fosters this kind of success, is all to the good. But we must not let a coercive or punitive attitude infect our invitation to literary experience. Forced reading is worse than none at all. It kills the spirit of both the reader and the book. Therefore we have a very permissive attitude toward homework, and usually let delinquents discover for themselves that it's more satisfying to be able to join in the discussion than it is to feel embarrassed and at a loss because you haven't read what the others are talking about. At the same time, we make sure that even those who shirk their homework can contribute something to the conversation. To do this, we spend ten or fifteen minutes at the beginning of every class writing answers to some searching question that grows out of the reading but does not require precise knowledge of a text:

   Please pick one big lesson you
   learned in your childhood and tell
   the story of how you learned it and
   what difference it has made in your
   life.

   What can people who are "weak"--
   because of youth, illness, poverty,
   prejudice, or a history of being in
   trouble with the law--do to
   change their lives and make themselves
   "stronger"?

   How can people survive hitting bottom?
   Why do some people cling to
   their anger, pride, or self-pity, while
   others are able to find something
   new to believe in?

To meditate and write on such questions briefly before discussing them is something every member of our class can do. In this way, we can function together as a group, regardless of how much or how little individuals have prepared at home. Sometimes the readings figure prominently in discussions, sometimes not at all, but in our small groups no one fails. Some who start out resisting their homework end up discovering they like to read after all; others say something more like this:

   I hate to read, but it was a challenge
   to myself. I haven't been in school
   for twenty years! The goal was to
   eliminate six months from my sentence.
   The ultimate prize upon
   completion of the program for me
   was expressing myself in class,
   through homework and in groups.

   Or this:

   Through the course of this program
   I've learned how to communicate
   with people a little better. It seems
   like before I came to this program I
   was going numb. I can't remember
   the last time I picked up a book to
   read it or even skim through it. I
   also have a better relationship with
   my girlfriend. I try to think about
   other people's feelings now. It just
   isn't about me any more.

I hope it is obvious that the methods and goals I have been describing here have implications for any classroom, especially in times like our own. I leave it to the reader to weigh the possibilities. Let me move on now to a few final remarks that focus on tone and atmosphere rather than rules, and that may illustrate some of the risks and benefits that come with bringing people back to school long after their original compulsory education.

As I have been arguing, in general it is better to let students find their own way to the give-and-take of the classroom, a setting where few of them have ever been comfortable. Early in every semester, for instance, there are always some in our classes who raise their hands like little children, asking where the water fountain is, or for permission to go to the men's room. It takes two or three times to break them of the habit--Just go! You don't need to ask. But I don't worry about the other habit, also formed long ago, of using a "call of nature" as a brief escape from class. The "numb" student just quoted was invariably the first to finish writing his class exercise, and after a minute or two of staring at the floor, he would get up and amble out. Others did the same thing when they finished, though rarely more than two at any one time. Were they having a cigarette? I never saw anyone in our class smoking, just as I never heard them swearing and cursing, but then I rarely saw them outside the schoolroom or courthouse. My guess is that they often did have to relieve themselves, but that they also felt bored waiting for others to finish writing, and perhaps uneasy about their own lack of more to say. They were uncomfortable just sitting there, quietly thinking, though that was what I hoped people would get used to. Little did they realize that their comings and goings furnished the timetable for our writing stints. I would always wait till everyone was back in the room before calling a halt and assigning people to their small groups for discussion. I wanted everyone present when serious conversation began.

Fewer students left for the toilets once we had broken into small groups, and I remember a comic moment one night that puts all of this in perspective. It was the seventh class, and we were talking about facing crisis, how a man can sometimes come back from hitting bottom a stronger person. One of our most charismatic students was telling his group about living for a few years in an all-white community where his high school classmates shunned him, even in the basketball team locker room. One day he found himself alone in the showers with a white teammate, and opened a conversation. He made a joke and got the fellow to laugh. Soon they were walking home together every day after practice. The suburb was near Chicago, and he offered to take his new friend to visit the black neighborhoods there. Before long he was guiding tours of his teammates through the South Side.

This student was re-telling the story that he had written in his homework that week:

   It took a while but the other students
   started talking to me. It
   started with the basketball team,
   because we had more time with
   each other. I had some of the guys
   coming to my uncle's house after
   school, so they could see how I
   lived. But that wasn't how I really
   lived, so I got about six guys to
   come to the city with me. The
   things they saw were so different--different
   people, food, houses.
   One guy told me he saw it on TV
   before, but they never watched
   BET (Black Entertainment
   Television) shows, video, and rappers.
   They didn't even know what
   skins (pork rinds) were.

In writing up his story, he compared his high school experience to the way that small group discussions in our class also helped bridge racial boundaries. And indeed, in his small group that night he was doing the same thing, for he had them all, black and white, on the edges of their chairs. With others picking up the mood, the conversation was very lively. Here, for example, is what another, much older student was saying that night about his experiences across the color line:

   In 1948, I can remember
   going to town with
   my mother. We had
   walked a mile and a half
   to catch the Greyhound
   bus. I was tired, and the
   sun was very hot. When
   the bus finally came, I
   was glad to get on and
   sat in the first empty
   seat I came to. My mother
   snatched me by the collar and
   dragged me to the back. Of course
   I didn't know why. Later I learned
   we weren't allowed to sit up front.
   The back of the bus was full, and
   black folks were standing up, even
   with empty seats up front. A white
   man from up North offered me
   the seat next to him, and I took it--only
   to give it up to the next
   white woman to get on. But I
   always remember that white man
   who gave me the seat.

Of course, the white students in the group had their own stories to contribute. (I too had a basketball anecdote I was dying to tell, though I was only an eavesdropper.) One black man summed it up in his homework the following week:

   There's no difference between any
   man. We are the same, white to
   black, black to white. We may get
   raised by intelligent beings or
   ignorant beings, but we will
   remain a unified pack of souls,
   under God's eyes, and whoever
   preaches differently doesn't know
   the truth.

In the midst of all this, suddenly the original speaker stood up, and announced that he needed to pee--that he had needed to pee for quite a while, but didn't want to miss anything. They laughed, and as he left he told them not to talk about anything without him--and in fact he was back in two minutes. At the end of the evening this group didn't want to break up. They kept at it long after all the others had handed in their writing and vanished.

This was our class at its best, the men in the circle establishing their own agenda, mutual trust, and conversational decorum. Much of it in this case was due to the man whose basketball story I've just told. At mid-semester he wrote the following avowal, not in answer to any assignment, but out of sheer exuberance:

   I really like this class. I think it's the
   best thing that the court has ever
   done. I find myself using this class
   when I'm on the street. Certain
   things that we read about. I
   encounter the same things and I
   think what that person did, and I
   add that with what I think. And
   most of the time I come out on top.

   I'm also learning about things that
   black people did that I never knew,
   thanks to this class. Knowing is half
   the battle.

   Another thing is, I've met white
   guys that I probably wouldn't have
   spoke to on the street, but being in
   this class and breaking off in groups,
   you get to meet and talk to them
   one-on-one. By being in small
   groups, you can get a better understanding
   of each man's view on life
   and other situations--black, white,
   Spanish, or what have you.

Though it means ending on a dissonant note, I must also tell the sequel. This man whose delight in our class was so evident and contagious was the very man mentioned at the beginning of this essay, who had to be informed at the last meeting of the semester that he had collected more than his allowed absences--more than three, in fact-and would not graduate. He had been warned; now it was too late. He argued with the probation officers, was shown the attendance sheet with his five signatures, and stamped angrily out of the room.

I still ask myself: did we serve him well? Was his another failure experience, or not?

* In 2004 Changing Lives Through Literature received the New England Board of Higher Education's highest award, for "Excellence" in program development. Thanks to a substantial National Endowment for the Humanities grant, Changing Lives can be studied in all its variety, including a detailed account of a semester in Dorchester, online at http://cltl.umassd.edu. A book based on the website materials is currently in press from the University of Michigan, written and edited by Jean Trounstine and Robert Waxier. Taylor Stoehr's essay on the Dorchester program, "Is It a Crime to Be Illiterate?" appeared in the March/April 2005 issue of Change Magazine.