Inside and Outside

As a photographer, I have always loved the works of Diane Arbus.  Diane Arbus: In the Beginning, an exhibit at the Met Breuer, gives a glimpse of the earlier works of the photographer.  Arbus is noted for having photographed members of the circus, female impersonators, dwarves and giants, and others perceived to exist on the edges of society.  Her work humanizes those we see as different from ourselves.  And though she is known for documenting the marginalized, she also photographed those we consider normal--children on the street, couples, cinema audiences, well-dressed older women, and young patriotic Americans.  Within her oeuvre, placing these disparate people together makes us question the very concept of normal.  Are we all freaks?  Are we all outsiders?  Who am I and where do I belong?

These are questions that resonated with me as an Asian American woman, but also a teacher and Academic Dean in a middle school.  One assumes that early adolescence is beset with these kinds of questions.  If I can guess by the responses when I tell new acquaintances that I teach middle school, then middle school is recalled as encompassing an awkward coming-into-being.  That which makes us different can be a point of pride, or it can be the germ of self-doubt and desire for invisibility--our differences are related to whether we feel like insiders or outsiders.  This is true for adults, but it seems especially marked in adolescents.  Do I love Arbus because I love middle schoolers?

Certainly, at Black Pine Circle, the teachers and the leaders--our Head of School, Division Heads and Dean of Students--are always in conversation about making our community more inclusive and supporting students’ individual voices.  We have students who feel nurtured when belonging, as well as students who love being different and being on the outside.  In our classrooms and in our advisories, we find ways to honor all different kinds of people.  After viewing the Arbus exhibit, I realized that this is evident in many our classrooms and since I am most familiar with English classes, it felt most obvious in our English classrooms.

In eighth-grade English, students finished F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and then watched Baz Luhrmann’s cinematic version.  Gatsby wanted to be a part of a world he couldn’t belong in, and recent critical analysis suggests that Fitzgerald might have intended Gatsby to be bi-racial--complicating his outsider status due solely to class.  Luhrmann’s film emphasized the narrator Nick’s observation that he “was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”  As the narrator, and as someone with the high breeding Gatsby sought, but none of the wealth, students observed that Nick felt both within and without.  Next, students read Dasha Slater’s New York Times article, “The Fire on Bus 57,” describing the story and sentencing behind an agender student whose skirt was lit on fire by another teen.  8th graders noted that the victim and perpetrator were both insiders and outsiders in their respective words.  The curricular themes in 8th grade English class are past and present, forgiveness, revenge, and reparation, but it could very well have been about the idea of insiders/outsiders, especially with upcoming studies in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, Octavia Butler's Kindred, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

In seventh-grade English with Stephanie Piper, the curricular theme is the American dream but, again, it could have been about insiders/outsiders.  In fact, the first full text they studied was S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, which focuses on the ways in which individuals and groups feel both within and with-out of belonging.  Seventh graders are beginning work on Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese, in which the protagonists (yes, there are three), struggle with differences and belonging.  Later, students will read Sherman Alexie's Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, a variety of short works by African American authors, and J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, all concerned with the same themes.  Even sixth graders are starting work with Maria Palmer on Cynthia Kadohata's Weedflower, which tells the story of a girl and her family’s experiences with being Japanese American during World War II.  (Maria Palmer offers this text to her sixth graders every year, but it seems very timely given the recent public discussion about requiring Muslims to register themselves in the United States.)  In all of these works, the struggle of being inside and outside is highlighted.

Why do English teachers use these texts?  Do we, as teachers, choose them because we feel our middle schoolers can relate to the feeling of being an outsider, or because we feel that they should be able connect with characters who feel excluded?  Perhaps this is a struggle that begins in childhood or adolescence, but is never resolved even when we are adults?  Since before the election and certainly after, the concept of the outsider has played a key role on our national and personal dialogues.  There is the anti-establishment, but also the marginalized, the disenfranchised.  Discussion after the election, among students and other members of the BPC community has been centered around making spaces for differences and finding ways to protect those whose differences might mark them as targets of bullying.

As always, our Admissions Director, Greta Wong, and our Board look for ways to make the BPC community better reflect our West Berkeley community.  How can we get those who are considered outside of the typical independent school inside our school?  What about a more inclusive faculty?  Recently, teachers Stephanie Colker, Cheryl Sumsion, and Rachel Fryke recently attended Gender Spectrum workshops and they are putting together a proposal to bring their new understandings to the other educators at BPC.  A student and a teacher, Cris Mytko, are starting our first GSA (Gay-Straight Alliance) in the Upper School.  Teachers Sandi Tanaka, Coach Gerry Branner, Carwai Seto, and Chris Chun will be attending the NAIS People of Color Conference next week.  Inside and out of the classrooms, we are exploring what inside and outside means in our BPC community.

Diane Arbus wrote: “There are and have been and will be an infinite number of things on Earth. Individuals all different, all wanting different things, all knowing different things, all loving different things, all looking different…. That is what I love: the differentness.”

Connections

In John Carlstroem’s welcome to prospective BPC families last Saturday, he quoted John Phillips, educator and founder of Phillips Exeter Academy: “Goodness without knowledge... is weak and feeble, yet knowledge without goodness is dangerous.... Both united form the noblest character and lay the surest foundation of usefulness to mankind."  In various classes at BPC, we see our current John’s reference to that past John.  Through the support of their teachers, students are thinking about how elements of their lives connect to the lives of others.

In history class, Aly Mitchell examined the labor movement with the 8th graders, learning about labor movements such as the the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the deadliest industrial disaster in US history, which resulted in improving  factory conditions and workers’ rights.  They also studied the Singing Strike of 1912, where people of different ethnic backgrounds came together--women, in particular, had a strong and effective role in improving conditions.  Students then read Bertold Brecht’s 1935 poem, “Questions from a Worker Who Reads.”  Brecht asks, “Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?/ And Babylon, many times demolished/ Who raised it up so many times?  In what houses/ of gold-glittering Lima did the builders live?”  

As a response, the 8th graders wrote their own poems, examining the labor and people that comprise our everyday lives.  A student, considering the Starbucks holiday coffee, asks, “How much do these elves in orange get paid?  90 cents to 4 dollars a day!”  Another student’s writing--“With a nice name like Hershey/ We could never see” that there are “people working with cut-up feet/ While Hershey makes money off our feast/ They are struggling to eat/ Now doesn’t that sound bittersweet?”--evokes the lawsuits, since dismissed, brought against chocolate makers Hershey, Nestlé, and Mars related to packaging and the use of child slave labor in harvesting cocoa.  Recalling the ongoing farmworker-led boycott of Driscoll’s berries, another student writes,  “Back bending, back breaking/ Toiling for hours in the scorching sun/ Arms aching/ Sweat staining/ Picking strawberries one by one.”  

Echoes of the same lesson are evident in Rachel Frycke’s gardening classes.  In the Permaculture Tea Party, 7th graders enjoyed two types of herbal tea blends from a local--very local, being only half a mile away--tea distributor, Leaves and Flowers that sources its products from Northern California farms.  Ms. Frycke said, “Students created a diagram to represent all of the resources, processes, and people that went into their cup of tea. We discussed the difference between an industrial system and a permaculture system: whole system perspective, closed loop, etc.”  She noted that students were surprised by how complicated these systems were.  She is going to work with students to grow and process their own herbal teas at BPC.  

Similarly, science teacher Jonathan Cohen is also working with 8th graders in workshop class.  All students in 8C are building chairs out of a limited amount of wood.  Students worked with partners to draw designs, make models with toothpicks, and ultimately build the chairs.  The model part was so easy, but actually constructing the chair was another story.  A student reported, “It was harder.  We couldn’t even get the drill in.  Sawing took way more time than we expected.  Being precise was hard with the limited amount of wood we had, and it ended up wobbly.  We had to use the very last of our wood to make it stable.  I don’t think differently about a plastic chair, but if I see a wooden chair these days, I feel differently about it.”  An 8th grader noted that it felt “weird that other people do this for a living.”

It is clear that students are acquiring knowledge here at BPC.  What makes this knowledge good is that they are considering perspectives and experiences outside of their own.