About Sex
I taught eighth grade social studies for fourteen years. For many teachers, eighth grade is “the worst”. Eighth graders are “the top” of middle school, the leaders of their building, and they know it. The old joke was that eighth grade boys thought about sex every eleven seconds. As an experienced middle school teacher, I think it was closer to six. Any slip even potentially “sexual” brought giggles and red faces. Eighth grade girls and boys were on the cusp of full “teenage-hood”, with all of the rampant mood swings that come with that age. It made for some exciting classes.
But I found that if I could bring enough energy to my classroom, those kids would go with me anywhere and do anything. They were just learning to process information beyond memorizing, just old enough to get beyond the stereotypes of American History. They began to see the more complex issues of good and evil that really made America. I taught for those moments when the light went on, and you knew they got it. Eighth graders were still fun, and education could still be eye-opening for them.
I taught middle school, sixth grade through eighth, for the middle of my career. Then it was back to high school seniors for the rest. I loved “my” seniors, but there was a raw energy in eighth grade it was hard to beat.
White Flight
One of the lessons I taught to my almost all-white students, was that the fight for civil rights wasn’t over. It was the 1980’s, and the civil rights marches of the sixties were before their time. Martin Luther King was dead before they were born. The major legislation: the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, were already seen as fundamental. It was hard for my students to imagine a time when those rights weren’t considered important. (It’s hard to imagine our present time, forty years later, when they are being eviscerated.)
This was the era of “busing” for desegregation. We were long passed legally required “white” schools and “colored” schools, but we still had segregated schools by neighborhood. The Courts tried to remedy that inequity by forcing big city districts to move students to create a racial balance. What it mostly did was create a “white flight” to the suburbs, just over the district (or county) line. Parents were trying to keep their kids from being bused to integrated schools across town. That helped create the first big housing “boom” in our rural town of Pataskala, just over the line, twenty miles east of Columbus.
These were the children of “white flight”. Many of their parents went to Columbus City Schools that were in “white” neighborhoods, (Walnut Ridge High School, for example). But, with desegregation by busing; now they were in Pataskala, and faced resentment from the farmers against all the city folks who they quickly out-numbered.
The Race
We had to talk about all of that. And we had to discuss what “equality” really meant. My mostly white kids thought that racial equality was achieved by the generations before them. They saw no need for busing or desegregation or affirmative action. They felt “equal”.
So we talked about what it was like to be discriminated against. We discussed how education was passed down through generations – parents who went to “good” schools, understood the classroom, and were able to afford the books and the fees. And because I was a track coach, I gave them a simple track analogy.
Track is the ultimate in “fairness”. Everyone starts and finishes on the same lines. There is no one to help you along the way, each competitor is on their own from gun to tape. But what if some were allowed to train, with the best coaches and the best facilities and the best shoes; and some were not? Then, even though the “lines” were fair, the race wouldn’t be.
Fair
Eighth graders know one thing for sure – what is “fair”. So we talked about how to make life fair, for those who had generations of unfairness leading all the way back to enslavement. And one more thing my white flight eighth graders had to understand. Many of them (not all), were the advantaged. Making things fair might require them to give up some of that advantage, in order to “do fair”.
It was an interesting conversation with a bunch of thirteen and fourteen year-olds. They also had a strong idea of what was “fair” for themselves, and many of the solutions offered were those that took away advantages they had as birthright. They weren’t sure that was “fair” either.
Today
It was the 1980’s. We were talking about racial equity in an eighth grade classroom. The two or three black kids (out of the 160 I was teaching at the time), squirmed through the conversation. They didn’t want to stand out; it was better to fit in and “be small”. I made sure they weren’t centered in the conversation, but it was a discussion their classmates needed to have.
Teachers don’t have that conversation today. In our current polarized society, they would be accused of “indoctrinating”, or perhaps worse, “teaching equity”. Or more likely, some parents would (ignorantly) demonize the teacher for using “CRITICAL RACE THEORY”. Because, a segment of our society thinks it’s all “fair” now. Desegregation is over. Racial issues are social not legal. It’s all just history. An entire state made it a “law”, to ban this topic from discussion. It’s a felony to discuss it. Of course, it’s easy to say it’s all over, if you are one of the “advantaged”.
So teachers don’t bring it up, even here in Ohio. Controversy creates administrative questions. They don’t want to lose their jobs.
And the eighth graders don’t get it.
