Sunday Conversation with...Bernie Schein

By Rosalind Bentley

Sunday, January 11, 2009

Educator Bernie Schein took an unconventional and controversial approach to teaching during the difficult middle school years. He taught for nearly 30 years at the Paideia School, an elite Atlanta private school, ruffling feathers and trying to help seventh- and eighth-graders become stronger academically through emotional writing and call-it-like-you-see-it tactics. Schein, who now lives in Beaufort, S.C., will speak at the Margaret Mitchell House on Tuesday. His new book is “If Holden Caulfield Were in My Classroom.” So what would he do if he were teacher to “The Catcher in the Rye” character?

Q: To be a middle school teacher, you’ve got to have the strength, endurance and pain tolerance of a Navy SEAL, don’t you?

A: I think you’ve got to be crazier than hell.

Q: Parents of middle schoolers often find it one of the most trying periods of parenthood because they never really know, one day to the next, who their child is going to be.

A: Or what color their hair is going to be.

Q: So how did you decide that that was where you wanted to spend the bulk of your career, basically in hell?

A: [Laughs] When I began teaching, I didn’t know anything … and I had a group of seventh- and eighth-graders. I felt like I had suddenly parachuted into a friendly field. Those kids were talking about things that I hadn’t yet resolved and that were interesting.

Q: You didn’t know what you were doing?

A: Training is no good. … By the time [kids] get to middle school they’re little more than a gaggle of symptoms, a rookery of defense mechanisms ricocheting off the wall. They’re nuts! Now, in schools, the question has always been, ‘What does the child need to know?’ And books are important, but the first question [should be] ‘Who in the hell is this kid?’ My idea is that true emotion, rather than pure reason, inspires kids and will enable them to be much more loving, creative and much more intelligent in a way that will knock everybody’s socks off.

Q: There’s an adage: A child with an empty stomach can’t learn. You seem to say that a child who hasn’t had some psychotherapy can’t learn.

A: I’m not saying psychotherapy, but reason —-thought —- follows in the wake of emotion. So, as a teacher, you’ve got to get [the student] to the right emotion.

Q: In your book you describe a student confessing to the entire class that his father beat him. You had another lie down on the floor in front of the class to talk about his abandonment issues. That’s highly personal, too personal. Who does that in order to help a kid learn?

A: What the teacher has to do is believe that kids want to love and be loved and want to learn. Now, creative writing is a staple in schools. Teachers are always telling kids, ‘Go back to when you were 5, tell me what you see, write about it.’ They’re trying to get them to write about their feelings. The problem is, the teachers need to have time to really get them to those feelings. All of the great themes are jostling inside these kids to come out: unrequited love, sibling rivalry, romantic stuff, friendship and betrayal, identity issues, problems at home. Everything that there’s ever been a story written about is right there in the hearts of these kids. They need help finding it. That’s a teacher’s job.

Q: In your book, you talk about confronting a student, in class, about her low-cut shirt by remarking on her breasts, which you used a slang word for. You leapt across a table and pinned a student to the floor, just to make a point. In the wrong public school, these days, that might get you shanked, shot or beaten up. (Or fired.)

A: I don’t think I could get away with a lot of that now. I also don’t think it’s necessary.

Q: Then why’d you do it?

A: A teacher that was not willing to get his hands dirty for a kid probably shouldn’t be there. And sometimes you really have to do that. The leaping across the table thing I don’t think was such a big deal. It took that for [the kid] to get below that bluster and machoism and bullying. … [With the shirt confrontation] It’s going to sound sexist, but I really do worry about the way girls dress in school. They’re inviting, at a very young age, what they don’t want: overtures that are suggestive and border on the obscene. I don’t let girls come into my class dressing like that. I’ll say, ‘Go find a sweater, and then we’re going to get to the bottom of this.’

Q: Most teachers have classes too big and too little time to do that even if they might want to.

A: Can they do it as deeply, are they going to do it to the extent that I’m doing it? Well, it depends on who you are, what kind of freedom you’ve got and whether or not you’ve got to just teach the test.

Q: So what do you think of No Child Left Behind?

A: No Child Left Behind is anti-educational and anti-creative, because it only measures passivity, docility, memorization. There are too many ways to be smart and intelligent, and it’s too complicated to just boil it down to some test score.

Q: When do you know you’ve done your job as a teacher?

A: When the kid is happier. … When he reads and he’s perceptive. When he sees things that he hasn’t seen before and they … wake him up. When a revelation tips about his face like a smile. When he is expressing his true voice.

—Atlanta Journal-Constitution