The Wikiness

My first year of high school teaching was in the all-boys Fenwick, where I taught English and coached the Speech and Debate teams. I’d brought speakers from the community to my classes –war veterans, businessmen, and controversially, an atheist and a communist–to broaden the boys’ minds about the outside world. While the Fenwick fathers indulged my efforts to expand literacy and gave me daily free lunch, at the end of the year they RIFed me (“reduction in force”) citing reduced enrollment.

I sent out my dual-threat credentials–I could teach English OR French–and sure enough another all-boys Catholic high school–this one run by Carmelites on the South Side–hired me. 

I would teach all levels of French and one section of English at Mt. Carmel, located near Jackson Park at 64th and Dante, but culturally located pre-Vatican II, in the 1950s, at least. Emphasizing scholastics less than athletics, the school was and still is a sports powerhouse, with more IHSA football championships than any other school in the state. 

When I showed up in 1987 its ethos of discipline and domination had succeeded for more than eight decades. You could hear it at the start of their pep rallies: the priest finishing invoking the mother of God: “Our Lady of Mr. Carmel…” he began. And immediately, 1,000 male voices screamed, not a petition but a demand, “PRAY FOR US!”

My combined French 3 and 4 classes were scheduled in a bare-walled basement room, the nearest to steps leading down from the practice fields. And because I believed I was charged with making young men aware of the beauty and sophistication of French civilization, I knew that these concrete walls would not answer.  A day before classes, I put up 12 x 15-inch renderings of art by Monet, Cezanne, and Renoir on the walls, each a carefully selected portal into our rich subject. Their colors illuminated the room when I left them the night before, sure that my students–the serious ones, at least–would be pleased.

The next day I entered the class and saw all of my prints had been taken down and left in a pile on the desk in front. My smirking seniors told me what had happened. My little windows into French culture were unacceptable to Coach Lenti, whose team used the room as its screening room. Last week’s game was parsed, and next week’s opponent scouted inside these dark walls. My French Impressionists would leave a bad impression. 

I was caught off-guard, reminded that I was operating in a different educational value system than I had before. The stack of un-desired images posed an unspoken challenge.

“Hey, you gay-acting, pencil-necked geek, Mr. French teacher. This is not Fenwick or some fancy-ass fruity place like France. It’s the South Side of Chicago, where our grandfathers sweated in mills and killing floors. They endured hard sacrifice to send their boys here, to Mt. Carmel, so that they could get a chance to do better than the old man. It’s a place we value winning, and that means nothing, certainly not your faggoty-French artwork, is gonna get in our way.”

It was the opening salvo in a professional dialog I engaged in for seven more years. But my response, a request for a classroom aligned with my purposes, was approved.

“OK,” I thought.  “Game on.”