tive classroom did not match the chaos I face daily. My students straggle in, still munching
on Popeye’s chicken, wearing Walkmen, and generally acting surly because of some incident
in the hall during break.... Too often, they were suffering from pains much bigger than I
could deal with: homelessness, pregnancy, the death of a brother, sister, friend, cousin due
to street violence.”
Each new school year, Linda starts with the “misconception that I’m going to create a
compassionate, warm, safe place for students in the first days of class.” But new students
quickly remind her that community is created out of shared relationships that develop over
time and that before she can build a classroom community, she must find ways to connect
with her students and for them to connect with each other.
Linda calls her collected essaysReading, Writing, and Rising Upbecause in her classroom,
reading and writing are fundamental to community building and human empowerment.
Linda has her students “plumb their lives for stories,” stories that they share with each
other. This process helps them discover common themes. “Students who stung privately
with humiliation discovered that they weren’t alone.” Common themes, shared understand-
ings, and the experience of reading and writing together become the building blocks for
classroom community.
Another valuable teaching activity used by Linda and her co-teacher Bill Bigelow “to pro-
mote student empathy with other human beings” is the interior monologue. For an interior
monologue, students imagine the thoughts of a character in history, literature, or life during
an event that they are studying. Linda believes that this activity develops social imagination
(a variation of what Greene called creative imagination), which allows students to connect
with the lives of people “with whom, on the surface, they may appear to have little in com-
mon.” Students read their dialogues out loud in class, which allows the entire group to dis-
cuss their observations and arrive at new understandings about people. Again, sharing
builds understanding, respect, and community.
Linda believes that it is a mistake for teachers to ignore “the toll the outside world” ex-
acts on students. She begins the semester by having students interview each other, to estab-
lish that their identities and questions are at the center of the curriculum. Readings are se-
lected to explore the issues that students raise.
One semester, when Jefferson High School students were caught up in a storm of vio-
lence, she had her class readThousand Pieces of Goldby Ruthanne Lum McCunn (1991). The
novel includes an uprising by Chinese peasants who rampage through the countryside.
Some of the outlawed peasants organize into bandit gangs, where they re-create relation-
ships that were lost when their families were destroyed. As her students read about these
Chinese rebels, they discussed conditions in their own communities. As they better under-
stood their own lives, they began to recognize what was happening in the Chinese society
they were studying.
One of the things I enjoy about Linda is her willingness to discuss the difficulties she has
as a secondary school teacher. In “Discipline: No Quick Fix,” she describes how she strug-
gles along with her students to become intellectually and emotionally aware of her own
choices and prejudices as she tries to develop a classroom community each year. Linda rec-
ognizes the difficulties for a teacher to relinquish her or his control over the curriculum, her
uncertainties when student decisions push classes into uncharted waters, and her concern
that after all of their efforts, a cohesive classroom community might not emerge.
Despite my enthusiasm for Linda’s classroom, I have gotten mixed reviews from teacher
education students when discussing her stories with them. A math student teacher wrote in
her journal, “Sharing power and passion are important experiences for students, young peo-
COMMUNITY 153