Reflections on class in the classroom

“I hope nobody saw me pick up the cigarette butt off the sidewalk…The narrator is at a bus stop, heading home after a typing class at the Y. She smokes the butt while she waits, even when it becomes apparent that another girl has caught her in the act and is completely grossed out. I don’t really care, the narrator says, because I don’t know her.”
The protagonist in Tobias Wolf’s novel Old School attends an elite all-male American boarding school in 1960. He comes from modest means, raised by one parent, and is there on scholarship. Predictably, his new ecosystem is one that privileges privilege and gives the appearance of uniformity. But the boy discovers that if you’re white, well versed in contemporary literature, and willing to obscure your non-patrician origins, then you and just about anyone can play the game. In fact, someone savvy enough to exploit the subtlest—and in this kingdom biggest, most influential—nuances, like perfectly frayed loafers and an ability to write in pointed, self-deprecatory revulsion about the decadence of one’s very caste, can rule the roost.
When the boy receives word that Ernest Hemingway will visit the school and hold a private audience with the winner of a submission contest—judged by the writer himself—he is paralyzed with eagerness and writer’s block. Recently, the boy has come to see his favorite author’s work in a more complex light. No longer are Hemingway’s protagonists simply stoical, but they have deep insecurities of their own. This revelation mirrors the boy’s own coming of age at the school—that is, the crystallization for him and for the reader of the carefully and deceptively cultivated image he has cut over the last four years.
Unable to unchain his insecurities on his own, he leafs through literary releases from other boarding schools. He finds a story written by a female student at an all-girls school. He doesn’t like the opening sentence, the part about the cigarette (above), but as he keeps reading, the story becomes his own. It is the tell-all story of an outsider who is savvy and eager enough to forsake a modest, lonesome past for a present that is fleeting, illusory, and delicate—but rich and grand. With uncharacteristic abandon for his social reputation and academic honor, the boy weaves together his own story—of being Jewish, of being on scholarship—within the same mold left by the female student, even including the bit about the cigarette. The cigarette dilemma makes the narrator and reader grapple with the question of by what ends—and more importantly, in front of what audience and at what risk—will we satisfy our most personal, corporeal or innate needs.
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As I thoroughly enjoyed this novel during my prolonged Eid/H1N1 holiday, I casually casted parallels between this fictitious but very real place and both the high school I attended and the school in Cairo where I currently teach. The book, and my own similar experience, had me thinking almost exclusively about class.
I attended that very school from the book, albeit 40 years later and with co-ed student body, minority students, and the internet. Personally, I was acutely aware of but never got too bogged in the pervasiveness of class and its potential suffocations and rewards to the extent that the narrator did. I was not the son of a banker or anything in the Upper East Side stratosphere, but I was also white and not on financial aid. Most of the time I was too busy studying to care. Maybe if I had been the son of a banker I wouldn’t have felt the need. But if examining social strata, class snobbery and cliquishness was what you were after, then you could have had a field day. If you had asked my roommate, a scholarship student from Spanish Harlem, about anything from girls to athletics at the school, you would receive a lecture on class politics and oppression. After much wandering, he finally found his expressive outlet in jazz band, an activity which garnered about as much celebrity and social capital as a spelling bee.
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I’m at a loss trying to dissect the class consciousness and differences at my school in Cairo. In fact, when it comes to Egypt I’m still stuck on the basic dichotomy between have-nots and have-a-lots that you hear in the foreign press. It’s the beleaguered masses who live on two dollars a day or less, and the business families, government higher ups and important tribal families that wipe their feet and floors with the former group. There must be more complexity than this, and it’s not difficult to see that my Egyptian colleagues live comfortable but far from lavish lives. I attribute my limited knowledge mostly to the fact that I can’t speak Arabic. Lots of gossip occurs regarding salaries, tuitions, parents’ occupations and connections, very little of which I’m privy to. Aside from being vaguely middle or upper class, I have no idea what kind of social spectra my students occupy, and whether their rank and distance along this spectrum is at all salient. The school dress code policy, which offers the choice of T-shirts in fluorescent orange, fluorescent blue, and slime green with hideous striped sleeves (somehow the most popular choice), has the effect of vagabond-izing the student body and nullifying their class differences to the naked eye.
But several things are unmistakably clear. First of all, the servant culture is alive and well and in no need of hiding. As I mentioned in a previous entry, the maids are scrubbing hard at the main lobby tiles for all to see. They are called dada’s, etymology unknown, and on school days they too are in uniform—a loose all maroon outfit. Unlike the faculty, for which the divide between veiled and non-veiled women is roughly even, each dada wears a veil. They are the first to arrive and the last to leave, and rather than take the school buses that the children and teachers enjoy—or begrudgingly accept in the latter case—they catch the crowded, decrepit public microbuses. Their complexions seem notably darker those of the faculty of the students, and they are on the whole shorter in stature. Aside from compulsive scrubbing and lugging of desks, books and photocopies, they are also on call to fetch lunch for many of the faculty members. The occasional banter between dada and faculty/children seems positive and in cases motherly and loving, including sometimes pecks on the cheek.
The male counterpart for the dada is the bus driver. While I cannot say that the dynamic between faculty and driver is visibly strained, there is an underlying disrespect, distrust, and resentment. When I informed one of my Egyptian colleagues, the high school literature teacher, that I would be riding the bus home from school, he preached wariness and patience. He fished for the right word. Caste. Class. The bus driver class in this country, they’re accountable to no one. They run on their own schedule, and if by some miracle they’re early, they won’t wait for you. They resent their job and take it out on you. I can’t say that my experiences riding the bus have been pleasant, but one also must understand the context of each misadventure. Last week, trying to return home from the parent/teacher conference, I asked for transportation home because it is guaranteed as a clause in my contract. The bus supervisor fetched a random driver with no familiarity with my neighborhood to give me a private ride with no students. Ultimately, he ended up dumping me on the side of the highway somewhere in the vicinity of my turn-off. He was treated like dirt by his supervisor, and with nobody watching, he was more than happy to pass on the treatment to a hapless foreigner.
In Old School, there is a scene in which the boy inadvertently hums a Nazi march song that he picked up from a quirky Austrian chef at a YMCA camp, the chef also presumably oblivious to it significance in a sensitive American context. By dumb luck, he is humming the tune as he follows the school handyman, a Jewish immigrant, down the stairs, the handyman craning under the weight of several laundry bags. The handyman has lost all of his family in the Holocaust, and lives in the basement of the school, worlds away from the glee clubs and literary competitions above. When the handyman tells someone in the school administration and it gets back to the boy, he is not only quaking under the reprimand of the school dean, but in shock and horror at what he has done. Memory and guilt, far from remedying the interwoven injustices of race and class, have served as constant forces in altering and perhaps softening the American social and racial hierarchies. Affirmative action is the most concrete evidence of this sentiment of culpability and responsibility.
While racism is certainly a bigger, more controversial problem in America than in Egypt, this is not because the former people are more xenophobic than the latter. Far from it. From everything I’ve heard, Sudanese are overtly treated as third-class citizens here. The number of black Africans or other immigrant groups is paltry in Egypt compared to the generations of immigrant populations in the United States who have come, paid their dues, and moved up the ladder. We all saw the tidal waves created by a football match between Egypt and Algeria, and this supposedly between Arab, Muslim ‘brothers’. For all of this outward tribalistic loyalty, the internal class system seems completely entrenched and stagnant. Is this because, as I’ve just suggested, the country is sorely lacking an infusion of new blood? Or is it because the government has cultivated this outward unity as a mechanism for defending the status quo? I’m sure the answer is more nuanced, but I would bet it has something to do with both these factors.
And finally, what of class consciousness, and the school-age realization of where one comes from, how one should act, and what one can aspire to be? Because of the stagnancy I’ve just described, I would venture that this realization occurs quite early on in the child, but that subsequently, the stark, unbridgeable differences between the two acquired lifestyles, privileged versus poor, render class sensitivity almost a moot point. Early this semester, I mentioned to my 8th grade class how much I relied upon the Cairo metro every day, and how it was an example of human geography. It was a blank, quizzical stare they gave me, as if they needed further affirmation that I came from a different planet. When I asked about their thoughts about the metro, it turned out that none of them nor any of their parents use it regularly. The majority of them had never set foot on it. The dadas and perhaps their maids at home are the only fraction of Cairo’s 10+ million poor people they see every day. The situation is not drastically different for a student at an elite boarding school, but at least he or she is privy to some variation, the opportunity to grapple for themselves with the question of whether or not the scholarship or minority student can hold their own in the classroom, and whether or not the whole system of class and privilege should be revised. I try to imagine what would happen if one of the dadas’ children one day showed up in my class, by virtue of some new school scholarship. What is he doing here, they might ask. Your new classmate has just won a scholarship to study here, I might respond. Oh. It is greeted with the same naiveté as questions of Social Studies, that discipline which teaches us to examine the differences between peoples and places.
BM