Real Change News | A ’60s revolutionary today

June 30, 2010
Vol: 17 No: 26

Interview

A ’60s revolutionary today

by: Maggie Tarnawa , Contributing Writer

On teaching, the media and the Sixties

Bill Ayers, former militant with the Weather Underground, has turned his well-circulated book of essays on being a teacher into a graphic novel.

Photo by: Maggie Tarnawa , Contributing Writer

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William Ayers is a professor at the University of Chicago at Illinois, the author of numerous articles and books, and, most notoriously, co-founder of the Weather Underground, the radical organization that bombed government buildings as a response to the Vietnam War. Ayers’ practically became a household name during the 2008 presidential campaign, when his acquaintance with Barack Obama incited a whirlwind of accusation. Sarah Palin questioned whether Obama was fit to be president, considering he had “palled around with terrorists.”

Today, Ayers says he still receives death threats, but he doesn’t let them bother him. When we sat down together June 7 – in the course of his book tour for “To Teach: the Journey, in Comics” (Teachers College Press), a graphic novel illustrated by Ryan Alexander-Tanner – he shared his thoughts about comic-book storytelling, the U.S. education system, and the campaign debacle.

Why did you choose the graphic novel medium for this book?

I’ll start at the beginning. I had this book called “To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher,” that I had written 15 or more years ago. And it was a very successful book, so it went into a second edition. When they approached me for a third edition, the idea put me right to sleep. And so I said, quite flippantly, “I’ll do it if you let me make it a comic book.” I figured this would get me off the hook. But they went to their editorial board, and two months later they said it was approved.

That was a shock, but it put me on a really interesting course. I found an artist, Ryan Alexander-Tanner. He was working for a weekly newspaper in Portland, doing one-panel frame interviews with people on the street. It was a fantastic little strip.

So Ryan moved to Chicago and moved in with my partner and me for six months. All I had to do was feed him lots of pizza and keep him busy. He’s an amazing guy. I went on a very steep learning curve. My illusion was that he would illustrate my words. But it took me a while to get slapped into shape.

We were writing a brand new book, although it had many of the same ideas and some of the same phrases. Unlike the book of essays I wrote 15 years ago, this book has characters and a plot and a narrative arc, and a beginning and an end. And it begins on the first day of teaching for this hapless 20-year-old kid named Bill, who’s teaching kindergarten and trying to find out what the hell he’s gotten into. He learns lesson after lesson, and by the end he’s a much better teacher, but still struggling to be a better teacher. And that reflects how I really think about teaching.

Would you say that a graphic novel is both a medium and a genre?

No, I would say it’s a medium. It’s a very common misconception. We’ve been on book tours together, and many lovely, well-meaning people say to us, “So this is an entryway into the book?” And we just tear our hair out. No, this is a real book. It’s got everything that a book has; it’s got real ideas, complexity, idiosyncrasies that are particular to the medium.

A genre is something like Romance or Westerns or Superheroes. But to say film is a genre, or novels are a genre, is ridiculous. We see this medium as complex and dense and as layered as any other. It’s not a gateway drug to real reading. That’s why I wouldn’t say it’s both.

Who do you want to reach the most with this book? Teachers, parents, students? Or pretty much anyone?

Fifteen years ago, I hoped to reach new teachers, would-be teachers, teachers who were interested in renewing their sense of teaching, parents, state legislators and policy makers.
And today my hope is to reach all those people and the kids who go into the comic book section of the book store and find this book and think, “Teaching isn’t as deadly boring as I thought it might be, it actually could be an exciting place to be.”

I’d really like to hook all the marginal people into the idea of becoming teachers. I think there are several hugely underutilized resources in the community. Where I live in Chicago, we desperately need mothers, folks on welfare, people who can’t get a job, people coming out of prison who can’t get work to not only re-enter society in a productive way, but we need them in schools. We need them to help kids think about the world in all of its weirdness and multiplicity.

So, a little more diversity in terms of who’s teaching?

Diversity, and also, folks who look at school from the point of view of folks who failed at school, or failed at some level.

In this country we have a wild diversity of people and points of view and that’s why our politics are so wild and crazy. I think that teaching requires a mentality that sees diversity as a fact, not as an ideological desire. Teaching to diversity is a real challenge, but it’s something that we all need to learn how to do.

You talk about the myths of teaching early in your book. How specifically do they harm teachers and students?

One of the great myths is the idea that there is such a thing as “the third grader.” In Chicago, all the fourth grade teachers are angry at the third grade teachers. Why? Because the kids aren’t ready for fourth grade. What an idiotic myth it is to imagine that there is such as thing as “the third grader” or “the fourth grader.”

Take something as straightforward or essential as reading. If you teach in the third grade, and you have something you think of as “the third grade reader,” you’re going to end up missing half the kids on this side of the norm and half of the kids on the other side of the norm. If I were teaching third grade today, I would have books as complicated as “Maus” and “Tom Sawyer” and I’d have books by Dr. Seuss. I know that there are third graders who could benefit from each of those categories.

This ties into your idea about how every teacher needs to be a student of their student, and really understand each individual kid.

Absolutely. In fact, I argue that the number one intellectual and ethical challenge of a teacher is to see each student as the one and only. To see each student as distinct yet as part of a community. The challenge is to figure out, who is this person? How do I teach this one, and this one, and this one?

Both the joy and the hell of it is that you’ve got a whole lot of high school kids, and each one is different, and each has different needs and demands and trajectories, not only in their lives, but also in the math they’re learning. And keeping that straight is a challenge of absolutely enormous proportions. So becoming a student of your students is the radical gesture that gets you on the path to doing that.

How can teachers do this with such limited resources?

We need to rethink schooling in this country if we’re serious about giving everyone an education. We need to give teachers more time, much fewer students, much smaller classrooms, much more resources and much better schools.

ADD, ADHD, and other so-called disorders that plague young kids: Do you think that these disorders are simply over-diagnosed, or that they’re not much of a problem at all?

Labels are a little sketchy. What I argue here that not just ADD or ADHD are over-diagnosed, but that this whole business of labeling is itself a problem. Kids are so complex and multi-dimensional, that to reduce them to a label like BD, Behavior Disordered, or Learning Disordered, actually conceals more than it reveals.

I resist the idea of labeling at all. Smart kid, class clown, dumb kid, misbehaving kid: I resist that in general. But I also really resist the medicalization of it. I think that every kid labeled with ADD or BD you could also label a great poet, or a talented skateboarder. I want to look for assets, and I don’t want to trap a kid in a label that’s unfair and not useful.

What do you think are the biggest challenges facing teachers today?

The disrespect, the lack of understanding of what they’re doing, the fact that they have to pick up Newsweek and see the cover story, “Fire the Bad Teachers Fire the Bad Teachers” written on a chalk board, as if that’s the whole problem with education. Meanwhile they’re killing themselves to do an impossibly difficult job for not really great pay. I get pissed off at the policy makers, politicians and journalists, who have bought into this idea that the fundamental problem in our schools today is bad teachers. There are, of course, bad teachers. No one wants to defend them. On the other hand, every time John McCain gets to a microphone and says, “We need to get the lazy, incompetent teachers out of the classroom,” he wins the argument just by stating it that way.

But if I got to the microphone, and framed the issue in a way that it needs to be framed, which is every public school kid in America needs an intellectually curious, morally committed, compassionate, caring, well-rested and well-paid teacher. I’d win the argument too. But whose argument are we listening to? Unfortunately, we’re listening to the reactionaries, as they beat up on the public schools, and the teachers. The biggest challenge to teachers is keeping your head up when the whole society is throwing mud at you.

What specific policies would you like to see enacted?

We need fair and ample funding and resource allocation. Some schools today get $4000 per kid per year, and others down the road get $40,000 per kid per year. Does that buy something different? Yes. It buys athletic fields, it buys arts programs, it buys drama theaters and debate clubs. The kids who need the most are actually given the least.

We also need serious gun control. Get the guns out of the community. We need to de-militarize the schools. Get ROTC and JROTC out of the schools.

Get rid of cameras and metal detectors. That doesn’t make us safe, that makes us crazy. What makes us safe is relationships, small classrooms and small schools. That will prevent violence far more deeply and more seriously than metal detectors.

I would want a participatory public meeting about curriculum and teaching. What does the community think our standards should be? That’s not a discussion to have among professionals, who have some kind of precious knowledge, that’s a discussion for the community. I would also get rid of punitive standardized tests. I’m all for standards, the only question is, who sets them? And how do they loop back into making us better teachers and learners?

Do you think that funding more programs for all students and re-allocating resources is feasible?

Yes. That’s a question of political will, not a question of money. This is the richest society on earth. For example, in the Chicago Public School system, they have one outdated physics lab for 50 high schools. If you’re really serious about wanting kids to do better in math and science, you would hold the government accountable to providing physics labs to every Chicago high school.

But we’re not serious. Instead we say, “Fire that teacher, she’s a lazy, incompetent teacher.” If we’re serious about accountability and serving these kids, it requires resources. Where do those resources come from?

If I started by saying, everything we have for the Obama kids, we should have for every kid in America. This isn’t something we can do in a year, or even five years. But it’s a worthy goal. Then we as a society could begin to talk about things such as, “Do we really want to have a trillion-dollar military budget?” We can’t even get a billion of that money for our schools.

Looking back now, what’s your reaction to the whole campaign issue of your connection with Obama?

It was absolutely surreal. I didn’t say anything during that whole period. My oldest son said, “The quieter you are, the more hysterical the media will become.” And it happened exactly like that.

The media character that was created around me, to this day, is ludicrous to me, and I don’t see myself in it. But worse than that was the notion of guilt by association: [that] if we were in a boardroom together, then somehow Obama owns those histories, those perspectives, those policies. Nothing could be further from the truth.

And worse even than that, was when Sarah Palin got ahold of the phrase, “Palling around with terrorists.” She wasn’t just implying guilt by association, she was saying that there are real Americans, real citizens, and then there’s the rest of you. And the fact is, I am a real citizen, I was born here. She may not like what I believe, I don’t like what she believes. But I would never say she’s not worthy to be part of the polity. I’ll fight her on her evidence, arguments and policies, but the idea that I can cast her out of the polity is wrong.

A few former Weathermen, such as Mark Rudd and Cathy Wilkerson, have had teaching careers. Do you think there’s a connection between being a radical and teaching?

I think that the so-called ’60s generation, when we graduated from college, we thought hard about living our lives without making a mockery of our values. That became a great quest for many of us in that generation. I met my partner of 40 years, Bernadine, at a conference called Radicals in the Professions, because we were trying to figure out what the hell you do when you’re not a student. I was becoming a teacher, she was a lawyer. Many of us from that generation, from the civil rights movement, from the peace movement, from the women’s movement, from the queer movement, went into teaching, into city planning, into medicine, into the law and social work.

I have kids and grandkids I care about. I think having grandkids has made me a deeper radical than I was not so long ago. I’m horrified at the fact that my granddaughters are growing up with the Gulf oil spill. What kind of world is that they’re inheriting? So, I have to get busy, and I don’t have all that much time. I have to write more books, give more talks, go to more demonstrations, get arrested more times; all this stuff is still happening.

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