Number of words: 650

On that afternoon it was really made easy by Miss Bentley, the viceprincipal. Miss Bentley offered us the example of the Army. The Army, she submitted, was an organization of people given certain tasks to perform. So was a school. The tasks were vital. Perhaps, she grinned, those of us old enough could remember the messed-up details, the old hurry-up-and-wait, the origin and meaning of the word SNAFU, but the over-all mission was vital, The school’s overall mission was the education of children.

There was nothing new in any of this even then, and as a result I lost interest and failed to make interpretations. I wasn’t worrying about the existence of “discipline problems” nor about whether or not I might have one. I hadn’t any interest in the question of classroom control–I’m telling you how I felt about the matter then.

In order that learning may take place, Miss Bentley was saying, there must first be order. Mr. Grisson was nodding cordially. He was a man of perhaps fifty, gray-blond, going a bit bald. He spoke quietly but in quite definite and commanding tones like an actor or an officer. Miss Bentley was tall, solid and hard of limb, neat, and not unattractive; her age was perhaps thirty-five! It wasn’t easy to tell. She didn’t do much smiling. She had a job to do, she appeared to say, and if she seemed to look us over speculatively it was probably to wonder which of us was going to understand. Which would be able to help–who might hinder? It never occurred to her, I think, that someone might not choose to act the way she thought correct; if some of us didn’t do so, it was because we couldn’t understand. At least, that’s the way I came to think later on in the year. At the time, I wasn’t very interested.

Since that’s a remark I’ve made twice now, I feel obligated to explain it. My lack of interest wasn’t simply naive, at least not in the way which springs immediately to mind, that of the imaginary progressive educator who imagines, or has been popularly supposed to imagine, that given a nice, friendly teacher and lots of freedom of action and very little planning, the students will always be good-natured, orderly, interested, motivated, well- behaved and studious, in short, nice themselves. I didn’t doubt that there might be noise, disorder, anarchy, chaos and all that in my own classroom; I just didn’t see that this constituted a “problem” any more than a quiet, studious class was a “problem.” Perhaps they were both problems, put it that way. But what administrations mean when they say “problem” is something which is not supposed to happen, something which happens all the time of course, or it wouldn’t be a “problem,” but which isn’t supposed to happen. A problem. You were supposed to believe in, and work toward, its nonexistence.

Noise, quiet. I simply wasn’t making any plans to promote one and forestall the other. I didn’t feel I was going to do things, say things or try things with an eye to their result in terms of noise or quiet. I think I felt then, or would have felt had I thought about it, that you do what you want to do or can in a classroom, and then you see the result, or something of the result, and then you deal with that as you want to or can. One result isn’t really much better than another, as far as you can tell. You don’t know. I think that should be obvious to everyone by now. 

Excerpted from pages 8-9 of ‘The way it spozed to be’ by James Herndon