Armored Adolescents

I’VE JUST RETURNED from a school-visit trip to inner California, to a city south of Sacramento. These visits are always glad events on both sides: I get paid, kids get entertained, and some of them will remember a few of the things I’ve said. I do school visits because kids should know that art in writing and images isn’t generated by a computer program, but by real, thinking, wage-earning, involved people.

Candidly, it may be better for me than for them. I’m thrown into direct dialogue with my primary audience. Their questions and comments are navigation tools. I engineer a channel for them to talk to me, and through me to the editors and publishers. The line is, for a brief time, open.

And they have something to say. I hear what interests them and sometimes what bores them. I often ask them what they’d like to read about but this isn’t a fair or a productive question. They like what they know. It would take unusual creativity and perception for anyone to choose a fresh topic. Look at the books we read as adults. Do we know just what we want? No, we’re constantly surprised at the subjects. Kids are even less prepared to select a shelf in the library as their own.

When I’m talking to kids I’m moving constantly, walking among them, singling out this one or that one to answer a question we’re considering, touching a head or shoulder or gently teasing someone who looks like he or she will enjoy it. There’s a kinetic component to the interaction and an intimacy I couldn’t get from a stage. I’ve used a microphone once and I didn’t like it, though at the end of a day my voice is strained.

I have a few theme-sets as PowerPoint programs, usually about art and its important place in life. I insist that the image of art as a lovely creative pastime is ridiculous; art is hard. I ask them to look around them: everything they see was designed, for better or worse. The linoleum under their feet, the acoustic tile overhead, the clothes they wear, the lighting fixtures above and the building around them – all products of an artistic process, a balance of selections. My visit gives them a glimpse of a life in the arts.

I have one program called “How to Rite Gud,” about the importance of the one great art, communication. It underscores the absolute necessity of knowing how to use your own language to get what you want and need. It is, I tell them, their job for the next sixty years, to reach through the glass wall of alienation with the tool of language.

After the set-piece I show them some of my illustrations. I tell them what I was trying to communicate, and I sometimes ask them what they see in the illustration before I address it. I describe some of the illustration tools I used – cutaways, ghostaways, simplification, compressed story-telling, special perspective, &c. After they’re “entertained” by pictures, I throw the last half of my visit open to questions.

The situations aren’t always ideal, the audience isn’t always perfectly quiet (especially little guys – I speak to kindergartens and up through high school). Between the slide show and questions I normally ask them to stand up, raise their hands up, and bounce up and down on their toes for a few seconds, then sit down all at once to make a big noise. It bleeds off some energy and resets their attention. Before the first group of students enter I learn from the teachers what the local “quiet” signal is – usually two fingers held up; one by one kids hold up their two fingers until everyone is quiet. I use it sparingly and it’s seldom needed.

This format has worked well. The questions take up more time than we normally have. One of the teachers usually gives me a five-minute hand sign and I ask for three or four more questions. There are always kids who grouse that they didn’t get to ask their question. It’s a lively interplay. But part of my first day’s visit went badly.

The first of three session was with a cafeteria full of 4th through 6th graders. Delightful: lots of questions, high interest, good humor and attention, eager to be joshed and wowed. Grand. The last session was kindergarten through second grade, antsy but dear, sweet-faced and willing to be pleased. Unblunted happiness. Between these two, however, was an ordeal with 7th & 8th graders, largely black and Hispanic kids. For a time I thought there was an excellent chance of being lynched.

They were armored. Nothing I could throw at them went home, nothing called up a reaction, nothing roused them out of a sullen, show-me torpor. They talked openly and jostled one-another during the first part of my presentation. A few incipient scuffles between jousting boys were suppressed by teachers who often looked at me with hopelessness and raised their hands, “What can I do?” Curiously, there was not a gender break in the rowdy but pouting behavior that I could mine for reaction: the girls were as distant and cold as the boys.

I could not cajole or enlist or pry forth any participation. I can usually get someone wearing a decorated sweatshirt to stand up and point out that the lettering on the shirt, the shirt itself, the color, the fabric was all designed, a production of the arts. I can usually call out someone’s hair style and ask if this was a piece of personal art. Not a single member would venture a question or participate. Falling back on a well-used standby, I picked this one and that one, “What design arts are in your life?” “Do you know any artists?” “Does art touch your life?” Nothing. Nothing beyond “I don’t know.” There was no voltage bridge between my energy and their dark entrenchment. I failed them.

How should I have confronted them? I tried to insist that their lives or at least the quality of their lives depended on learning some of the arts of communication. I offered them a window of opportunity, in this school, at this time, to talk about the barriers they faced. They must, I said, become culturally literate – they must learn the common ground of speech and images the world recognizes as a useful language as their only path to employment and inclusion. I tried to explain that their conscious span of, say, ten years acquaintance with a restricted culture couldn’t help them through the Big Culture of the nation. How could a splinter culture see them through difficulties and disappointments to a good life, a better life than they and their parents knew. Unless they fashioned the tools of their own survival in this school’s classroom workshops they would die . . . if not factually, spiritually; if not now, soon, much too soon. Nothing.

How to reach them? What cipher could decrypt their private redoubt of comfortable boredom?

It set me to wondering how they view life. Do they even see themselves surviving beyond next year? Do they have goals?

Perhaps that’s what I should have asked: What are your goals? What do you want from life? What do you think life might provide for you? How hard will you work for it? Do you feel school prepares you for it? Or do you feel so lost that the effort to succeed is a painful reminder of inevitable failure?

They live in a heavy gang area. Entrances to the neighborhood turfs are marked with graffiti pronouncements that the land belongs to Black Bloods or other gang identities. Would I want to belong to something larger than my family if I lived in this blasted, flat, monotonous, and financially forsaken plain? Bedsheet curtains at grimed windows, lifeless streets, 60% unemployment among the parents of these preternaturally aged, pathologically dispirited, soul-diluted children. Their principal shook her head as she told me that of the 58 students in the 8th grade, 38 are failing in both language and math.

Who can swoop in to save them? A black or Hispanic god-breathing evangelist? A born-again athlete? A boxer with a message? A reformed criminal? A tough hero? But these kids don’t have heroes as I knew them at their age. Heroes have always offered us a handle to lift and guide kids. Buffalo Bill isn’t the kind of role model they buy. A pimp-daddy, wealthy, dark-side rapper with a tough posse and a fly ride might be impressive, but what useful message could he suggest? And what message do they need to stir their energy toward something positive?

It’s important to recognize that these aren’t stupid kids. They represent the normal span of intelligence in any school, whether or not they bother to fill out all the blanks on the intelligence tests. All tests are snares to their suspicious instincts. Don’t expect tabular data to represent them or correlate any theory. Any cure or balm to the situation must be intuitive and inventive. Where are the handles? What are their pressure points? What can their immediate society offer to give or take away that can guide them? The carrot or the stick or both, applied lavishly?

Perhaps I can build a better presentation that will call up some recognition of reality. But I’m a middle-class whitebread writer and carry no persuasive credentials – no wealth, power, sports fame. What can I offer them?

In my last session of the day, the faces of the little guys, kindergarten through 2nd grade, were like delivering angels. They shone with delight and each of them wanted to shake my hand. Driving back to the motel I asked myself if those seraphic smiles would be worn down into the dishwater gray depression I confronted in the morning. I’m afraid for them, K through 12.

Braxinoso speaks:

Certainly an inordinate concern for reaching children marginalized by a short-sighted society smacks of narcissism, as if Adkins, himself, could turn their attention toward productive thoughts. The deadening effects of poverty and the low priority we place on education is systemic. Hundreds of fine teachers and dozens of caring visitors won't undo that Gordian knot, and this particular class of adolescents may be forfeit.

Braxinoso