Some Lessons Learned About Teaching, Research, and Academic Disputation

Some Lessons Learned About teachers after WWII.) I began to read over Teaching, Research, and the next months, fairly quickly beginning to Academic Disputation “get it.” Since my learning at home was accelerating, my parents spoke about my Frederick Erickson situation to the superintendent of schools, whom they knew. He agreed to examine me before school began in the fall. And if I was able to read, I would be allowed to go on to second grade. On a hot day in August I went to his office, he handed me the last of the first grade “Dick and Jane” basal readers, and I read it aloud to him, fluently. Two weeks later I matriculated in second grade and soon became an avid reader, in a trajectory that has continued ever since. My mother was a children’s librarian. My father was a small town businessmen. They were both college graduates, members of local community social networks through which they were acquainted with the school superintendent. And they were White. In addition, my mother possessed very well-developed literacy skills, with a number of years’ I started out in the bottom reading group, professional experience in supporting and so I know what that feels like. In children’s early reading. As a family we September 1947 I was placed in the bottom didn’t have much money but we had a lot of reading group in first grade, in Lake cultural and social capital in a small Wobegon, Minnesota, where I grew up. By community where everybody knew March I still was not learning to read and everybody else, especially in the professional was on schedule to fail first grade. At that class. Lessons learned: For succeeding in point my mother decided to teach me to school it’s an advantage not to be read. (Earlier in the year she had asked the stigmatized by race and class, and to have teacher if she could help me at home and credibility and connections. If my family had the teacher told her no—let us do it at been poor, and especially if we had been school. This was a first year teacher both poor and Black or Latino, the odds prepared by a two-year course at normal would have been very different for me. I school, in emergency recruitment of would have continued to struggle with Erickson, F. (2017, September 13). Some lessons learned about teaching, research, and academic disputation. Acquired Wisdom Series, edited by S. Tobias, D. F. Fletcher, & D. Berliner. Education Review, 24. http://dx.doi.org/10.14507/er.v24.2290 Acquired Wisdom/Education Review 2 reading, my parents would have been very YMCA.) From a pay phone in the main unlikely to be able to advocate successfully Music Building on campus I telephoned for me to the school superintendent, and I Stone at cocktail hour at his North Shore would most likely have been flushed down home. The butler answered, and I said “This the drain at the beginning of my school is Frederick Erickson calling from career. Another “school failure.” (I now Northwestern University (literally true). I think of “school failure” as a school would like to speak to Mr. Stone about an problem, rather than as a student problem idea for an after-school education program or a parent problem—schools failing to for teenagers in Lawndale.” teach.) The butler said he would ask if Mr. In 1959 as a college freshman I was Stone was available to talk with me. A few a music student at Northwestern University, moments later Stone’s voice came on the with a double major in composition and phone and I sketched the proposed music history. Halfway through program. He said, “Send a proposal letter undergraduate school I helped to organize to my personal secretary at company fellow music students to give free music headquarters,” and gave me her name. lessons on Saturdays in North Lawndale, an (Lesson learned: A certain amount of gall— African American inner city neighborhood chutzpah—doesn’t hurt when you are on Chicago’s West Side. We taught at a asking for funding.) I also did youth work YMCA, and as time went on I became more with older teenagers, some of whom were and more engaged with what was happening members of local street gangs. I met parents in that neighborhood and less engaged with of those young people. For six months I music school, even as I continued for a fifth taught a basic education class in a steel year and received a master’s degree in music plant, with employment trainees who were history. Along the way I took courses in the high school dropouts. It was a heady time— anthropology department, in Dr. Martin Luther King came to that ethnomusicology (the study of world music) neighborhood, with the Southern Christian and in folklore, as well as Anthro 101 and a Leadership Conference’s “Northern course on psychological anthropology, in Initiative.” I was a volunteer in that effort, which I was introduced to the child rearing as well as helping with a newly established research of John and Beatrice Whiting at local community organization modeled on Harvard. Saul Alinsky’s approach. After graduating I got a small grant I was assigned as the Y staff liaison from a local foundation, the W. Clement for a program of musical and dance Stone Foundation, to develop an after- performance called “Teens with Talent.” It school informal education program for early was organized by a volunteer youth leader, teens in Lawndale, titled “Afro-American Al Johnson, who was at that time a janitor at History in Music.” the Hawthorne Electric plant (Stone was an eccentric on Cicero Avenue, then Lessons learned: For self-made insurance owned by Illinois Bell succeeding in school it’s an magnate who wrote on Telephone Company. (Al later positive thinking and advantage not to be became a public and gave generous support stigmatized by race and community relations man for to Chicago youth class, and to have credibility Illinois Bell and even later set agencies, principally the and connections. up his own public relations Boy’s Clubs and also the consulting business. Among Some Lessons Learned About Teaching, Research, and Academic Disputation 3 his clients for help in a mayoralty race was That department was founded by and Richard Hatcher, who became the first guided in its development by a student of African American mayor of a major U.S. Franz Boas, Melville Herskovits, who had city, Gary, Indiana.) Singers and dancers in specialized in study of the “African “Teens with Talent” developed their own Diaspora”— tracing the lives of slaves who songs and choreography, in the “Soul” style had been taken to the New World, and their of the Motown Sound. One of my jobs with descendants—from West Africa, through the program was to write out the words, the Caribbean and the American South. melody, and chord changes for the songs Herkovits and his colleagues were interested that were created by singing groups, since in African survival in New World the young performers, who were mostly situations—a notion that was then school dropouts, did not read and write controversial but since has been more and words well, nor did they read musical more seriously considered. notation. I was a scribe for the groups, My idea was to trace West African producing the written text for applications patterns in musical style and in sociocultural for copyright for their songs. I sat in on the purposes of music in everyday life, as composition process, watching as the young musical practices traveled and were men produced initial snatches of melodies transformed in New World contexts, from and some lyrics, and then—usually over the the Caribbean to the rural American south, space of two days of continuous, careful and eventually to the urban American north effort—crafted a whole song with complete (ultimately showing up as African roots in lyrics, melody, and accompaniment by two the “Motown Sound” that was currently guitars and drums, with dance steps for the popular among the teenagers). Rather than singers. the then-typical curricula in “Negro I remember being in the YMCA History,” which emphasized heroes and Boy’s Section on weekday afternoons as kids holidays [in those days Booker T. came in from school. They walked slowly, Washington (vocational education), George with heads down, like zombies. After about Washington Carver (peanuts) and Charles 20 minutes it was as if they’d had oxygen— Drew (blood plasma and blood banks) were they became more animated—the talkative, prominent, “safe” heroes] “Afro-American curious, energetic kids I knew them to be. History in Music” would be about the But their entry behavior was so consistent, I anonymous musicians and their audiences wondered, “Why are they so shut down? Is who flourished, albeit within circumstances it something about school?” I also listened of oppression, across the full to older youth in a job training program, temporal/spatial scope of the West African after they had come back from job Diaspora. I created teaching materials for interviews. Quite often they would say eight sessions, for groups meeting once a something like, “I talked to ‘the Man’ and he week after school. The sequence of topics acted like I was stupid—like I didn’t know was chronological—starting with West anything.” I wondered what was going on in Africa and then covering the Caribbean, the those interviews. southern US, and culminating with the urban north. In the after-school program I learned something fundamental about The very first meeting was held on a curriculum and teaching.

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