Listening Skills

I taught three periods of English Literature at C** Middle School. We read aloud “A Retrieved Reformation,” by O’Henry. I asked students what O’Henry meant in the first paragraph when he wrote, “When a man with as many friends on the outside as Jimmy Valentine had is received in the ‘stir’ it is hardly worth while to cut his hair.”

I asked the class what the passage about having friends on the outside meant in regards to not expecting to stay long in jail. Since no one was able to infer anything, I read the sentence before: “He had served nearly ten months of a four year sentence. He had expected to stay only about three months, at the longest.” No one got it except this black kid who couldn’t read.

Most of the class could read quite well. But they could not infer meaning from the text. The black kid said he could not read but he could listen. It was a very interesting experience because he was one of about three students who got the clues and irony of O’Henry’s work.

Some kids thought it meant their friends had deserted them or their friends had bailed them out, two opposing ideas. Some thought Jimmy Valentine was going to commit suicide so why bother to cut his hair. Boy, they were just not paying attention to this piece of writing.

Even thought they had just read "Why, I never cracked a safe in my
life," they still laughed hysterically at the term “cracksman,” thinking that it was about somebody who sold crack. They could not break out of their giddiness. When I explained that a cracksman was a person who broke into safes, there was genuine astonishment and a kind of awakening.

But it didn’t last. Their brains closed off again, rapidly retreating to the safe place of disdain for each other and the outer world. Later, in the halls, I overheard them calling each other crack whores. The flat screen (television) is the flat affect of their lives. Insulting one another but afraid to break out of the entrapment of sameness that is the life of the adolescent. I wish I could get you to see what I see…get you excited about other places, other worlds.

I wanted so badly to fill their minds up with the joy I was experiencing. I read the passages with emphasis. I got bright expressions on my face. One student asked me what “that look” was for!