Texts "about the sub," as I revealed above, can all be read meaningfully from one focal perspective; the sub is a pseudo-teacher who is constantly trying to decode a state of "normality" (i.e. the ritual life of the classroom) within any particular classroom situation, and encode a day's activities upon that ritual life. This is what the sociology of the texts "about the sub" contributes to substitute teaching life, at least from my experience of it. Now the various experiences I underwent while substitute teaching from March, 1997 to June, 1998 in the Valley Unified School District range from communally joyful to solemn to chaotic. There were certain regularities in the ritual life I might experience, and these regularities would vary with where I was going, who I was teaching, and what I would be doing on any particular day. But there would also be a regularity that would proceed in terms of how I learned a code called "classroom management" that "helped me function" as a substitute teacher in the classrooms I ventured to enter into.

This code, in its most direct expression, is the lesson plan, but it's more than a lesson plan, because the most distinguishing feature of the lesson plan is in how it implicates a series of gestures and postures constituting a classroom routine, that the substitute teacher is assumed to know already, or to find out by asking others. Knowing the implicit routine in a classroom appears, from my experience, to be more important the younger one's students are on any particular day of subbing. I often had to rely upon previous experience in performing the ritual of "calendar," which was (in Valley) very important in Kindergarten or 1st grade, and became less important in the typical 2nd grade classroom.

I learned the risks of experimentation with routine in my assignment at the beginning of September 1997, a 4th and 5th grade "long term" assignment with a class that spoke almost no English and a hard-to-guess amount of Spanish, but I was willing to put up with the great uncertainty of each day because I felt that I could behave as an authoritarian teacher were I to need to do this in order to get control of my classroom, that I could "get by" with some non-threatening measures to control my classroom, despite the generally "controlled" feel of the other classrooms at that school. I tried to get students to sit in a circle and to discuss matters of school, to get the attention of the class, but they were more interested in talking to each other. In the end, what my students seemed to fall into was a disruptive style of learning where they would get up out of their seats and wander around the classroom, playing in a disruptive way. By the time I really developed the longing for classroom control above all else, I was unwilling to do the hard work to "discipline" the students, because I was unsure that I was succeeding in gaining their attention in any "non-disciplinary" way. I felt like I didn't know yet how to be anything better than a bad disciplinary teacher with these students, when I wanted to be a "good teacher," a teacher who taught something with serious content, but also a teacher who could manage a classroom. I concluded that my poor knowledge of classroom management was my undoing in that situation.

I felt that the more days one is a substitute in a single classroom, the more one has to learn the codes of "classroom management," because in shorter assignments one could usually rely upon a disciplinary pattern, that there would more likely be a short lesson plan for a shorter assignment, and furthermore it would be likely that the regular teacher would have a pattern of classroom management that would hold for the one day he or she was not there. But when one is in a longer assignment, one is more liable to learn the disciplinary patterns and other codes of classroom management, and to become more like a regular teacher. And, furthermore, these codes appear to follow, to a certain extent, a logic that encourages privatization while discouraging publicity. So, even though I didn't successfully imitate a successful teacher when presented with an opportunity to do so, my findings about classroom life showed a tendency with political implications. I will talk about these private versus public implications later -- here I wish to underscore the concept of classroom management as a set of codes, codes supposedly hidden in the existential situation of the committed classroom teacher, that is supposed to signify success for teachers, leaving for the last part of this text the implications for publicity.

Classroom management texts: five genres of advice

As a general rule, as I said earlier, classroom management becomes the name for the key to understanding teaching as the tenure of the teacher in any particular single classroom increases, from the day position of the substitute (where the lesson plan offers some advice for classroom management, where the regular teacher is "still in charge" despite her/his absence that day, and where the task-at-hand is "getting through the day" and thus extraordinary), to the commitment faced by the long-term sub (where the sub is in essence a "regular teacher").

My discussion of the significance of the lesson plans I acquired, in Chapter 4, showed the importance of teacher directions in the life of short-term substitute teachers facing classrooms full of students that have become more-or-less "disciplined" to follow the directions for classroom ritual that had been arranged by the regular teacher. Here I will try to address the more general concerns about teaching of classroom management, a concern not necessarily faced by short-term subs in the same way it is faced by regular teachers. To tell the truth, there were one-day assignments where the children I was placed in charge of appeared to be in a state of near-rebellion, and thus classroom management appeared as an important thing for me to understand as a short term sub.

There was, for instance, a one-day assignment I had substituting for Mr. ****'s class, a 5th grade class I had to tend for a day very late in the 1996-1997 school year, which wouldn't watch the movie I was supposed to show them, wouldn't do the work I assigned, and insisted on a "free time" ritual which had some basis for being "normal" for them -- but what they insisted on doing, during this "free time," was going outside and tearing up the lawn in the playground, and throwing grass at each other. Many of the students in this class also claimed to have a strong disliking to me personally, the reason for which I never quite understood, in only being able to spend one day with them. I remember returning to the classroom with the students, keeping them at an arm's distance at the end of the day to avoid being ridiculed by them too much further, and being greeted by Mr. **** himself, who immediately engaged a conversation with one of the hardest-to-persuade students, a young woman who wouldn't do what I told her to do, who said she wouldn't come to school on a particular day, and was at that point tentatively suspended by Mr. ****, who said, "OK, if you don't come in with the paper, you can't attend school unless you have it signed by your parents" or something along those lines. So, upon having heard that, I had the feeling that the difficulty I was having in getting students to follow orders that day was a difficulty the regular teacher also experienced. In future experiences of whole-class refusal to perform a task, I learned to be flexible in my understanding of what the class could do, often ignoring the lesson plan entirely for the sake of creating peace between myself and the students.

But with Mr. ****'s class I might make the rule a bit more tentative, and argue that, typically, the sub needs more classroom management skills in a longer assignment because a longer assignment implies more discretion to shape "his (her) class" on the part of the sub, rather than the sub's leaning on a lesson plan, a discipline plan, and a prior arrangement of classroom materials and personal classroom relationships. Nevertheless, it appeared as if the instructions to the sub amounted to this hidden "map" of classroom management, a map that books about classroom management attempt to provide. What did apply, however, was that my skill at making the best of "classroom management" in any substitute teaching situation depended on my level of understanding of the ritual life of the classroom. And to understand this ritual life also meant understanding my role within it.

What I understood, in the final analysis, about my role, was that the substitute teacher is always to a certain extent what Victor Turner would call a liminoid figure, within a context that has been semi-tribalized, laden with status symbols and "disciplinary" communications, for the sake of classroom management. When seen as a liminoid figure, the latent politics of the sub’s subbing will become apparent.

My understanding of the sub as liminoid figure is accomplished through a translation from the discourse of education, the discourse of classes, activities, and curricula, to the discourse of symbolic anthropology, the discourse of rituals, myths, and tribes. The typical class, most principally the typical elementary school class, is a tribe of sorts, a tribe brought together by administrative means, and this tribe exists to follow a myth, the curriculum, that is to be illustrated performatively through the rituals known as "classroom activities." Classroom management is the force that creates the ritual bond, the "organic solidarity" (Durkheim 1933) of the classroom, if you will, and the authorities presume that in the classroom context that this organic solidarity is supposed to originate in the efforts of the teacher. The way classroom management is handled in classrooms can have a latent political meaning, as one can understand from a reading of Chapter 2 of Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed -- there it is shown that an education that silences students and commands them to believe in their own powerlessness before the received word of the teacher is politically different from an education that would try to empower the student to create a more egalitarian society. So what does classroom management mean to the sub as liminal figure, and how is that political? In the hierarchical context that I understand the school system, the subtitute teacher is a convenience of the principal, who cannot find a teacher to instruct a particular classroom on a particular day, and for some students, the sub is a liminoid object, a symbol of play and of choice, to the students, whose routine has been disrupted by a teacher who cannot behave exactly as the regular teacher behaves.

The substitute-teacher role as liminoid object become significant in terms of "student-centered" education, a type of education (corresponding somewhat to Paulo Freire's idea of "problem-posing education," but more about this later) which I will elaborate below. When the substitute teacher is asked (by the lesson plan) to arrange student-centered education, the element of "choice" that appears to students with the substitute teacher is incorporated into the student-centered activity, because student-centered activities incorporate "choice," or some sort of liminoid aspect of schooling, into the performance of the activity. (My experience at Valley USD and other districts would seem to indicate that this form of education is most common in Kindergarten, possibly due to the pressures of standardized testing (in this case the STAR test (http://www.startest.com/), the standardized test given to grades 2-12 in California starting in the 1997-1998 school year) and popular notions of "traditional schooling" upon the school definitions of classroom success.) Student-centered education can make the substitute teacher into a resource more readily than teacher-centered education, and this has some latent political importance for educational systems whose members share a dependency on substitutes and a concern for the efficiency with which their students learn a curriculum.

Classroom management has become, to be sure, the "key word" describing the investment of classroom ritual with its ultimate meaning, whether that ultimate meaning be described as "learning," or "success," or the making of a coherent "class" of students through the interaction of students and teachers who have been brought together by administrative means. As Robert Di Giulio points out in his book Positive Classroom Management,

Research clearly shows that students learn more -- and they learn more efficiently -- in smooth-running classrooms. In a recent analysis of 50 years of educational research, of the 28 factors evaluated, classroom management had the greatest effect on school achievement... classroom management affects learning more than factors such as home environment, cognitive processes, school climate, school policies, and parental support (Di Giulio p. 5)

The social arrangement of "classroom management," in the physical setting of the classroom, is to be conveyed through a series of codes, and these codes can be classified as a set of genres of advice. These discourse genres of teacher advice, that fill the various books on classroom management, provide a clue to understanding what classroom management signifies to the authors who discuss it.

Five important genres of discourse stand out in a cursory reading of the literature on classroom management:

• (A) advice on how to communicate properly to students, how to communicate "instruction" in the rituals of instruction
• (B) advice on how to create an appropriate classroom environment by appropriate arrangement of material objects and appropriate use of scheduled classroom time
• (C) advice on how to design classroom rituals by giving appropriate instructions
• (D) appeals to teacher philosophies of student "control" and corresponding rituals of student behavior management, what one might call "teacher-centered educational ritual." These appeals are phrased in the discourse of a psychology that has been instrumentalized for such ritual purposes.

• (E) ways of using teacher power to ritualize student-led learning initiatives, i.e. student-centered educational ritual. Strictly speaking, a guide to classroom management cannot be "student-centered," since such guides are by definition written for an audience of teachers. Today, there are guides written for audiences of students on how to handle (and how to avoid) the ritual process of schooling; the most important of these that has come to my attention is Grace Llewellyn's The Teenage Liberation Handbook, and most of the thrust of Llewellyn's book is in showing teens how they can become home-schooled if they do not want to go to school anymore. There are of course other guides to how to think critically in school, and how to succeed at tests. Books such as The Teenage Liberation Handbook, on the other hand, are offered directly to students, and so they offer a different discourse from that of student-centered guides to classroom management, which are for teachers. An examination of the literature will buttress this dissertation's above categorization of genres of advice, as follows.

C.M. Charles and Gail W. Senter's Elementary Classroom Management, a text I found in the educational text section of a local university, is perhaps comprehensive in its gloss of these genres of advice. This book offers a guide to "classroom management" that can easily be recast in the terms of ritual performance and anthropology, though, strictly speaking, it offers a guide to classroom management strictly from a "management science" perspective -- my recasting of its discourse in terms of the the discourse of symbolic anthropology is to show that what classroom management aims for at the elementary level is the creation of an educational "tribe," the class.

Basically this book offers a laundry list of items to be mastered by new teachers, organized thusly by chapter: Chapter 1 of this book is an introductory chapter. Chapter 2 starts a discussion of how to lay out the school year, i.e. the overall ritual, including the curriculum, the overall symbolic hagiography of the class(B). Chapters 3, 4, and 5 discuss the overall environment, the matter of how a classroom society, or tribe, is to be physically and socially organized(B). Chapters 6 and 7 discuss the creation of work routines, the setup of the primary rituals of the classroom(C). Chapter 8 is about managing studying behavior, which is that quality of formality that accrues to the non-liminal rituals of a tribe, when the status structure holds(C). Chapter 9 is about assessment, and assessment is important as a way of fitting students into an overall status structure (in a preliminary way; grading and retention policies are decidedly more important in middle school and high school), but also, assessment is important because it measures to what extent the students have gained a knowledge of the curriculum, the institutional myth that is to be learned in classroom literature(D). Chapters 10-12 discuss in what ways one is to best communicate with students, parents, and school personnel (A), important in the way in which school communication is to reinforce the status structure of the school.

So the various chapters of a standard manual of classroom management offer advice as to how to conduct the communicative rituals of the school year, in the genres I mentioned above. Other standard manuals offer the same genres of advice, and a brief cross-section of the literature will bear this out. Some are more student-centered, having more of (E), and others are more teacher-centered, having more of (D). Other books in "classroom management" also use these themes: Beatrice S. Fennimore's Student-Centered Classroom Management and James S. Cangelosi's Classroom Management Strategies are almost entirely a discussion of how best to communicate to students, though Fennimore's book is initially concerned with the experience of the students whereas Classroom Management Strategies is oriented toward "gaining the cooperation of students," as the title says. Jones and Jones' textbook Comprehensive Classroom Management is about communication also, but with a strong emphasis upon using one's communcative behaviors to control students. A collection of authors (Evertson, Emmer, Clements, and Worsham), have a guide titled Classroom Management for Elementary Teachers that is largely centered upon using psychology for control purposes (D), though there are chapters to this book on "Organizing Your Classroom and Supplies (B)" and "Communication Skills for Teaching (A)," and the psychology recommended is fleshed out in ritual scenarios (C), involving seatwork, group work, and "centers." The same authors have a similar book titled Classroom Management for Secondary Teachers, organized in a similar way. Levin and Nolan's Principles of Classroom Management seeks to take the varying approaches and combine them into a do-it-yourself "decision-making model," emphasizing that classroom management is a problem involving (D), teacher use of psychology to ward off unwanted student behaviors.

On the other hand, the Learning Library's collaboration titled Classroom Management is a combination of suggestions about how to create an attractive classroom and about how to organize effective classroom rituals; its advice about student discipline is student-centered to a certain extent, but with an emphasis upon designing a ritual that will allow "students to learn to work together successfully," indicating a prior teacher arrangement of co-operative learning situations. (I will discuss the tension between this type of classroom management and the type of classroom management that relies upon (D) in the next chapter.) Classroom Management's advice is this regard is heavily contextualized; its focus is upon my category (C), offering advice as to how to design a classroom ritual for specific classrooms. Hal Malehorn's Elementary Teacher's Classroom Management, on the other hand, is heavily weighted toward suggestions for how to create a good classroom environment.

My own reading of the "genre" scheme above is that, although different categories of advice may have different levels of importance in any particular manual, they all point to a central necessity; that represented by "category C," the construction and performance of classroom ritual. Teachers succeed in following curricula, and substitute teachers succeed in following lesson plans, to the extent to which they can successfully conduct classroom rituals. In the paragraphs below, I will use one of the above "typical" sources of classroom management narrative to understand how such narrative can function additively as strategies of ritual planning, how mastery of the communicative and physical environments, a successful "following" of the advice in discourses (A) and (B) and some form of advice using either or both of (D) or (E) are prior (and ongoing) necessary conditions before a teacher can follow (C), advice on how to construct rituals that one's class will successfully follow. So the integrative discourse of classroom management, the one that incorporates all the others, is the discourse of how to create rituals.

So what types of rituals are considered in books of "classroom management"? In constructing a typology of ritual, I would start with the basic elements of "postures and gestures" used to capture the physical and symbolic aspects of ritual in Ronald Grimes' Beginnings in Ritual Studies. Charles and Senter, in Elementary Classroom Management, see ritual as a rather complex thing in an elementary school classroom, but encapsulate it in chapter 9, "Managing Students at Work." Behind each ritual, I argue, is a norm of student behavior that will allow communication during the ritual to take place, and in each case I will attempt to specify the norm at work. I am choosing Charles and Senter's book not because of any special attributes it might have, but because I view it as typical of classroom management books that are offered to students in collegiate teacher training programs, i.e. future teachers. I found Charles and Senter's book in a college bookstore in the education section of the text section. Most such books offer the idea of classroom management as a laundry list of preparations one needs to make in order to be a successful teacher. Below, I recast Elementary Classroom Management in the discourse of "instructional ritual" in order to show what metanarratives direct it.

First, Charles and Senter specify as rituals "opening activities" which can be a complex ritual drama involving the singing of songs and the playing of music and the placing of dates upon a calendar, (Charles and Senter, pp.112-113). Volunteers are often chosen from the student bodies, which are sitting on the carpet. Sometimes norms for calendar will appear partially optional, such as when the class is singing or dancing or walking around the room, shaking hands and saying "good morning," as was the ritual in one classroom I taught; not everyone in the class has to sing or dance or shake hands in order to allow the class to follow the norm and successfully perform the ritual. Necessary norms for calendar might be "don't interrupt the teacher" and "raise your hand before talking," since the only type of talk that will facilitate such rituals consists of questions addressed to the teacher, or requests to volunteer for an activity, and in raising one's hand, a student warns the class that he or she will be talking. Such norms will also be appropriate for the ritual of "instructions for doing assigned work" (pp. 113-114), since teachers talk and students listen for that ritual. The communicative principle at work in specifying these norms is one I have asked Kindergartners often: "Can you listen and talk at the same time?" to which the scripted answer is, "no, you can't."

Rituals of "movement in the room" and "obtaining, using, and replacing materials" (pp. 114-117) need to be governed by norms of "respect for the classroom" and "staying on task" that will specify guidelines regarding going to the bathroom, sharpening pencils, using glue, scissors, rulers, and other important classroom equipment.

Rituals of work involve, of course, the ritual the teacher must use to organize it (p. 118) and rituals of "monitoring" (pp. 119-120) where the teacher allots disciplinary duties such as taking attendance and caring for equipment to the students; but in a more complex vein, there is the ritual of performing classwork, which is listed in the chapter titled "Managing instruction." Here the authors identify "two instructional approaches," direct teaching and facilitative teaching, which are confusingly categorized in terms of "instructional strategies." Direct teaching is associated with the "instructional strategies" of "clinical instruction" (teacher talk followed by seatwork, followed by a question and answer period followed by more seatwork), "advance organization" (teacher talk followed by seatwork), "concept attainment" (teacher talk followed by seatwork followed by student presentation), and "mastery learning" (seatwork with teacher talk in the form of tutoring). So we have five basic rituals to be performed within the ambit of "direct teaching" : teacher talk, seatwork, student presentation, question and answer, tutoring. All of which require students to be silent and "on-task" (listening or working, which usually means inscribing marks on pieces of paper) when they are not performing toward the entire class, for successful ritual performance.

Facilitative teaching is said by Charles and Senter to use two primary strategies: "inquiry," which involves student rituals that will "gather, verify, and interpret (and explain) information" (student observing, writing, and reading) and "cooperative learning," which involves groups of students in teamwork (writing and reading while talking). In cooperative learning, each student must perform his or her assigned role within the group for the ritual to be successful.

The facilitative teaching rituals involve a considerable amount of teacher power over students, to assure that students perform the appropriate rituals to maintain "on-task behavior," but they also require students to have a certain amount of power over themselves. Inquiry, for instance, requires a particular perspective upon the subject at hand; as the authors say in advertising inquiry as a good strategy for teachers to direct: "The strategy encourages open-mindedness, as students frequently encounter conflicting information and opinions (Charles and Senter p. 100). Cooperative learning, as well, requires students to work together well, which requires them to learn important skills of cooperation, but which can't merely be scripted.

The role of scripts in the performance of classroom ritual becomes apparent once we try to imagine norms governing successful performance of facilitative learning rituals. Rituals of direct teaching can be made to follow a script, where the student communicative behavior that follows the norm involves either silence or saying what the teacher wants the students to say. Rituals of facilitative learning need something of a script as well, but they also appear (as well) to demand independent communciation from students. Both types of ritual involve what Courtney Cazden (Cazden pp. 99-110) would call "communication as scaffold," teacher communication of a framework for performance, for the sake of coercing the student production of "learning" communications.

This topic, of the successful performance of ritual within the classroom, involving the successful imposition of the communicative scaffold upon the students by the teacher, appears to me to be the primary ability involved in "classroom management." Often, "classroom management" is taken to be synonymous with "classroom discipline," but as the chapter on "Managing Student Behavior" makes clear, classroom discipline is about misbehavior, and misbehavior is serious because "misbehavior disrupts learning" and "misbehavior disrupts teaching," (Charles and Senter p. 133) both of which are represented in the classroom by the rituals described above. So, the proceeding discussion in the chapter on "Managing Student Behavior" is also about preconditions for the maintenance of the classroom ritual.

So, on the one hand, classroom management can appear as teacher imposition of classroom ritual. But furthermore, there is a dialectic of power in classroom interactions, a sense of negotiation between adult and student for power over the rituals of learning, that one can see illustrated in the discourse of some books on classroom management. Weinstein and Migriano's Elementary Classroom Management is a classroom management text which discursively elaborates upon the problem of managing a physically-existent classroom. This book starts out with the assertion that one of the primary qualities of the classroom is that "teachers work with captive groups of students (6)." However, having denied the contribution of the student to the formation of the classroom setting, the book later illustrates the discourse of exemplary teachers who involve students in learning to "exercise some choice (Weinstein and Migriano p. 79)." So even though it is asserted factually in the above book that public school students are "captive," there is some move to allow students to exercise responsibility within that captivity.

A book on classroom management that is more directly centered upon the invocation of "control," of category (D) of classroom management advice, is Bob F. Steere's Becoming an Effective Classroom Manager. Steere is really interested in justifying classroom discipline, in finding models taken from science to show the best way to keep order in classrooms. His main consideration is phrased in the discourse of mechanical physics:

Classrooms are largely managed by forceful efforts, some of which are less obvious than others. Force is defined here as the energy that is brought to bear upon a situation (Steere p. 6)

Steere's second chapter is a review of various psychologically-based marketings of classroom discipline, from Haim Ginott to Abraham Maslow to Rudolf Dreikurs to William Glasser to Lee Canter to Frederic Jones. Like many books with "classroom management" in their titles, Steere's book offers 31 flavors of psychology for that the reader may want believe in when trying methods of control upon students. These authors appeal to the notion that teachers can understand student behavior, appeal to common motivators of student behavior, and thus "psych" students into behaving well. Many of these same names of psychologists are also given in Comprehensive Classroom Management, and the psychological discussion of students and of management in classroom was an important topic in at least two classes I was required to take when I was applying for a teaching credential in 1988 and 1989. So there is a large market for the discourse of psychology within education, as a talisman granting teachers power over students who would otherwise disrupt classroom ritual.

The remainder of Steere's book is concerned with efficient expedition of the techniques that supposedly have this basis in psychology (a basis that is not proven but, curiously, left up to teacher discretion). Steere devotes an entire chapter to "time on task," a term that recalls (and, in this instance, means) the creation of "docile bodies" in Foucault's Discipline and Punish. Foucault specifies that the creation of docile bodies has two basic compositions, modeled upon the categories of dynamics and thermodynamics as basic categories of Newtonian physics:

Discipline is (not) simply an art of distributing bodies, of extracting them from time and accumulating it, but of composing forces in order to obtain an efficient machine. (Foucault p. 164)

Have all students perform in unison.

Require the remainder of the class to read silently while one child reads aloud.

Use more frequent shifts of activities as opposed to long periods of just listening, copying, or completing multiple worksheets.

Realize that busywork types of duplicating sheets may keep students occupied but are not worthy on-task assignments.

When correcting a students, consider giving only a simple reprimand instead of a nagging sermon.

Plan and structure the day so that necessary time is not lost because of poor directions, materials not readily accessible, procedures, traffic jams, handling in materials, and so forth. (Steere 92-93)

There is something of a judgment about "task," here, however: Steere's definition of time on task is "the amount of time students spend on worthy tasks (Steere p. 81). But, unfortunately for Steere's reader, he offers no description of the ideal worthy task (rather instead relying upon the typical task, "seatwork,") nor any defined norm of worthiness; Steere's judgment is hidden. Foucault, interestingly enough, accompanies his descriptions of the growth of the industrial process of creating docile bodies (Foucault 135-169) with no explicit normative advice either.

The point of my explication of Steere is to show that the Foucauldian discussion of the technique that is involved in creating docile bodies, in making people "shapable," has its component in the literature of "classroom management." When the discourse of "classroom discipline" in its teacher-centered sense is elaborated in logical form as "time on task" as Steere does, it is what Foucault calls "extracting time from bodies." and when it is unhindered by discussion of the necessity of student initiative in internalizing learning (Cazden p. 108 for instance), what one reads is a list of directions for operating the classroom as a production process for a culture industry that uses power to manipulate bodies with the notion of time on task, without assessing the task that has been assigned according to any ethical ideal of schooling.

The question prompted by books like Steere's is the question of what actual definition of "education" does his technical description of classroom discipline support. If teachers were to consider promoting "education" as the process of attaining responsible adulthood in today's world, would Steere's book be their guide to classroom management?

But even if one were to reject Steere's discourse of classroom management in order to reproblematize "what education is for," there is a considerable justification for putting the classroom teacher in the role of manager, and it comes from the economic-administrative hierarchy. One might say that, with respect to the "regular teacher's" planning of classroom ritual, orienting classroom activity according to the requirements of the curriculum (regardless of who plans it) ostensibly represents a standard for student success, and that "unit planning" according to "learning objectives" is an activity that is supposed to combine curriculum with classroom management, in order to justify the teacher's preparation of classroom ritual to the adult population whose political power is brought to bear upon public education. Thus managerialism in public schooling is justified by the politics of the status quo.

But teacher justification of classroom ritual isn't necessarily aimed at the children themselves, the recipients of this education, rather it is aimed at some instrumental adult notion of what children are to learn that is a ritual that can be performed with a script, where children are to remain on-task in terms of their following the teacher's script, paying attention to the teacher's subject in some measurable way. Public school "education" can thus be aimed entirely at the teacher's success in maintaining classroom management while performing scripted instructional rituals. The danger is that real student learning, student capacity for making meaning of instructional ritual, can instead focus on what Kris Gutierrez et al. (1995) call the "student counterscript," while still allowing the instructional ritual to have a meaning for the teacher, to symbolize student learning while creating a separate, perhaps secret, discourse of student learning content. Gutierrez et al. explain:

Even in a classroom where procedures and talk are strictly monitored, the teacher does not succeed in completely stifling student voices and capacities for meaning making. Although students in... class are unwilling to directly challenge the teacher script, occasional student utterances take the form of a student counterscript that appears to challenge the teacher's participation rules. (Gutierrez et al. p. 422)

Exactly because organizations offer definitions of identity, they also offer individuals the opportunity to respond to the definitions in creative ways. Because definitions of self exist in organizations, individuals can give information about how they see themselves by rejecting the definition offered. Institutional underlife is exactly such a case: actors in an institution develop behaviors which assert an identity different from the one assigned them. (Brooke p. 143)

Gutierrez's example of the "subjugated perspective" is a student she observed whom she names "Nora," who has been required to sit in the classroom, isolated and away from the other students, and whose classroom utterances are self-marginalizing within the classroom situation because they do not follow the teacher's script. The owner of the "subjugated perspective" is the big loser in this form of education, instructional ritual performed entirely according to a teacher script. Nora is characterized as a failing student and a potential highschool dropout.

All of which might beg the question of why completely-scripted educational ritual is so often seen as successful. One answer to this question might be that completely-scripted educational rituals can be successful when students have the necessary background to understand the teacher script and the necessary willpower to appreciate the script and learn from it. Another reason for the apparent success of such ritual is that it might be viewed as part and parcel of a particular role of schooling, that is to say, schooling might be assumed under such a (completely-scripted) model as keeping students down. In short, and to bring Gutierrez's analysis into an earlier thread of this dissertation, some forms of scripted schooling (especially those characterized by the "rigid system of control" Gutierrez cites as characterizing her example of the subjugated perspective) may merely produce what Foucault calls "delinquency" (Foucault pp. 264-272) with respect to prisons. The school system that operates primarily through such forms of classroom management may produce docile bodies, but it also experiences bouts of "delinquency" coming from such bodies, a delinquency that can function within the overall school system as part of a "general tactics of subjection," an economy of rule-breaking, as it does in Foucault's observation of prisons. (Foucault p. 272).

A script, of course, is important and necessary in establishing some sort of order to instructional ritual. Scripts such as the lesson plans I discussed above were and are important in helping teachers such as myself create activities for students. Scripts, however, do not have to establish a "general tactics of subjection" within instructional ritual, and can be used in several ways, as I will observe in the next chapter.

My own experience in observing classrooms, within Valley USD and elsewhere, would tend to support my suspicion that the counterscript, the talk that occurs between students independently of teacher talk, takes the form of a constant urge to talk in class elicited by the elementary school students I observed/taught, an urge that is expended in discussion, whispering, even hand signals between students, in classrooms from first or second grade onward, in every opportunity where students do not take as a situation of punishment, quiet learning, conditioned silence, or sleep. In this light, educators ignore the counterdiscourse in their classrooms (and their root causes) at their peril.

My experience in substitute teaching in special education classrooms at Valley Unified School District (in these cases I am referring to classrooms labeled SDC, special day classes) is that, when there is no aide actively "keeping discipline," the student counterscript appears to dominate over and above any simple invitation I might make to them to "do work." This counterscript becomes something I observe, when I am the substitute teacher, as a form of oral learning that goes on separately from regular classroom activity, carrying greater significance to the students themselves than being in school. Presumably, resistance to or inability to do grade-level work according to the regular-education script put the students in special education programs classified as "significantly below grade level" by whatever standard Valley USD used. Two one-day assignments, in two separate SDC classrooms, where this counterdiscourse was dominated by the use of "put-downs," dissuaded me from accepting most assignments in special education at Valley. The counterscript was in those cases something that scared me, as a given outcome of the schooling process.

The view of repressive, scripted classrooms offered by Gutierrez et al. (1995) revisits in communicative form the bad infinity described in Peter McLaren's Schooling as a Ritual Performance, where student participation marks a "streetcorner state" which is in constant competition within the classroom with a "student state" to be imposed by teachers under the pretext of the instructional script. The two student "states" described by McLaren aren't analytical opposites, and don't necessarily have to be separate: curriculum could be integrated and reoriented toward student-chosen and community-oriented goals of success, to make the "liminoid" figure of the teacher (or substitute teacher) into an educational success, and allowing the ritual and commuicative goals and requirements of classroom management, choice, play, and community appreciation of learning to all be met together whether the regular teacher or a substitute were there to "guide" (i.e. be legally responsible for) the ritual.

So there is a political form to "classroom management" as it is laid out in these texts; and such form has to do with creating a social world where students obey a ritual manager in a way that is wholly separate from their tendency to behave in situations that aren't instructional ritual. Classroom management is the strategy that teachers are required to use to impose order upon the encapsulated the schooling environment, created with the separation of schooling from the business of the rest of the social world, and formed in a bureaucratic imitation of that social world. Seymour Sarason discovers the political importance of this encapsulation when he says that:

I became aware of the very unsettling fact that my thinking, like that of everybody else, rested on an axiom that wholly or in large part was invalid. The axiom was that education (schooling) best takes place in encapsulated classrooms in encapsulated schools. So... I began to examine seriously the implications of the axiom's invalidity, and then I wrote Schooling in America: Scapegoat and Salvation (1983). Very briefly, I argued as follows: 1. Schools generally are and have been uninteresting places for students and others. They are intellectually boring places.

2. In this century, developments in the mass media, and their ever-growing influence (especially through television), have created for young people a wide, unbridgeable, experienced gulf between two worlds: that of the classroom and school and the "real" world. In terms of interest and challenge, the former cannot hold a candle to the latter.

3. By virtue of their encapsulation, physical and otherwise, schools have two virtually impossible and related tasks: to simulate the conditions that engender interest, challenge, and curiosity, and to make the acquisition of knowledge and cognitive skills personally important and meaningful.

4. As long as we uncritically accept the axiom and think of reform only in terms of altering classrooms and schools -- what goes on in them -- educational reform is doomed. (Sarason p.111-112)