Overview
Jonathan Kozol makes this assertion in On Being a Teacher: "Conscientious teachers who have studied the origins of public education are faced with a difficult and painful choice: If they are honest with themselves and with each other, they cannot help but look upon the public school today as an archaic and dehumanizing institution. This is true not only for the students, but for their teachers also" (3). A harsh indictment indeed! Teachers can assess the validity of this statement as it applies to their circumstances. Too many times the public school system is autocratic and hidebound, devoted to its own agenda which does not include input from teachers, parents, and students. A bit further in the book he lambastes the school curriculum teacher's guide as ". . . taking away the satisfaction of all independent and creative labor in the preparation of the daily work. The guidebook seems to be the teacher's friend. Insidiously, it also robs the teacher of the only intellectual dignity which our profession still allows us: the individual, passionate or whimsical exhilaration of invention" (49). The following curriculum unit is an attempt to offer a viable alternative to the comfortable, staid requirements of the school curriculum. It is an attempt to stretch the confines of the school curriculum in a way that will make learning and teaching more fun and effective for students and teachers than many of the regimented offerings in the curriculum.
My students are well-acquainted with crime. They live in Philadelphia, Pa., and most come from backgrounds where working class (or lower) poverty is common. They witness the experiences associated with living in poverty in an urban setting - street crime, gangs, drugs, etc. They live by a code which declares "snitching" almost as bad as the crime itself. Our school itself has not escaped its share of crime, with eight laptop computers and a digital camera having been stolen during the year, bullets found in the pockets of one of our students, and so on. The last thing on the minds of too many of our students is learning the 3 Rs. Our school is criteria-based, so we can select our students, but withal, the skills of our general student population are way below grade level. Student apathy is rife. Teachers are astounded by and then depressed by the breadth and depth of this apathy. So a teacher's focus then becomes: how do I arouse students out of this apathy and how do I stimulate them to become avid, eager learners? How do I do it? Detective fiction! What is a detective story? There is a great body of literature analyzing the kinds, permutations, aspects, and characteristics of a detective story. George N. Dove has whittled down all this analysis into a template with four main qualities: "First the main character is a detective. . . male or female, professional or amateur, public or private, single or multiple. . .. Second, the main plot of the story is the account of the investigation and resolution [no matter what other sub-plots]. . .. Third the mystery is. . . a complex secret that appears impossible of solution. Finally, the mystery is solved" (10). Once the play frame of "detective story" is set up, then we can expect that Dove's qualities will be there. This idea of "play" and "frame" lets us see how murder and mayhem of the most barbaric kind is tolerable in a mystery story, in the famous example of Gregory Bateson's dog whose ". . .playful (my emphasis)" nip denotes the bite, but does not denote that which would be denoted by the bite" ( Bateson 183). The playful dog manages to communicate not only that the nip is not a bite, but also that this nip is meant to express an urge for a friendly interaction. So too in the frame of a detective story, gory details are given as essential parts of the play frame so that the reader and writer can play this mystery game together. This reader-writer relationship seems to me to be a muted adversarial one. So my student-readers, once the characteristics of the frame are known to them, can know what to expect and what is expected of them. Mystery reading becomes not scholastic chore, but a pleasure.
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