DeWitt Clinton High School - Clintonian Yearbook (Bronx, NY)

Page 21 text:

Wise, I have come to learn, keep on smiling but refrain from smiling too patronizingly at us kid heretics. IV Apparently, teachers, like bankers and critics, are particularly self-conscious about their trade, they still hope to ascertain their exact standings and measure their results. They probably relish frank advice from the undergraduate ranks. Yet, since they are pleased to consider my reactions and capabilities as not quite average, I cannot help them much. I do not know how the improvement of mass-instruction can be effected. V In novels, young students who declaim and arraign are called sinful, radical, or subversive by their instructors. Here in Clinton, it is pleasing to note, these cliches are evaded very carefully. The young gentlemen are called conceited. This does not discourage anyone. Given the requisite taste and temperament, the individual Will find the rare stimulating minds, the brilliant classroom teachers, on his side. Every large body has its percentage of the keen, valuable, distinctive, and enlightened, and Clinton has its quota. VI It is a pale but distinctly visible minority among them Who earn teachers their reputation for sentimental conservatism and ethical conventionalism. In Clinton, the really alarmingly intolerant or reactionary constitute but a mere handful of pebbles on the pedagogical beach and, after all, no one is exactly invited to become a beach-comber. VII Why is it that most high school teachers realize, as most grammar school teachers do not, that it is an essential law of their craft that they shall not irritate or be irritated? VIII In classroom teaching and in the relations of teacher and pupil, the tendency swings between loose, crass, obvious, vaudeville methods on one hand and mannerly, tenuous, stately, neatly-patterned ethics on the other. For vigor and forthright declaration, for deep-chested assurance and assertive criticism in their students, many instructors would substitute complacent acceptance, to which is sometimes applied the absurd cognomen, being constructivef' -.lar -efzr s :X ': 4 ': 4': 4 ': 4 ': - ': 4 gfiex 453 'lex Tl16CLINTONlAN --245517

Page 20 text:

,Freshman Through Senior NOTES ON FOUR YEARS AT CLINTON By CHARLES B. Srmuss I Gne of the salient characteristics of classroom work in English composition is the strong pressure exerted on us to express ourselves, to nail up a fever chart of our emotions, to survey our environment very superficially, but With a fountain pen behind our ear. Whatever the psychological implications of all this may be, I am at least certain that some extremely uncouth results ensue. And thus, the idea of Telling All about my school life, just because I may be a moderately talented, articulate, or observing product, rings repugnant in my ear. Many sweet-minded folks want some not wholly criminal graduate to pen pretty confessionals in which influences and associations figure prominently-that is why they have created prize contests and valedictories. In a like manner, others may desire a frank, skeptical delineation of the melange of correct practices, strong ideals, and startling incompetencies from which I am now emerging. In either case, however, I can but make a few observations. II In spite of myself, I cannot think of another secondary school, public or private, which I should rather have attended than DeWitt Clinton. This eager, relentless mass-production, this constant leavening of the individual before the multitude, has shown me much. The easy patterns of thought, emotion, and art which characterize my classmates are so patently those of Everyman. Our bawdy materialism and our government by privilege--things which I might have blasphemed with idealistic murmurs a few years from now-have already become perfectly natural and amusing to me. I am part of them, I know the futility and good fun of proselytizing them. III What is most humorous and humane in the philosophy of my teaching elders leads them to expect anything but gratitude from me or anyone else my age who attempts to generalize about high schools. Few teachers are surprised to find youth eternally dissatisfied and damning, many, on the other hand, make the mistake of opposing our reforming clamor too evasively. The intrinsically .,y'Ls.,9r-,5rvrQ-.- gif fa-.1 fwfr fifx sy's..Qs..aQs 16l3+Q'- Tl1eCL1NToN1AN

Page 22 text:

IX Teachers are discomforted and aroused by ungodly and non-conforming stu- dents who wish to bend ideas, art, and society until they break or snap back. The student body itself is as conservative as the N. Y. Times. X Such forces as these, although they tend to embitter the artistic mind, are not to be criticised for their existence in a high school, since they flourish so heartily throughout the civilized world. They may even be a good thing for us, for we young iconoclasts, with blood and gall and salt burning within our spindly frames, expect and demand a good measure of oratorical castigation from the faculty. Already we are developing rheumatism and incredibly bad stomachs, now, if ever, we must exhibit the ist's impact that will justify our intellectual existence. Hence, the value of opposition to us. XI Of the four teachers to whose conversation I can listen longest without fContinued on page 951 'lllcom the Qllass of June, 119330 ZIFAREVVELL! For some of us the word is symbolic of wild relief after four years of sometimes useless and standardized drudgery and of sometimes brilliant and inspiring contacts. For all of us, however, it means fare thee well --a prayer of happy wayfaring for those of us who go and those of us who stay. To the many who in all sincerity feel the imminent breaking of close ties, remember we all stand at the frontier of a strange land when the old must give way to the new, when accustomed ways depart and strange ways come to replace them, when even our old selves will be discarded for new selves, young, and yet a bit older and possibly wiser. Very soon we shallihave forgotten much of what was supposedly important to us as members of a high school. But there are things deeper, clearer, sharper, which all of us will long remember. They may be the gaiety of the Prom, experiences with the Dotey Squad, the fun in the lunchroom, the wit of certain instructors, a senior7s pessimism, friendship gained and kept. Insofar as these thoughts and feelings have become interwoven with the fabric of our lives, that far has Clinton entered into and become a part of us, a working force for a fuller, deeper, richer future. Then does not farewell become rather hail and farewell-farewell to the past, hail to the future! J osEPH TEPERMAN, Senior President. ,452.f1s,.4yf1sffQi..f:ixs.f:i.,f:Qi.fiixyfiwl-aw's.1Qs.awrs lglgem- Th6CLINTONIAN