West side (teaching) story

Truman Capote famously said of Jack Kerouac’s work, “That’s not writing, that’s typing.” Capote at his bitchiest, perhaps, but I think he was at least partly correct. And, regarding education, I would add: If you’re not meeting your students halfway, that’s not teaching, that’s talking. I learned this first and best from my students on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the mid-1990s.

When I followed my wife’s academic career from Oakland, California, to New York City, I told myself it wouldn’t be so difficult. Sure, I had no prospects at the moment, but I’d find something. And I’d taught two years in the Bay Area; how different, really, could it be to teach in the Big Apple?

Very different, it turned out. And not just in the obvious New York-versus-California ways that any Yankee or Dodger fan will enumerate without provocation. The kids in my 8th-grade Oakland classroom were more laid back than their NYC counterparts. Check. New Yorkers moved faster and talked louder. Double-check. But the East Bay and the Upper West Side were both heavily Latinx, right? That, at least, would be familiar.

Not so much. Mexican/Spanish heritage is woven deeply into California’s food, architecture, music, and place names (beginning with the name California itself). No walls or xenophobic laws can erase that truth. But at the same time, my Bay Area school was filled with third- and fourth-generation Mexican Americans who spoke little or no Spanish — they were more “American” than my second-generation, Irish American self.

My students in Manhattan, on the other hand, lived in two worlds. Mainly Puerto Rican and Dominican, some spent summers and Christmas vacations on the islands. They moved fluently back and forth between Spanish and English, sometimes settling on Spanglish, with a grammar all its own. And they claimed the islands with equal or greater pride than they did New York or the U.S.

If you’re not meeting your students halfway, that’s not teaching, that’s talking.

They were also loud and proud in my classroom. It took some time for my Midwestern reserve to appreciate how my Dominican and Nuyorican students needed to hear what they thought before they wrote it. In my writing workshop, conferences between students (both sanctioned and un-) were constant. But after a few months, I came to appreciate all the “good noise” in my classroom.

They were more visible outside of school, too. On pleasant spring afternoons, when I walked home from my job at MS 44 on West 77th to my apartment on 123rd Street, I’d see them hanging out on stoops, slurping flavored ices, as the abuelos played dominoes on fold-out card tables. One such afternoon, I was greeted by the papi of a girl who was giving me the run-around in my second period. He was the super of several brownstones, raising his family in one of the basement apartments. Que hay, Señor Lopez, I dared in my rusty, high school Spanish. My command of his language was embarrassing, but he appreciated the effort and I managed to convey that his hija, though muy agradable, was — como se dice — underperforming. Never has such a brief parent-teacher conference had such impact. She was angelic in my class from that moment on.

But though some of my students enjoyed giving their gringo teacher a hard time, most of them charmed me. And, after a semester, most had decided that Mr. McIntosh knew a few things worth knowing. When I announced we were having an end-of-semester literary fiesta, a celebration of their writing, like the slams at the Nuyorican Poets Café, they filled Room 223 with the smell of rice and beans and a merengue beat, as they fought for stage time to share their poems, stories, memoirs, and essays. We had, finally, entered each other’s worlds.

Shakespeare . . .

As the long winter ended and the snow gave way to dirty slush, I wanted to give my students a spring treat. A drama unit! We’d read, write, and perform plays — both one another’s and maybe a classic. Scrounging for a class set in a used bookstore, I stumbled on a stack of Romeo and Juliets. Perfect. Best of all, the immortal Shakespeare tragedy was paired with West Side Story. I laughed out loud. Teaching West Side Story to West Side students: What could be better?

Romeo and Juliet was an easier sell than I’d imagined. The film version with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes had just been released, so that was a hook. And it was a story of clan violence wrapped around teenage sex. Footnotes, even, gained a new fascination, once I showed them that was where the Elizabethan dirty jokes were explained.

After we read and deconstructed the text (no easy lift), I let students choose a favorite scene to perform. They grabbed the opportunity and rehearsed with gusto: Diego, the sturdy catcher on his Little League team, played the nurse counseling Juliet on love; two alpha girls made the most of the mother-daughter spat over Juliet’s forced engagement to Count Paris; my class clown took the role of Mercutio, of course, performing theater history’s longest death scene after being stabbed under Romeo’s arm with the math teacher’s yardstick.

My students were surprised but delighted when I informed them that they would perform their scenes outside the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. Though it was only a brief stroll from our school, these mostly native New Yorkers were oblivious of the Shakespeare-in-the-Park tradition, part of the cultural-institutional world that, to them, was for tourists and rich white people only. But they took pleasure and unspoken pride in performing their scenes in the shadow of the (surprisingly hot!) statue of Shakespeare’s young lovers.

And Bernstein

As much as I loved the Bard, though, it was the modern version of this star-crossed tale that I considered my ace-in-the-hole. Especially the film. I remembered the commercials from the late 1960s when West Side Story was going to be broadcast for the first time. Such anticipation in that only-three-channels world of my boyhood! The promotions looked so cool and tough to me and my Chicago suburban schoolmates; we snapped our fingers menacingly as we passed one another in the hallways, miniature Riffs and Bernardos.

As much as I loved the Bard, it was the modern version of this star-crossed tale that I considered my ace-in-the-hole.

Before showing the movie, I prepped it lovingly. I played highlights from the score, analyzing Bernstein’s music and dissecting Sondheim’s clever lyrics, how “Tonight,” with suns and moons all over the place, mirrored Juliet’s admonishment to hot-pantsed Romeo, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon. We walked the 10 blocks south to Lincoln Center, doing some reader’s theater on the same spot where they’d filmed the musical when the area was still tenements.

At last, the moment was at hand. My students moved their desks tightly around the TV and VCR I’d reserved for that week, and I popped in the cassette I’d rented from a mom-and-pop video store on Amsterdam Avenue. Then that haunting aerial view of early ’60s Manhattan came on the screen, Bernstein’s opening music — eerie whistles to jagged bongos to jazzy horns — louder and louder and louder until it’s reduced to the riff of Riff’s finger snap. I surveyed my students; they were as riveted as I had been on first viewing it.

Then, laughter. At first a few alpha boys, followed by their followers, then titters from the popular girls, then even the teacher-pleasing  girls joined in. I looked back to the screen: That immortal Jerome Robbins choreography was as tough and taut as I remembered it. But through their eyes: 30-year-old ballet dancers were twirling on a blacktop just like the one beneath Room 223. And then Russ Tamblyn burst forth with When you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way — who does that? Having been raised on Broadway cast albums, I hadn’t thought to teach my students about musical theater tropes. My bad, as they would say.

Then it got worse. Much worse. Enter the Sharks, led by Oscar-winning George Chakiris, as sexy and feline as ever, his “Puerto Rican” band of brothers trailing behind. I looked at my Puerto Rican and Dominican students. They weren’t laughing anymore. Disgust, disbelief on their faces.

I looked back at the screen. How many times had I watched this film? Half a dozen? More? Had I never noticed the thick brown makeup smeared on the faces of these white actors? What was I thinking? I’d thought I was showing my students a film that — however tragic — celebrated their culture. But apparently I’d popped in a cassette of what looked an awful lot like a Latinx Birth of a Nation.

We watched for the rest of the period, because, what else can a young teacher do? The bell rang as Russian American Natalie Wood finished singing about how pretty she felt (in Marni Nixon’s “Latin” voice). So many complicated layers.

But it was a teachable moment. And, after a late night’s research and planning, teach I did. About the history of white portrayals of people of color in popular entertainment: blackface, minstrelsy. About Swedish Walter Oland playing Charlie Chan. And I apologized for not discussing this history earlier, so they could view West Side Story in its proper context. We all felt a little better. But there was something I couldn’t let go of just yet.

“So, at the beginning of the movie, why were you all laughing?”

“’Cause it was funny,” offered Diego, Juliet’s beefy nurse.

“These grown men dancing and singing down 68th Street. That was funny — silly — right?”

My 8th graders nodded in agreement.

“OK. I hear that.” I nodded with them. “Survey: How many of you watch rap videos? MTV? BET?” I raised my right arm.

They looked at one another, then raised their hands as one.

“Those grown men in the videos you watch, singing — rapping — in the street. That’s not funny?”

It was not funny, they all agreed. Some videos were better than others, they admitted, but there was nothing ridiculous there, not like those ballet guys in West Side Story.

“Maybe your videos are just in a style you’re accustomed to. Maybe that movie,” I pointed at the TV, “the costumes, the music, the dancing, just seems old-fashioned to you.”

That, they all agreed, was, decidedly, not it.

“So, you think the videos you watch now, your kids will think they’re cool?”

They nodded.

“Really? All of them? Your kids — in 30 years — won’t find them funny?”

They nodded, a little slower.

I put a hand to my bearded chin. “Even that skinny guy in Public Enemy? The dude with the clock around his neck?”

Long pause. They looked at one another. “Well, maybe him,” Diego conceded.

We’d met halfway, almost.

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This article appears in the December 2021/January 2022 issue of Kappan, Vol. 103, No. 4, pp. 58-59.