Kids "Lit Like Torches" Write True to Emotions

The class had started when I arrived at Paideia School. In a former dining room of an old Ponce de Leon mansion, 30 students — boys and girls, mostly 12 and 13 years old — were sitting around a large table several circles deep. They were listening intently to Bernie Schein, the bearded teacher, who was standing at one end of the table reading a story by one of the students.

Last week in this column, I spilled off the excitement I caught for this visit to the creative writing class of this remarkable couple, Martha and Bernie Schein. In this column I want to tell more.

The story Bernie was reading was about a kid's problems with his alcoholic father: how the son had to fetch his old man from the Blue Bird Cafe (it is taking place in a small town in Alabama), had to rummage through the basement to find the hidden liquor bottle, which he located under "a box of old radio tubes." Through the story there flickered feelings of love and hate the kid had for his father. It ended with a stinging realization by the storyteller-son: "All through high school I kept searching for the real man in my father. I never found it."

There was a moment of silence in the room. Then the students all came to their feet, applauding. Then began comments. They usually began with genuine praise. "God, that was great, really great," one began, sliding his hands forward on the table. "That description of him lifting his face — you could just picture it."

"Is there really a Blue Bird Cafe?" Bernie asked, his eyes alive with delight at the authenticity of the name. The writer got the name from the Blue Bird Hardware store in the town. And, yes, it based on fact but not his personal experience, quite. It was from a story his father had told him about his father, the student's grandfather, who was an alcoholic.

"It reminded me of Carson McCullers," said another and many nodded. Then some gave pinpoint criticism — a confusion of sequence, of prior knowledge. The author listened, explained, absorbed it like a pro.

Then Martha read a story by another student, this one based on an adolescent-parent conflict. It conveyed the complex pain of growing up a direct experience. It was extremely well written. "The dialogue was great," Bernie said in the discussion. "It's spare, it's wonderful, it's true to the ear."

How do they get such good writing from these students? They begin by insisting on emotional honesty.

"Our students must write what they feel," Bernie and Martha wrote in the introduction of one of six annual anthologies of their students' best short stories. "That is the only truth we request: that they be true to their emotions. We ask that they not be cowards and liars..."

Courage is often required in resolving a story honestly even if it is to face the fact that it does not resolve emotionally.

"Do you want to be Superman?" Bernie asked a student who was trying to slip in a hero-riding-into-the-sunset ending. "Or do you want to be human? It takes courage to be honest with yourself."

The point is not therapy. It is art. And, if few students are likely to go on to pursue writing as a career, they will never hereafter be intimidated by words. They will possess the language.

"It does a lot of catharsis, a lot of release, a lot of enlightenment," Bernie admitted. "But that isn't really our purpose. If that story is too sentimental, if that story is mud-slinging angry-confessional, then we don't want it no matter what kind of therapy it does. We want an artistic piece." The walls of the room are hung with rules of punctuation and syntax, whimsically illustrated: "Bernie, of course, is a creep."

Bernie and Martha Schein have been exuberantly driven to blaze new trails in education for the 10 years they have been married. They have studied and gotten degrees from Harvard, Duke and the University of South Carolina. They wrote a book together on open class for middle schools, a book they laugh about now, for how wrong they were on some things. Experience replaced theory. Bernie quit a high-level job in educational administration for the state of North Carolina to get back to the classroom. "Education," he shook his head sadly, "isn't the same thing as what a kid and a teacher do to one another."

What Martha and Bernie and their students do to each other is a wild, loving, impudent experience. Bernie will yell, call them brats, threaten to break their noses. The room is absolutely electric with fun, excitement and E-string alertness. "If they need explosive praise," Bernie said, "they deal with me. If they need sensitive, direct understanding they go to Martha."

There is a poem by John Crowe Ransom that came to mind, watching these students, thinking of them going out of this experience, into the straight-edged world of emotional deceptions. The poem describes Harvard graduates all turned on, "lit like torches," scrambling forth into the world, likely to be quenched. But, "if there is passion enough for half their flame," the poem ends, "Your wisdom has done this, oh sages of Harvard."

Likewise, Martha and Bernie Schein.

—Joe Cumming, Jr., The Atlantic Journal and Constitution
March 16, 1980