Sit down and shut up How discipline can set students free

Cinque Henderson

Book - 2018

"On his first day as a substitute teacher, Cinque Henderson was cursed and yelled at by a class of 11th graders. One kid openly threatened him. Cinque, not wanting trouble, called the hall monitor, who escorted the student to the office. But five minutes later, the office sent him back. He carried a note that simply read, "ok to return to class." That was it: no suspension, no detention, no phone call home, no picking up trash after school, no sidebar conversation with the office to figure out how they could intervene. In the generation since Henderson had gone to public school in a poor black town in the rural South, the world had undergone dramatic change. Sit Down and Shut Up: How Discipline Can Set Children Free, part mem...oir, part jeremiad, is a passionate and personal analysis of that change, the story of Henderson's single year as substitute teacher in some of America's toughest schools. Henderson found that the culprits for the failures of our worst schools weren't some endless stream of unqualified teachers, but rather the result of population in crisis. He soon came to see that public school classrooms were hothouse laboratories/microcosms--chaotic, teeming, vibrant, tough--of all our nation's most vexing issues of race and class. Beneath the surface, the legacy and stain of race--the price of generational trauma, the cost of fatherlessness, the failures of capitalism, the false promise of meritocracy--played itself out in every single interaction Henderson had. Henderson also found solutions, namely a recommitment to the notion that discipline--emotional, psychological, behavioral and moral--wisely and properly understood, patiently and justly administered--was the only proper route to freedom and opportunity for generations of poor youth"-- more