HAVOC OR CHAOS?
by
Ray H. Greenblatt
Delivered to The Chicago Literary Club
December 14, 1998
Copyright 1998 Ray H. Greenblatt
I was sitting on the hall stairs outside Room 308 waiting for the bell to signal the end of
fourth period. Suddenly there they were--two girls, probably fourth or fifth graders, on a
breathless mission. Could I tell them please the difference between havoc and chaos?
The question was not just unusual. It was challenging and even timely.
During fifth period, in Room 308, I would try to teach Economics to a group of juniors
and seniors in this private school with its exclusively African-American student body. Some of
my eleventh and twelfth graders were distinctly uninterested in Economics. One or two were
downright recalcitrant. Economics class attitudes seemed to shift unpredictably with sudden,
sometimes severe, student mood swings. During fifth period in Room 308, havoc and chaos were
two real-world possibilities.
Of more immediate concern, who had sent these two girls on their seemingly urgent
mission and why? Had their own unruly classroom behavior precipitated the assignment? And
why, in a school noted for its strict enforcement of disciplinary rules, had these girls been running
through the halls without a hall pass while classes were in session?
Finally, what should I tell them? How does havoc differ from chaos?
A joke from an earlier time crossed my mind. The former senior partner of an old and
prestigious Philadelphia law firm was said to have been so conservative that, had he been present
at the creation, he would have favored chaos. Somehow the joke helped me to organize my
thoughts. I answered the girls in substance that, while "havoc" and "chaos" both denote utter
confusion and disarray, the two words differ in that "chaos" connotes the total absence of order
while "havoc" suggests that someone or something has brought about total disorder.
The girls seemed satisfied. They went on their way. I made a note to check out my answer
after class against the dictionary in the school library.
What was I doing at Providence St. Mel School that Spring of 1997? I had practiced
corporation and banking law at Mayer, Brown & Platt in Chicago for 38 years following my
graduation from Harvard Law School in 1956. I retired from this 700-lawyer firm on August 31,
1994 at age 63. In September, 1994, I began work at Providence St. Mel as a volunteer, team-teaching the advanced Economics class with a retired businessman, reading and writing poetry
with first and second graders and coaching the PSM high school debate team. It would be a new
career radically different from my recently-concluded professional life at the mega-law firm.
Why did I think I might have a contribution to make at Providence St. Mel? I had not
trained to be a teacher. I had, however, raised three sons pretty much on my own, my wife having
died when the youngest was born. In my law career, moreover, I had taken seriously the
responsibility of the experienced practitioner to train apprentice lawyers. Finally, the school said
it needed an Economics teacher. I had majored in Economics at the University of Pennsylvania's
Wharton School, graduating first in my class in 1953.
But my new constituency--African-American elementary and high school students, most of
them contending with poverty--was an unknown quantity. I considered it a critically important
constituency; but I knew practically nothing about it.
The students and my new staff colleagues would waste little time initiating me.
At the end of my first day at PSM, as I left the building, I observed School Principal Paul
Adams disciplining a high school boy in the front hall. Adams, a formidable, powerfully built
African-American, bellowed with such force, his demeanor so threatening, that, although the boy
did not appear particularly frightened, I was genuinely alarmed. I feared that he might do the boy
physical harm.
I soon learned that Adams' penchant for stern discipline was a quality that school parents
greatly admired. Discipline is pervasive at PSM. School rules mandate expulsion for possession of
a gun or knife on school property and for gang affiliation. Expulsion is mandatory; no second
chance is given following a weapons or gang violation.
Another distinctive feature of Providence St. Mel is its tradition of awarding monetary
prizes for academic achievement. After every quarter there is an all-school honors assembly
where students who have made the "A" Honor Roll or "B" Honor Roll take to the stage to
receive prizes denominated in cash or corporate stock.
* * *
Providence St. Mel survives today largely by reason of Paul Adams' iron will and
determination. The product of a merger of Providence High School, a Catholic girls' school run
by the Sisters of Providence, and St. Mel School, a Catholic boys' school run by the Christian
Brothers, Providence St. Mel was taken over in 1971 by the Chicago Catholic Archdiocese. Its
years as an Archdiocese school did not go smoothly; and, in 1978, the Archdiocese announced its
decision to close PSM. However, Adams, an Alabama native whom the Archdiocese had brought
in as PSM's principal, was able to persuade the Sisters of Providence to lease the school building
and an adjacent unused convent building to PSM for an annual rental of one dollar. With the
enthusiastic cooperation of his West Side school constituency, Adams set about the formidable
task of salvaging and perpetuating PSM as an independent, Catholic-oriented private school.
During those early independent private-school years, Adams was not only the school
principal, but also the bus driver, chief maintenance man and security officer. He lived on the top
floor of the school building and defended the property from burglars and vandals. To raise money,
the school held Sunday night bingo games in its basement.
Over the years, Adams' philosophy of hard work and stern discipline attracted increasing
attention and support. President Reagan, after watching a Today Show segment on PSM, visited
the school in 1982 and again in 1983. By the end of the 1980's PSM had a powerful Board, a
sophisticated development staff and considerable big-time financial support. Adams was no
longer a part-time bus driver/janitor, but a successful fund raiser, widely-admired educator and a
respected leader in Chicago's African American community. Sunday night bingo is a thing of the
past.
* * *
One fall evening shortly after I arrived at PSM, a ninth grade boy who had just transferred
to the school on scholarship was shot to death less than a mile from the school in a gang-related
killing. The next morning at a special assembly students and faculty mourned the youth and tried
to steady their own frayed psyches. Throughout the school year, classmates maintained the dead
boy's locker as a memorial, posting a succession of printed tributes mostly stating that he was
missed and would be remembered.
Although this was the only violent death of a student during my PSM tenure, the school's
teachers and its surprisingly large staff of guidance counselors routinely devote considerable time
and effort to counseling students with psychological and other problems resulting from violent
deaths of family members and friends.
Providence St. Mel is located in the heart of Chicago's west side ghetto on Central Park
Boulevard between Monroe and Adams Streets across from Garfield Park. The surrounding
neighborhood still bears the scars of the fires that raged on the night of Martin Luther King's
assassination. Lots on which buildings burned to the ground that night are to a considerable
extent still vacant. Only in the past four or five years has there been new construction, and much
of that new construction flows from plans generated by the school to redevelop its surrounding
environs with subsidized, low-income housing.
Within a block or two of the school are a number of derelict buildings several of which are
used as crack houses. Drug dealers, gang members and prostitutes frequent Garfield Park and
can be observed throughout the neighborhood.
Students--particularly boys--who remain enrolled at PSM and stay to graduate presumably
withstand during their school years recurring pressure to become part of the lucrative drug culture
or to join gangs. Some succumb. The attrition rate is high. The school is a precarious island in a
sea of danger.
To reduce the risks inherent in PSM students spending indolent summers in the
dangerous ghetto community, PSM tries its best to get them out of the west side and south side
ghettoes during the summers. To this end, it maintains a program called Summer Opportunity of a
Lifetime, known by its acronym: SOAL. Colleges, prep schools and summer enrichment
programs in this country and abroad (Oxford University, The Choate School and Outward Bound
being but three examples) make resident summer opportunities available at little or no cost to
SOAL participants. In past years, United Airlines has flown the students to their destinations at
no charge. PSM also helps to place older students in daytime summer jobs in the Chicago
business and professional community.
During the summer following my first year at PSM, I vacationed in England with my
eldest son and his family. One evening we attended a production of Tom Stoppard's play, India
Ink, at the Aldwych in London. After the play, as we left the theater, I heard someone calling
"Mr. Greenblatt." Turning, I found PSM students Curtis Lewis whom I had coached in Debate
and Datoya Burton who would be my star Economics student the following school year. They
were standing with an otherwise all-white group of teen-agers enrolled in Oxford University's
summer youth program. The group had been taken from Oxford to London by train to see the
Stoppard play.
Although PSM is a small cultural enclave at war with a surrounding drug and gang
culture, there are very likely several points of conjunction between the two cultures. In their free
time before and after our Debate Team meetings, the debaters gossiped. A hot topic was PSM
high school girls conspicuously driving about with men in expensive cars or seen wearing valuable
jewelry presumably given them by these men. Perhaps unsurprisingly, some PSM coeds, although
not overtly disloyal to the school or its mission, become romantically involved with the big
spenders whose big money comes from drug dealing.
About three months into my first year of teaching Economics, I somewhat reluctantly
granted a request of a gifted student that we devote a class period to debating whether drugs
should be legalized, using the tools of economic analysis. The gifted student, Shea, a south-sider
who had transferred to PSM that fall, was the only class member willing to argue the affirmative.
So that she would not have to face the rest of the class alone, I announced that, although
opposed to legalization, I would join her on the side of the affirmative. The class, which was
frequently lethargic at best, quickly became electric. The topic elicited intense feelings. Shea, who
was the school's star debater, was highly effective in support of legalization. The opponents, led
by Danielle and Takesha, were vocal and extremely emotional. One argument advanced in favor
of legalization was the stock contention that it would eliminate or greatly weaken the violence-ridden illegal drug distribution network with its killings and maimings. Takesha lost her cool. She
responded angrily that the residents of Lawndale and Garfield Park didn't need outsiders like Shea
and me to come into their community to tell them how they could make their living.
Providence St. Mel is a private school that aims to be college prep. For high school
students the tuition is $3,600 per year, for elementary pupils $3,000. These are considerable sums
for these mostly low-income families and single parents who send their children to PSM. No
question that somebody really wants these kids in school. I soon learned, however, that--at least
for high schoolers--the matriculant does not necessarily want to be there.
Each school day at PSM starts with a recitation by the entire student body--first through
twelfth grade-- of the Providence St. Mel Mission Statement:
At Providence St. Mel, we believe.
We believe in the creation of inspired lives
produced by the miracle of hard work.
We are not frightened by the challenges of reality,
but believe that we can change our conception of this world
and our place within it.
So we work, plan, build, and dream--in that order.
We believe that one must earn the right to dream.
Our talent, discipline and integrity
will be our contribution to a new world.
Because we believe that we can take
this place, this time, and this people,
and make a better place, a better time, and a better people.
With God's help,
we will either find a better way or make one.
It is hard to argue with the aspirations and values expressed in this powerful Mission Statement.
Yet I sometimes wonder whether the daily recitations inspire students to absorb and internalize
those values and aspirations so that they become part of their own day-by-day attitudes and
behavior. Not surprisingly there are some PSM high schoolers who try to subvert what is perhaps
the core value of the Mission Statement: dedication to hard work. During each of my four years
there has been a small but conspicuous minority in the Economics class who have taunted
students who try to achieve academically for knuckling under to authority.
At PSM Economics is an elective full-year course available to students who have taken a
required one-semester Consumer Economics course. My team teacher and I have tried each year
to combine practical with theoretical content and to focus heavily on current events to supplement
our teaching of the rudiments of micro and macro economics. In addition to articles clipped from
The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, we have arranged student subscriptions to The
Wall Street Journal Student Edition, a periodical focussing on business news of particular interest
to t een-agers.
In addition, we have tried to provide an introduction to the traditional discipline of
economics, using a Junior Achievement textbook and study guide adapted for high schoolers
based largely on Paul Samuelson's classic introductory college economics textbook. We deal,
among other things, with the laws of supply and demand, economic scarcity and choice, economic
incentives and deterrents, productivity, fixed and variable costs, money and banking, fiscal and
monetary policy and market-based and command economies. We also teach the fundamentals of
how to read a balance sheet and income statement. In addition, we coach students in the art of
interviewing for a job and familiarize them with the personal qualities necessary for economic
success, ranging from productive hard work, regular attendance and punctuality to empathic
listening, networking and take-charge initiative. We also try to inform students about the
requirements, benefits and risks of entrepreneurship and to familiarize them with the wide range of
job specializations available in modern U.S. businesses. I subscribe to the monthly magazine,
Black Enterprise, which provides a rich source of topical material on successful black
entr epreneurs.
Perhaps of most significance, we emphasize the ever-increasing importance of a college
education and of persistent lifetime updating of job skills in the inexorably rapid-changing global
econ omy.
To add spice to the course, in early autumn students form into investment teams each of
which has a fictional $100,000 to invest in publicly-traded stocks and money market funds.
Included among the companies whose stocks teams have selected for their portfolios are such
names as Disney, Microsoft, General Electric, Intel, Nokia, Sears, The Gap, Coca Cola, IBM,
Amoco, The Tribune Company, America On-Line and Tommy Hilfeger. I enter the teams'
respective stock portfolios onto an America On-Line program which enables each portfolio to be
separately priced out whenever desired. Every two or three weeks, a class period is devoted to
the investment game. At these sessions, each team receives a printout showing the current market
values of its stocks and the value, including interest to date, of its money market fund. The teams
are then given the opportunity to purchase or sell stocks at the preceding day's closing price.
Imputed brokerage commissions are charged on each stock purchase or sale. During the course
of the year, the class discusses significant changes in the market prices of particular stocks
included in the respective teams' portfolios and tries to identify from current news reports the
reasons for these changes. At the end of the year, the teams receive final printouts of their results
for the year and prizes are awarded to the most successful teams. Many of the teams produce
results that a professional money manager would be pleased to achieve.
Periodically, guest speakers appear. For the most part they are economically successful,
younger blacks. They are encouraged to share with the class some of their own experiences in the
busi ness and professional worlds.
Because PSM in two recent years awarded shares of stock of McDonalds Corporation as a
prize for making honor roll, I also added a two-day unit in which the class analyzed McDonalds,
using as a principal source Value Line's writeup of the Company.
Finally, during the second semester, the class divides into teams to play a computer
simulation of a business competition. This game, which was also developed for Junior
Achievement, involves the invention of a fictional new product, the Echo Pen. In addition to
writing like any ordinary pen, the Echo Pen has a memory that can store, recall and reproduce
what it has previously written. The students on each of the competing teams make a series of
business decisions for each business period representing a calendar quarter. They decide how
many Echo Pens to produce during that calendar quarter, what price to charge, and how much to
spend on marketing, research and development, and plant and equipment. The decisions made by
each team for each period are fed into the computer which processes the information and
produces a composite industry report, copies of which are delivered to all of the teams, and a
separate company report for each team. The industry report discloses composite information both
in dollars and in units as to industry wide sales, production and orders, as well as capacity,
average production cost and average price. The company reports contain a summary of orders
received and closing inventory, a balance sheet, an income statement, other company-specific
information and suggestions for curing problems such as excessive unit production costs or
imba lances between quantity produced and orders received.
The team whose retained earnings are highest at the end of the game wins. If desired, the
computer participates in the game as an additional competitor. If the computer competes, it
usually wins. But in my first year the winning team, which was led by the gifted Shea, soundly
defe ated the computer.
It seems like a rich and varied program, but I would be less than candid if I left you with the
impression that our PSM Economics course has been a success. It is hard to teach economics to
high school juniors and seniors and especially so when most of the students come from poverty
backgrounds. These students believe--with some justification--that their families have been
systematically excluded from the mainstream U.S. economy and that they will be as well. They
are wary of white men retired from good establishment jobs who try to tell them how the
American economic system works and what they should do to succeed within that system. It is
hard to win the confidence of these young people.
In the first written assignment of each new school year, we ask the students to write a one
paragraph essay on the meaning of success and to state what they think they would like
to do for a living. One student wrote that she intended to be an exotic dancer. My team teacher
and I initially concluded that she was putting us on. After all, PSM holds itself out as a college
prep school and prides itself on being able to get its graduates into colleges. It turned out that the
young woman was not only quite serious but incensed that we did not accept and respect her
occupational preference. She asked to transfer out of Economics and was permitted to do so at
the end of the semester when openings became available in alternative electives.
* * *
During my second year, our Economics class met in a room on the fourth floor of the
dilapidated school building that houses Providence St. Mel. Whenever it rained or snow melted
on the roof, our classroom ceiling leaked copiously.
At the same time, across the street from PSM, a new Headmaster's house was going up.
The new house was large and commodious. If it were located in Winnetka or Lake Forest, it
would have commanded a price in excess of $1,000,000. The mansion that Harvard University
maintains for its president in Harvard Yard is not more elaborate. Paul Adams, who had for years
lived austerely on the top floor of the school, would henceforth have living accommodations
comparable to those of the president or headmaster of the most elegant Ivy League college or
prep school.
In Adams' defense, it was not his idea that PSM build a headmaster's mansion at a time
when the school building was at best poorly maintained and at worst in hopeless disrepair. The
idea is said to have originated with a Board member who himself contributed all of the money
required to build the mansion. The theory behind the headmaster's dwelling was apparently
threefold: first, building the mansion would encourage investors to commit their money to
upgrading other property in the neighborhood; second, the very presence of the mansion would
convey a message that being headmaster of PSM is just as prestigious as being headmaster of the
most elite eastern prep school; and third, the mansion would serve as a buffer between the school
and derelict buildings along Madison Street to the north. Providence St. Mel has acquired a few
of the most threatening of the derelict buildings to the east and south and then torn those
buildings down to put an end to their use for prostitution and drug-related activities.
* * *
As PSM Debate coach during the 1994-95 school year, I got a special glimpse into the
lives and attitudes of PSM juniors and seniors. PSM had not had a debate program prior to my
arrival, and I soon learned that my PSM debaters were unable or unwilling to do the time-consuming research necessary to enable them to compete against more seasoned debate teams
from other schools. As a consequence, we instead engaged in intramural debates and discussions
on current events and other topics suggested by students or selected by me.
The O.J. Simpson case was in progress at the time, and, despite my reluctance
to do so, the students invariably voted to discuss it. It was from these discussions that I got the
first hint about how the Simpson jury was likely to come out. Also from these
discussions, I learned how literal-minded a high school junior can sometimes be. It suddenly
dawned on Curtis that the Simpson jury was sequestered and that something had to be
done to insulate the sequestered jurors from the intensive coverage of the Simpson trial
on TV and radio and in newspapers and magazines. "Yes," I said, "all the Simpson
jurors are allowed to do is listen to Beethoven and crochet." At this Curtis became so indignant
that Shea had to intervene. "He's joking," she explained.
I ultimately learned of the Simpson jury's verdict from Paul Adams whom I met
in the hall shortly after it was rendered. Adams was clearly mortified by the result. I observed that
race plays strange games with jury verdicts and recalled how uncomfortable I had been as a boy
when I heard about lynchers being exonerated by all-white southern juries .
* * *
By far the most pleasant of my teaching experiences at PSM came with reading and
writing poetry with first and second graders during my first year. Visiting each class for about 50
minutes each week, I read poems by Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, A.A. Milne, Eugene Field, Shel
Silverstein, John Ciardi and other children's poets. In addition, the children and I collaborated on
writing haiku and other light verse. The children were quick to memorize some of the shorter,
more rhythmic poems that I read to them, and, given a few examples, they soon made major
contributions to our collaborative writing.
An example of the children's quick aptitude came in our unit on alliteration. To
demonstrate alliteration, I read them the following doggerel that I had composed for the purpose:
Pretty Polly Primrose
Pummelled Peter Popcorn.
Terry Tuggle tattled;
Teacher tossed a tantrum.
I also e-mailed a copy of this masterpiece to my first grader grandson, Jordy, in
Princeton. In response, Jordy e-mailed back his own alliterative doggerel. The next day I read
Jordy's response to the first grade class and asked them to compose an alliterative reply to him,
noting that he had an older brother, Danny, and a two year old sister, Susannah. In less than five
minutes, the first graders composed the following with minimal help from me on the third line
only:
Jump jiggle Jordy.
Flip, flop, flea.
Double dare Danny.
Sue silly see.
It may not be Shakespeare, but it's mighty good verse for first grade. I wouldn't be
surprised if one of these kids were to turn into a future Gwendolyn Brooks or Langston Hughes.