ARTS & RESISTANCE
No. 58 (Fall/Winter 2023)
Too Cool for School
Marion Shipley’s classroom note evokes the delicious feeling of putting one over on the adults who regulate the daily life of children.
When I think about “Resistance” my mind automatically capitalizes the word, and I conjure visions of protests in the street, paint flung on fur coats, tea dumped in the harbor. I dwell on things with high stakes and big consequences, steeped in publicity and fevered debate. In short, I imagine worlds that feel beyond me in my (mostly) quiet library office, where I spend my days bedecked in a cardigan and generally avoiding conflict whenever possible. But in truth, our lives include more acts of resistance than we tend to realize. We might not break the rules, but we sure do bend them. Driving 75 miles per hour in a 70 zone. Reading in bed with a flashlight. Rolling into work five minutes late. Passing a note in class. Which brought to mind one of the favorite things I processed this past year, a stunning volume kept by Marion Shipley while a young teenager at the turn of the 20th century. She filled its pages with exquisitely collaged scenes, colored pencil drawings (including images of cat and elephant butts), newspaper clippings of dashing actors, embarrassing love letters, and several diary entries. The one dated June 7, 1907, is the one that captures my heart, as Marion celebrated having a substitute teacher. “We raised ‘ ’ (look at it upside down). We all drew pictures of each others’ backs and passed them around the class.” And in one of those rare moments of archival serendipity, Marion saved the passed note in her notebook and it stayed safely nestled between its pages all these years.
It’s a small slip of paper with the word “PASS” written on the outside, six pencil drawings of the back of classmates’ heads on the other. Holding it in your hand, noticing the braids and curls and ribbons in the girls’ hair, it feels like the note was passed to you. That you’re part of the gang of kids raising hell and anticipating the consequences the next day when the teacher returns. While the students also coordinated dropping their rulers all at the same time, caused kerfuffles in the coat room, and participated in other shenanigans that undoubtedly made the substitute teacher regret their choice to accept the assignment, it’s the artwork that stands as a visual reminder of the day, treasured and saved as a relic of youth’s ability to resist authority. It was a bright, funny, empowering moment that Marion held onto and passed along to us.
Students have long circumvented classroom rules and found ways to challenge the constrictions imposed upon them. The 1831 Regulations of the Springfield Female Seminary lists 33 strictures to carefully manage student behavior, or at least try to. It tells the students the appropriate way to hang their over-garments, how to sit and where, where food could be eaten, and forbids “boisterous talking and laughing” or “complaining of lessons, teachers, or each other.” The one that made me smile though, was the edict that “No pupil may speak with her fingers, or have any communication, written or symbolical, with another out of her own seat.” The fact that rules needed to be printed at all certainly indicates that students were whispering and passing notes and making signs to each other, complaining of teachers and laughing too loudly, just as Marion would some 70 years later.
While students in Marion’s class drew pictures and passed them desk to desk in order to reclaim degrees of power, others used the learning materials themselves to steal some time and agency. Richard M. White, a student at South Carolina College in 1813, wrote himself into being all over his copy of The Elements of Euclid, viz the First Six Books (Philadelphia: 1806), inscribing his name at least 37 times across the volume’s 518 pages. Doing so, the book is more his now than Euclid’s, forefronting his interpretation, his ownership, and his experience beyond all else. In the margin beside a particularly challenging exercise, he scrawled, “Is it not difficult to get knowledge? Yes it is out of Euclid. Ergo.” And elsewhere, in perhaps my favorite addition to the book, is an exquisitely simple and beautifully oversized “Oh Man” plastered across the top of the page alongside two hand drawn geometrical diagrams. You can imagine this student, frustrated and ink-stained, using the text itself to vent his exasperation. Perhaps like the Springfield Seminary, the students here were told that “complaining of lessons” was forbidden, but what if it was done silently in the empty space of the page?
“I have twenty eight pupils, most of them from thirteen to seventeen & some as wild as young colts. I am sometimes inclined to wish them very far away from me[.] [T]hey continue to keep me all the time busy & all the time tired.”
As much as students sought ways to press against rules, so too did teachers groan about having to enforce them. Classroom management is tough all around. As a very tired Philomena wrote to her friend, Caroline, of the class she was teaching in December 1837 in a letter found in our Education Collection, “I have twenty eight pupils, most of them from thirteen to seventeen & some as wild as young colts. I am sometimes inclined to wish them very far away from me[.] [T]hey continue to keep me all the time busy & all the time tired.” Comments like these, from the past as well as from the teachers in my own life today, make me wonder about how art and resistance might have eased some of the strain the instructors felt, too. Did they, too, find ways to complain about “lessons, teachers, or each other”?
Looking for signs of this, I paged through a notebook kept by an unnamed itinerant New England schoolmaster, where he compiled instructional exercises and explanations, helpful literary selections, and details about the classes he taught over the years. The leather cover is evocatively warped, raising visions of a water-logged teacher riding through the rain to his next class. Amid beautiful pen-and-ink trigonometry diagrams and surveying examples, lists of student names, and other teacher records, appears the ghostly outline of a left hand. I gently placed my hand over it, and my fingers ever-so-slightly reached beyond the ink mark.
Is this from a student’s hand, one of those listed in a roster elsewhere in the volume, who snuck in while it was unattended and inscribed themself into history? Or could this be our instructor, himself bored or distracted, avoiding grading or waiting for students to complete an assignment, who traced his own hand? Some things in the archive are unknowable, but the art, and the impulse to resist that can spur its creation, stand as testaments to the very human desire to make our mark, assert our power, and claim those pockets of uplifting joy in whatever small ways we can.
