47 pages • 1 hour read
Carla ShalabyTroublemakers: Lessons in Freedom from Young Children at School
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2, Chapter 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “The Crossroads School”
Part 2, Chapter 4 Summary: “Marcus: On Being Good”
Shalaby describes her first day in six-year-old Marcus’s classroom: Unlike the other students, he approaches her immediately, asking her about her coffee. She finds Marcus “charming,” but his struggles quickly become apparent as lessons begin: He fidgets, grows distracted by a student in time-out, and soon gets sent from the classroom himself. Later, he interrupts Emily as she reads aloud from a book about a young Black girl’s relationship with her father. Marcus is Black himself, but his father is incarcerated, and Shalaby wonders what he makes of the story. This time, Marcus himself decides to take a break, only to get into an argument with Emily a few moments later. All told, he ends up missing a significant amount of the day’s instruction.
Shalaby describes Marcus’s various support systems: a school counselor, an outside therapist, a mother (Cheryl) who diligently takes him and his siblings to visit their father, and special education screening. Cheryl is initially reluctant to involve more people in Marcus’s life, and Shalaby never visits Marcus at home or holds a formal interview with Cheryl. However, once convinced that Shalaby’s approach to Marcus would be different, Cheryl becomes eager to hear her “tips” on the situation. Although Shalaby tries to explain that there are no individual quick fixes, she understands Cheryl’s desperation: “Her request reminded me of how slow and useless research can sometimes seem to the people who most need a quick turnaround” (123).
Shalaby’s first “tip” is that Marcus wants to be authentically heard. This is why he so often calls out during class. However, while Emily tries to make space for his voice during lessons, Shalaby feels that the setting is too “fraught” for Marcus; though he is generally a strong student, the classroom question-and-response format presumes a single “right” answer and comes with the possibility of public humiliation.
Shalaby’s second tip is that Marcus wants to be authentically known. Shalaby quickly realizes that relationships are important to Marcus—something Cheryl and Emily confirm. He is highly social, generally getting along well with other students and always ready to strike up friendships with newcomers, including Shalaby herself. He seems especially at ease when arriving at school, where everyone from the principal to the nurse greets him by name. When the school counselor pulls Marcus out of class to celebrate his older brother’s birthday, Shalaby glimpses just how close his family is; both his mother and teenage sister have come to the school as well. Shalaby gets the sense that family is Marcus’s priority and that he would like to make school a more familial environment.
Shalaby’s next tip it that Marcus wants to be helpful, but on his own terms. Shalaby describes Marcus as highly empathic, particularly given his young age; he understands other people’s emotional needs and is quick to apologize when he hurts someone, but he refuses to do so when he feels his apology is being coerced. He is also eager to be a role model: When Emily tries a system of rewards to modify student behavior, Marcus asks to help out in the kindergarten classroom. This request goes unfulfilled, as his behavior does not “earn” it.
In exchange for being helpful, Marcus also wants help from others, even when he doesn’t need it. On multiple occasions, Marcus attempts to gain Shalaby’s help on his classwork. This generates conflict with Emily, who emphasizes self-sufficiency. On one occasion when he asks a counselor to sharpen his pencils, Emily scolds him for “tak[ing] advantage of people” (139).
Shalaby’s final tip is for Cheryl to take pride in Marcus, as he clearly craves approval and celebration. Like Shalaby’s other subjects, however, Marcus is sent to psychological counselors and prescribed medication, somewhat against Cheryl’s better judgment. Unlike the others, Marcus is prescribed medication for anger issues rather than ADHD, which Shalaby suggests is related to Marcus’s identity as a young Black male. Shalaby also wonders if Marcus’s defiance of Emily is related to her identity as a white woman and his sense of the injustice of a system that positions her as his “boss.” Shalaby agrees that Marcus’s impulse to challenge authority is a good one and ends the chapter with a suggestion: “if only people could let him be good” (149).
Part 2, Chapter 4 Analysis
Marcus’s portrait encapsulates the way in which the educational system subordinates care to control and the way in which this contributes to The Clash Between the Cultures of Home and School. At home, Marcus enjoys unwavering devotion from his tightknit family despite relative impoverishment and his father’s incarceration; the family works to embrace Marcus’s beloved but incarcerated father through regular visitation and saving him dinner each night.
Marcus carries this spirit to school, where he greets staff by name each morning with the expectation of receiving care in return. However, his teacher prioritizes independence and academic productivity over nurturing his need for positive adult relationships. In this, Shalaby implies that Marcus runs up against an educational system geared toward teaching students to be members of a capitalist society. Like Sean, Marcus bristles instinctively at authority, but he also implicitly voices an ethic of mutual obligation that runs counter to the dominant ideology. Even at his harshest, Shalaby notes, Marcus’s behavior aims at reciprocity and relational parity; she describes questioning Marcus on his refusal to complete a writing assignment and witnessing him respond in kind, mimicking her terse tone. However, teachers paradoxically interpret Marcus’s outreach as selfish—the only interpretation possible, Shalaby implies, in a system that punishes individuals to avoid admitting institutional failures. As is the case with the other students Shalaby profiles, the result is a vicious cycle: Marcus feels continually singled out as a “bad” student for craving meaningful adult love, which drives further bids for attention.
Yet Marcus’s story also differs from those of Zora, Sean, and Lucas in important ways. He is one of two children of color whom Shalaby profiles, and he is the only one to come from a working-class background. Shalaby argues that these differences explain the different diagnosis Marcus receives: “anger issues” rather than ADHD, even though Marcus is (in Shalaby’s estimation) no “angrier” than Sean. The disparate treatment reflects racist stereotypes of young Black men, which Shalaby implies are ultimately rooted in the knowledge that Black Americans have good cause to be “angry.” Of course, Shalaby argues that all four of her subjects are the victims of injustice, but Marcus’s race and class render the problem particularly acute.
Shalaby therefore ends the main body of the work with Marcus because his story encapsulates so much of what comes before. In fact, Marcus’s emotional intelligence means that he himself often gives voice to Shalaby’s own critiques of the educational system, as when he complains, “People never listen to people!” (139)—a remark that encapsulates schools’ failure to engage with children as full human beings. Likewise, Shalaby notes that she often sees Marcus offering the “very same insights as highly trained and experienced ‘experts.’ […] that care [is] more motivating than authority” (145-46). Marcus therefore demonstrates Shalaby’s ultimate claim: “[H]ealing [is] more beneficial than punishment” (146). He embodies a generation of children searching for unconditional care from the adults they spend their days with in schools. His story issues a call to rehumanize sterile, joyless classrooms by making nurturing relationships as high a priority as content delivery and behavioral control.
