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, Introduction-Chapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “The Crossroads School”
Part 2, Introduction Summary
The Crossroads School is a social justice-oriented, progressive school serving a diverse urban community. All faculty have a strong social justice mission, and the school attempts to disrupt power imbalances between children and adults through various means (e.g., having students address teachers by their first names). Emily, a six-year teacher new to teaching first grade, believes teachers ought to treat students with high expectations using a calm, nonauthoritarian approach. She seeks to treat her students as independent agents while modeling the empathy and emotional intelligence she expects of them. She does not employ a traditional system of rewards and punishments to try to modify student behavior, instead encouraging students to take breaks when they need to. She plans her lessons carefully, but students such as Sean and Marcus consistently disrupt them while rejecting her efforts to engage them as peers. Emily admits to Shalaby that she is frustrated with her class, but she tries to find happiness with her students where she can—something she is better able to do toward the end of the year due to the lightened academic load.
Part 2, Chapter 3 Summary: “Sean: On Being Willful”
Six-year-old Sean lives in a comparatively affluent home, parented by a single mom named Kate. He leverages tireless negotiations to get his way, but Kate consistently responds with patience and reason; she explains, for example, that she needs a phone more than he does because grown-up life comes with additional responsibilities. Shalaby is surprised by how different Sean seems at home than at school. He cuddles with his mother while watching an episode of television he has previously seen, and he correctly and clearly explains what is going on to Shalaby and Kate. He only grows annoyed when Shalaby and Kate begin to talk, but even when he puts his hand over his mother’s mouth to demand her attention, Kate reasons with him and he relents. Shalaby explains that while Kate herself is more of a people-pleaser, she recognizes the value of her son’s persistent demands for explanation. Kate therefore indulges Sean’s behavior at home even as it makes his life at school more difficult.
At school, Sean’s demands are typically less direct than at home. However, he monopolizes attention through other means; Shalaby recounts that during Emily’s attempt to engage students in a game, Sean, annoyed at not being allowed to go first, derails the activity by constant, unfounded complaints about other students’ behavior. This exhausts his teacher Emily and isolates him socially from his peers, who resent him for ruining the fun. On other occasions, he interrupts lessons and Emily responds by having him “take a break.”
Shalaby observes that despite Sean’s predilection for disruption and apparent selfishness—she describes playing a game of Bop It! in which Sean constantly tried to derail her progress—Sean clearly craves attention as well as inclusion. He is especially attached to a friend named Ilan: a popular and rambunctious boy who sometimes rebuffs Sean’s presence. Sean responds with frustration and often by picking fights, which Shalaby sees as a sign he prefers negative attention to no attention at all. However, he is also quick to accuse peers of slighting him, contributing to a vicious cycle that both Emily and Kate recognize as counterproductive. Ultimately, Shalaby suggests that Sean’s aggressiveness stems from how deeply he cares about winning acceptance; he feels his isolation keenly and struggles to manage the ensuing emotions.
This becomes clearer when Kate reluctantly pursues ADHD testing to help Sean “focus.” Initially inclined to blame “boy energy” and an absence of male role models, Kate becomes alarmed when Sean begins fighting more with his friends and takes him to a doctor. The medication makes him less distracted, but Shalaby comes to see Sean’s distraction as a coping mechanism for feelings of loneliness and grief. On the medication, he is sad and tearful, particularly once Ilan’s family announces plans to move to another state.
Shalaby notes that unlike some of the students she profiles, Sean comprehends school’s countless compliance demands perfectly; his defiance is “willful”—a charge leveled disproportionately at students of color, though Sean is white. However, Shalaby argues that while Sean’s endless questioning may be inappropriately combative, his willingness to challenge authority is a valuable skill in a democracy. Punishing Sean’s challenges rather than channeling them in more positive ways squelches his leadership potential and, Shalaby believes, his potential for future civic engagement: “[P]unishment for willful defiance does not only violate the individual civil rights of young people. It also threatens democracy more broadly” (110). Moreover, isolating Sean from his peers in an attempt to curb his impact on the class sets him behind academically and further limits his opportunities to form the connections he clearly craves. Shalaby suggests that Sean’s tactical use of distraction points to the need for more breaks and opportunities for play and socialization during the school day.
Part 2, Chapter 3 Analysis
Sean’s portrait illustrates the theme of Imposing Conformity Through Exclusion in School Culture via stories of his relentless questioning of rules and authority. He makes demands for fair turns during games and debates choices and work partners. He argues aggressively for additional recess time. In part because his disruptions so often upset other children or otherwise impact the classroom community, Emily frequently relies instead on hierarchical authority and isolation to enforce his cooperation. His story therefore throws into sharp relief the tension between the communitarian goals both Emily and Shalaby herself espouse and the needs of the individual: Punishing Sean may not be “fair,” but neither is the impact that his behavior has on his classmates. However, Shalaby suggests that this apparent conflict in fact speaks to an underlying lack of community in even the most well-meaning classrooms. Sean’s behavior, she suggests, stems in large part from his desire to connect with his peers in ways the classroom structure simply does not allow. Like Mrs. Beverly and Mrs. Norbert, Emily is therefore in an impossible position, working within a system that is at odds with the values she tries to implement.
The educational system’s values are also at odds with those Sean learns at home, developing the theme of The Clash Between the Cultures of Home and School. Kate generally encourages his disputatious nature at home, believing it promotes independence. She treats Sean’s many “why” questions as signals of critical thinking, patiently reasoning through his willful demands rather than asserting unilateral parental control. Sean’s mother intentionally builds skills to ease future life transitions. She rehearses negotiations and reasoning—not unchecked power. At times, her patience with Sean surprises even Shalaby, as when she simply moves the hand Sean has placed over her mouth to stop her from talking—behavior Shalaby notes that her own parents would not have tolerated. Nevertheless, Shalaby implies that Kate’s approach reaps rewards. At home, Sean’s intelligence and affectionate nature are evident, whereas at school he seems belligerent and unfocused.
This trust in his own judgment and ability to negotiate conflicts positions him uneasily in hierarchical school dynamics enforcing absolute adult control. Like Kate, the educational system’s response to Sean has an eye to the future, but its goal, Shalaby suggests, is to create compliant workers. This, she implies, is what produces the simultaneous and paradoxical emphasis on individual responsibility and deference to authority. Students, like workers, are not free to set their own agendas, but they are “free” to “make mistakes”—e.g., to disrupt the goals of the institution. This is why the charge of “willful defiance” is so potent, but Shalaby embraces it as a means for understanding Sean’s behavior. Sean understands school expectations for obedience but intentionally pushes back against the inherent power imbalance. His defiant acts are a form of Disruption as Communication and Resistance: a plea for greater autonomy and meaningful self-determination.
Ultimately, Shalaby uses Sean’s story to symbolize a generation of youth recognizing undemocratic contradictions between schooling for “freedom” while denying students their voices. Schools largely respond by pacifying dissent with medication rather than asking how they might restructure the system. This proves true in Sean’s case. The result is superficially “successful” in that it renders him more focused, yet it ultimately renders the system’s failures more glaring by exposing the social isolation that underpins Sean’s behavior.
