THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, July 16, 1994 TAG: 9407150087
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ELIZABETH SIMPSON, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 179 lines
HIS MISSION IS to make kids squirm. To goad them, turn their neck hot under their collar. To fan the fires of contention.
Another teacher might try to keep the peace, smooth the ruffled feathers, separate the rowdy from the shy, especially in a classroom of kids who have all been suspended from school for everything from bringing a weapon to school to punching out a teacher.
Not Jim Davis. He invites trouble. Seeks out the tender spots and the hot buttons in the psyches of Norfolk middle school students.
Davis, an instructor of an ``Alternatives to Violent Behavior'' class at The Barry Robinson Center, has just asked the heavy-set girl whom everyone has been making fun of all day to stand before the class. He tells them she has something to say.
``I know life is short and everything, and we are trying to better ourselves so we can stay in school,'' she begins haltingly. ``But joking and stuff, it's childish stuff.''
Not enough for Davis. He pushes her further. ``How does it make you feel?''
She stays away from her own, inner-most feelings though, concentrates on what the others are doing. ``It's not funny,'' she says, casting side glances at Davis, silently seeking permission to fade back into the woodwork.
Davis isn't done though. ``But how does it make you feel? How do you feel when they make fun of you?''
``Bad,'' she says looking down at her feet and murmuring. ``Joking and all.''
The others joke and snort and laugh and tell her it's not true, they're not guilty, she's crazy, what's the matter with her, - ``Hey, it takes courage to stand up here and be honest,'' Davis deftly cuts into the jabber. They settle down as the girl picks up where she left off. The rest comes out in a hot rush. ``When I try to be me everyone thinks I'm stupid and crazy. Then I can't be myself. I'm experiencing a lot of bad things. That's why I'm 15 and still in the eighth grade.''
The others are quiet for a change. The look of relief and accomplishment on the girl's face is all but written in paper as she settles down on the sofa next to her peers, and Davis carries on with his next point.
This pulling out the worst, and the tenderness, in teenagers is enough to make an outsider wince. But for Davis it's just another day in the life of trying to reach youth. And an exercise that could help keep teens from lashing out, from acting out, from dropping out.
This is Jim Davis, James H. Davis, to be exact, and he is. He wears black wire-rim glasses, expensive suits, and is always neat, orderly and distinguished down to the flower pinned in his lapel. At first glance, the 47-year-old instructor seems in a completely different world from these kids. He in his smart suit, his calm composure, his exact, measured cadence of speech. They in their baggy blue jeans, their boisterous and rowdy ways, their stilted speech and awkward, unsure manner.
Yet, they relate to him. They listen to him in a way they don't listen to other authority figures because he lets them know he cares about their future. That's all he's worried about, not about grades or homework assignments or right or wrong answers.
``Respect. Respect and dignity in actions and words,'' he tells them repeatedly through the 10-day class that these students have agreed to take to get accepted back into the school system. ``In your opinion, what do you think is respect? What does it mean to you?''
It's the basic tenet to his class, teaching youngsters what respect is, teaching them how to respect others and how to respect themselves. During the course of the next two weeks he'll weave in self-esteem, anger control, working with others, being part of the team, contributing to society.
This is what sociologists are calling the wave of the future in stemming violence in schools and society at large: Catching children when they're young, reconstructing how they respond to anger, sending them back into the world with new ways to resolve conflict.
Davis works with elementary and middle-school students, and his goal is to take his techniques clear down to day-care level.
``Being pro-active is something we must do,'' Davis says. ``Every child who is living and breathing is at risk.''
He started working with youngsters eight years ago when he worked for Family Services of Tidewater. His first students were substance-abuse offenders. Five years ago the Norfolk school district, alarmed at the number of students suspended for fighting, was looking for a way to change kids' violent ways before they hit the volatile high school years. Davis' class started as a pilot program, then moved to the Barry Robinson Center, a child and family guidance center in Norfolk, where it became a full-time program including students suspended from all of Norfolk's middle schools.
During the span of the three-hour class each day, Davis casts the students into situations where they turn crazy with frustration, get spitting mad at each other. Then he walks them back out in ways that don't involve fists and verbal lashings.
``When anxiety, frustration even anger hits you, how you respond either makes it better or worse,'' Davis says. ``Even the small things. It all runs together. Your response can fix it or make it worse. This is an opportunity to capture that.''
What he hears in class would keep another person up nights.
``How many of you have had a gun pulled on you,'' he asks the group of eight students. Four raise their hands.
``How many have had a knife pulled on you?'' Five students.
After one student nonchalantly describes some back-alley incident where he and a friend started out by joking around, then moved into an argument that left him looking down the barrel of a gun, Davis doesn't lecture. Even though he's horrified inside, outside he's as casual as the student. He asks a question.
``That could have ended ugly, don't you think? You see stories in the paper about people getting killed like that. We are talking about ordinary stuff that goes on every day. It can start mild and turn ugly just like that.'' He snaps his finger.
There's no doubt he's playing to a tough crowd here. A boy who got caught with a weapon and drugs at school. Another who punched a principal. A girl who accidently hit a teacher who ``got in the way'' of a fight with a classmate.
He sees the ill effects of society pop up in every group of students who come through here even though they cross every boundary of income and background. The single-parent families. Families where both parents work. The violence that permeates television, movies, street life, home life is inevitably regurgitated when the students get to school. And the lack of self-esteem, the fragile egos, the mix of racial attitudes can turn a mild incident into a suspension from school.
Davis is familiar with the settings where a lot of these kids are growing up. He grew up in Diggs Parks, a low-income Norfolk neighborhood, but one that's starkly different from the neighborhoods of today.
``The thing I remember most about Diggs Park is when I stepped out my door, I had parents all over the place,'' says Davis one day after class. It's a sense of community he doesn't see much anymore in neighbor-hoods, be they rich or poor.
Unlike a lot of the kids who come through here, he always had a clear sense of what he wanted out of life. He remembers as a 10-year-old getting up early one morning to go down to the corner store and seeing a drunk sleeping in the street.
``I couldn't fathom how you would let yourself get like that,'' he says. That was the point when he decided not to ever use alcohol.
And he didn't. He also always knew early on he would finish school, get a college education, do something with life. Those were things he knew, goals that were reinforced by parents, relatives, teachers.
His life profile - 20 years in the Navy, a master's degree, long marriage, daughter in college - speak to that clearness of vision.
What he sees lacking in a lot of children he works with today is not just that lack of vision for the future, but a lack of an inner sense of self. His job is to plant that seed of self, and hope that school, peers, family will keep it going. It's a tall order.
There's little preaching, but a lot of asking of questions in class.
``How do you know when you're getting angry?'' he asks. The students are sprawled out on sofas set in a circle at the Barry Robinson Center. ``Can you feel it?''
The students go down their list:
``You can't concentrate.''
``You feel hot, like someone poured coffee on you.''
``Your chest starts to tingle.''
``My hands make a fist.''
``I feel it in my head.''
By the end of the session they're discussing ways to make that feeling go away, by trying everything from going outside for some fresh air to talking through a problem instead of fighting through them.
``How can you start to make things better?'' Davis asks. ``How can you start to fix it?''
Years later Davis will run into former students he taught here for a mere week and a half. They remember him. Sometimes they're doing great. One teenager pulled out her grade card to show off to him. Sometimes they're back in trouble. Davis takes the success stories in stride, and doesn't sweat the failures.
``I can say unequivocally that 50 percent of the kids do better after coming through here. And I don't think that's bad.''
Tarmeco McNeil, a 15-year-old who went through the class three months ago after he was suspended for fighting in school, says he feels he went back to school with a new attitude after taking Davis' class.
``He acted like a father,'' he says. ``He talked things out with you.''
The weird thing, says Davis, is that even the kids that keep getting in trouble don't have any problem giving him a rundown of their suspension.
``You'd think they would, wouldn't you?'' he says laughing. It's his non-judgmental attitude that makes students honest with him.
``I'm just another guy to them,'' he says. ``One person to another. We look each other eyeball to eyeball instead of one up and one down. I do not have to like their behavior. I do not agree with their behavior. But the person, I accept.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by Beth Bergman, Staff
James H. Davis
KEYWORDS: SCHOOL SUSPENSION SCHOOL COUNSELOR by CNB