I’m visiting a classroom in a close-in suburb near Chicago. It’s less a suburb, in fact, than an extension of the dense streets of small houses, tall fences around many yards and bars on most windows, that fill large sections of Chicago’s south side. This is a neighborhood past the bloc of hard-core poverty and public housing, home mostly to families that live in tight spaces, send their children to school through at least the first one or two years of high school, and live with parents away more often than home – at day jobs and night jobs, on the other side of a border, or boarding with another family as a live-in nanny or maid. “These children are unpredictable,” says the teacher I’m visiting, a ninth-grade math instructor at a sizable but not huge high school. Midwestern public schools often run to three or four thousand students, massive brick buildings that no longer even look like factories, because no one builds factories like this anymore, square brick castles three or four stories tall. This school is, in fact, brick, but more sprawling, and enrolls about 1,500 students, still far too large for students to be well known by most of the teachers who work there but smaller at least than it might be.

 
The teacher I’m visiting teaches six classes a week, five a day, in 50-minute periods. She has lunchroom duty twice a week and advises the student newspaper which, in fact, has not published an issue in two years. Three teachers are, officially, advisors to the paper, but they have not yet found the magical combination of three or four motivated students who can write clear English and external funds – most likely from advertisers – to pay for printing of a physical issue. “When we find the next student editor, we’ll probably go with an online edition. But most students won’t go online to see it. The advisors have an official meeting twice a year – that’s required if we want the credit for the extracurricular duty – and last time we thought that maybe a Twitter feed could be good. So many kids have phones. But I’m not sure they use Twitter. So many of them work. They text short messages, less social or thoughtful, more about something happening, key details. It’s actually interesting as math – counting the number of characters, figuring out informal code. I hope I can find someone who wants to try it this year, and has the time.”

 
Her classes are larger than she’d like, but absenteeism is so high that she usually has fewer than 20 students in the room, and sometimes a good deal fewer. Her lowest-level math course – Commercial Mathematics, not much more than addition, subtraction, multiplication and division – has twelve officially, and eight or nine on a given day. “This is a class that works. The size makes it the kind of class where we can get to know each other, and I can have students working on problems that really fit their personal level of ability. We’ll open with conversation about what’s happening in their lives, do about ten minutes of a presentation of a concept or a review of one of the times tables, and then I’ll have a group of about twenty problems for each student, about half the class can do the same problems, but the others will get some variation on the theme, pitched a little higher or a little lower.”
The students come in to class after an electronic tone hums loudly in the hall for three seconds, the halls fill with an enormous collection of sound: first tables, chair and doors, then a wave of urgent conversation with a few voices and words standing higher above the tide, and then in twos and threes, and then in a final trickle of three single students, they arrive. The first and most noticeable difference from their peers in higher-income schools: no big bags or backpacks.

 
A couple do have backpacks, but not bursting. They hold notebooks, pencils, phones, a little bit of food. There’s little mystery why: “They don’t do homework,” their teacher tells me. She’s not apologizing, though not happy about it.

 
“In this school, they simply don’t. We assign classwork as homework, and have them do it here. Or not do it, as they choose, but we encourage them. The question as a teacher is whether to meet them where they are and move them forward from there, or lay out some rules and standards, and see what happens. A lot of us have tried both and a lot in the middle. It’s not a matter of discipline, but it’s a kind of culture and language issue. If I came into your class and gave you a homework assignment with the instructions in German, or told you to do it on your private airplane, or assumed that you knew all the parts of some highly specialized game and just began talking in that language, what would you do? You’d scratch your head maybe, you’d ask a friend, your friend would say, no we just ignore that, it doesn’t matter, or you’d just ignore it on your own maybe, because you’re running off to work at McDonalds or to help your mother with the new baby, or to go clean houses. I don’t lose sleep about this. I start with who they are, where they are, and move from there. It’s meaningful in every way. It makes as much sense to focus on what we’re not doing here as it would to talk to a history major at Princeton and bemoan the fact that he’s not a chemistry major.”