Model Behavior

On a Mission: Even in stocks, this enslaved Indian manages a smile.

Photo by Michael Amsler; illustration by David Rickman, courtesy Dover Publications, Inc.

The author wonders: Is it time to burn down the mission?

By David Templeton

IN THE YEAR 1769, beneath the gaze of Father Junipero Serra and under the guns of Spanish soldiers, a great number of stunned, baffled, and recently Christianized Indian laborers began construction on a giant wood and clay structure that was to be their new home. Called Mission San Diego de Alcala–part church, part farm, and part military installation–it was the first of 21 such installations.

Fifty-three years later, the mighty missions stretched all the way to Mission San Francisco de Solano in Sonoma. Catholic missionaries had introduced not only Christianity to the Indians, but smallpox, pneumonia, and venereal disease as well; by 1850 the native populations had been reduced from 30,000 people to a mere 3,000, and the missions–now a potent symbol of cultural contact gone bad–had been abandoned by the padres and lay in ruin.

But that is not the end of the mission story.

Over a century later, the building began again, at a rate never dreamed of by Father Serra. To date, literally millions of the baffling edifices–hundreds of thousands per year–have been obediently built, abandoned, and forgotten as part of a massive state-funded program. Last year alone, an estimated quarter of a million native Californians were forced to build missions, with only the faintest glimmer as to why. The reason?

Try the fourth grade.

MOST ADULTS who received their education in the public schools of California can recall their fourth-grade mission model project. A hard-and-fast tradition from Redding to Chula Vista, the annual building of mission models is as much a part of going to school in this state as are earthquake drills and smog alerts.

No one knows how the tradition began, or why it became so fashionable. The state curriculum–which has ordained fourth grade as the year that students learn the history of California–only says, “Teachers should emphasize the daily lives of the people who occupied the ranchos, missions, presidios, haciendas, and pueblos. Reading literature, making trips to a mission, singing songs . . . will bring this period alive.”

A sensible requirement. The mission era, and its dramatic clash of cultures, is among the most exciting and significant periods in the history of our nation. But what do the students learn about that history by building desk-sized replicas of one of these missions?

“Um,” says recent local fourth-grader Kayleigh McGinn, when asked the same question. “Was I supposed to learn something?” Adds her mother, Georgia McGinn, “We learned we shouldn’t have waited till the last minute. Other than that, the project was pretty much a nightmare.”

“The kids do learn something important,” explains one cynical school district employee from Chino after requesting anonymity. “They learn how to make marshmallows stick together.”

Aw, she’s just being nostalgic, remembering a time when the models were made of simple household items: shoeboxes, corrugated cardboard with glued-on noodles, sugar cubes, and graham crackers stuck together with marshmallows.

Though such low-budget versions still land on the teacher’s desk each year, an increasing number of mission models have gone upscale.

MADE OF not-inexpensive foam coreboard, painted with special coatings made to simulate the look of whitewash over adobe, with prefabricated sheets of plastic roofing that resemble the terra-cotta shingles of the missions, these models make the simple, quaint, old graham-cracker mission look like underfed distant cousins.

Not surprisingly, whole industries have sprung up to support the yearly mission-building tradition. Create A Mission–a subsidiary of the cryptically named P.C.F. & C. in Modesto–has come up with an entire line of miniature wagon wheels, mission bells, brooms, saddles, and crucifixes that lend an air of miniature realism to any kid’s project for “only” $1.99 per item.

A number of cardboard, punch-out-and-assemble pattern books are available, with prices ranging from $5.99 to $15. Canyon Foam Design in Ontario has even trademarked the term California Mission Kit as the name of its prefab styrofoam missions, available in the exact shapes of all 21 layouts for only $32.99.

According to Isabel Martinez, manager of Petaluma’s All Model Supply International, the average mission model can run up to $75. “I always know when it’s mission time,” she says. “The store is suddenly full of frantic parents and kids wanting to know how to make bushes and realistic roofing.” Asked what her own son, who recently completed his own model–in lieu of writing a report–had learned about the significance of his mission on the history of California, she said, “Honestly? Not one darn thing. No. That’s not true. He learned he can start something and finish it. But history? Not a thing.”

At this point it would appear that the educational value of this ritual of the mission model –assuming it ever was an effective tool for teaching history to children–has diminished so much over the years that it now exists mainly to support the mission-model industries. Some teachers now refuse to assign them, preferring to engage their students with other, more time-consuming methods.

Jim Silverman of the California History Project encourages teachers to have students make a quick study of the architectural facts of the missions, then choose a single mission to build as a class. Meanwhile, the classroom is transformed into a politically correct mission environment as the children take on the roles of the Indians, the padres, the soldiers, etc., and act out the culture clash with improvisational theater.

“Model building is fine. Anything you use to get their attention is fine,” says author Greg Sarris, a professor of literature at UCLA and the leader of the Coast Miwoks. “As long as you use it as an entrance into your students’ minds. Do you ask the students to imagine the missions being built by the Indians, and to imagine its effect on them? Do you ask them to examine the motives of the padres and all the other players?

“After establishing the mission period as an example of destructive culture contact, do you ask them to imagine how it might have occurred differently, with each culture giving to the other, instead of one choosing simply to dominate?

“That, I think, is what’s important.”

It is clearly time to rethink the mission-model tradition. But it may be too soon to trash the whole idea along with the countless dumpster-bound models produced each year. At any rate, it seems obvious that the powerful history of the mission era cannot be made to seem exciting merely by forcing a child to assemble a model according to some photocopied diagram.

But perhaps by relating the true story–with all of the riveting, complicated, philosophically complex, and undeniably bloody details–the annual building of a little model might indeed become an experience that fourth graders will never forget.

From the August 14-20, 1997 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Teen Terror

Blur: After the relative calm of elementary school, junior high can present a confusing range of experiences.

Hazing. Harassment. Guns on campus. Welcome to the strange, stressful world of junior high school. What’s a poor kid to do?

By Paula Harris

JUNIOR HIGH. Two simple words that can strike terror into the heart of an elementary school student–and parents. It’s the first day of school at a typical junior high, and the scene is feverish. Some students stride with confidence, but others hang back uncertainly in classroom doorways, clutching their schoolbags. Others dash blindly like beheaded chickens, in a lost panic, searching for the correct classroom. A few cling to mournful-faced parents in the parking lot, their stomachs swirling with butterflies.

Feeling lost, scared, and ignorant, parted from longtime friends who have been assigned different classes, they undergo trauma that can manifest itself in tears, sickness, and anxiety. New students find they must shift from the familiar and protected nucleus of elementary school into the “big leagues” of a sprawling junior high campus filled with both promise and peril.

That can be coupled with sudden increased responsibility and independence–carrying money, taking care of lunches, preparing gym kits, taking on more homework, changing classrooms, and coping with new teachers–all at a time when kids are dealing with internal and external biological changes.

It can be overwhelming.”Going from elementary school to junior high is one of the biggest transitions there is, even more than going from high school to college,” says Sonoma County Schools Superintendent Tom Crawford. “And the problem is as significant for parents as for students.”

According to Crawford, who was an elementary school principal for 18 years, parents are often loath to let their vulnerable children leave a perceived “safe” environment for a more hostile setting. “Too often, there are so many rumors about junior high–how big and dangerous and how bad the eighth graders are,” explains Crawford. “Parents see it as their child going into a big new world, their baby going into an unprotected environment.”

Still, Crawford adds that a lot of older students want to put the word out to new students that “you better walk softly, or you’ll be in trouble.”

Photo by Eric Reed, courtesy of the Argus Courier

Helping hand: Learn to know the warning signs about classroom stress.

AT JUNIOR HIGH, students may encounter for the first time in their young lives a panoply of real-world problems, everything from sexual harassment to gang violence. Crawford admits that current issues, such as gangs, are serious concerns. “Our society in general is more prone to violence,” Crawford says. “Junior high is a reflection of the community.”

Barbara, a public school instructional aide, says her family experienced teen hostility last year when her soft-spoken, gentle-mannered 12-year-old son became a student at Petaluma Junior High School. “My son was a happy McNear Elementary School student, the top dog in a secure, insular environment,” she explains. “Then, on the first day of junior high school, his status plummeted to the lowest place in a pecking order that is established by preying on the new kids.”

His scary experiences included being smacked and pushed into lockers by a group of “skinhead-type eighth graders,” says Barbara. “Suddenly there was physical confrontation and a level of intimidation which was invisible, but something he could rely on every day.”

While this was going on at school, Barbara says, her son would clam up when he came home. When prompted, however, he would describe the incidents “with little quivering smiles” and try to tell his mom it “wasn’t so bad.”

Within days of starting the new school, the youth became the target of an extortion attempt by a group of 14-year-olds. “A favorite hat was stolen from my son’s backpack. Later, a boy approached him threateningly and said, ‘Pay me $5 and get your hat back or get beaten up,'” Barbara recalls.

It turned out that the intermediary kid also was under threat of being roughed up if he didn’t secure the money. “There was a chain of intimidation,” marvels an astonished Barbara. “It’s like there are these Mafia organizations within junior high.”

Though her son, like many youths, didn’t want to talk about the problem, Barbara says the boy’s “numbed-out,” expressionless face and sudden predatory behavior toward his younger sister clued her in that something was wrong.

“It’s like sexual abuse cases: The children don’t speak directly about having someone hurt them–you have to tune into their behavior, their coping mechanisms, and whether they are lashing out,” says Barbara. Eventually her family solved the problem by discreetly going to school administrators, though she warns protective parents not to go charging into the school office, because that will only brand and humiliate the child.

While boys are picked on physically in junior high, the pattern with girls is that they are intellectually stymied, say some experts. “In junior high, a boy’s status becomes clear, but girls discover their status and begin to go downhill,” says Linda Purrington, mother of a 14-year-old daughter and a member of the Petaluma-based Parents for Title IX, a group that advocates for gender equality in public schools.

“If this happens, girls never recover ground. “

Trish Hallenbeck, a local marriage, family, and child counselor, and teacher of a “Parenting in the ’90s” course, agrees. “All of a sudden girls are shut down intellectually. For example, research has shown girls aren’t called on [as often as boys] in math and science classes. They’re derailed, or can be.”

Hallenbeck says girls who were feeling terrific about themselves in sixth grade suddenly become self-conscious and their self-esteem plunges. According to Cheyenne Purrington, 14, who attended Twin Hills Union School in Sebastopol, one friend found the transition so hard to deal with, she eventually developed anorexia. “Now she’s being home schooled,” says Cheyenne.

“Junior High is a big step, if you’re secure and you know who you are and what you want, you really come out well. But if you get in trouble, you drop back and your grades fail,” she adds

Parents must make sure girls are getting all the classes they need, Hallenbeck adds, and parents of all kids should be aware of the necessary requirements to get into state colleges.”

ACCORDING TO EDUCATORS, how students fare at the junior high level can make or break their futures. “If the child has an academically disastrous junior high experience, in most cases recovery is not good,” says Superintendent Crawford. “The more responsible students fare better than those who need more structure.” He adds that this new responsibility comes at an especially difficult time of life when a student is more apt to be worried about what he or she wore yesterday than about what’s on today’s test. While it’s a healthy development for junior high students to begin to exert their individuality and spread their wings, educators agree that parents need to be just as involved with their kids during adolescent and preadolescent years.

“Knowing where your child is, knowing whom they’re involved with at school, knowing the teachers and what the homework assignments are is so valuable,” says Crawford. “Some areas need to be addressed–these kids are neither fish nor fowl; they are searching socially for their identity. They don’t want their parents looking over their shoulder, but it’s just as or more important for parents to be actively involved.”

Hallenbeck echoes that sentiment: “It would be naive of any parent to think their [junior high­aged] child doesn’t have at least some working knowledge of drugs and not to know that the age for having sex is now down to 13.”

She advises parents to help kids become resilient and let them try to solve their own problems first, but to know when to step in if need be. “Keep communication open–children need a strong supportive home environment, as we all do when undergoing huge changes,” she says. “But don’t let lesser issues upset you. Sporting green hair isn’t the end of the world; starting to use drugs could be.”

Many schools prepare ahead of time to make the transition run more smoothly with such activities as principal/counselor visits to elementary schools, student shadow sessions–in which elementary students follow junior high students for a day, then report back–and pre-class orientation sessions.

“It’s such an important time,” says Hallenbeck. “I often think, if kids can get themselves through junior high, they can get themselves through life.”

From the August 14-20, 1997 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.