JOURNAL OF EDUCATION 77 Several children: (Groan) Not again. Mr. B, we done this yesterday. Child: Do we put the date? Teacher: Yes. I hope we remember we work in silence. You're supposed to do it on white paper. I'll ex- plain it later. Child: Somebody broke my pencil. (Crash- a child falls out of his chair.) Child: (repeats) Mr. B.; somebody broke my pencil! Child: Are we going to be here all morning? (Teacher comes to the observer, shakes his head and grimaces, then smiles.) The children are successful enough in their struggle against work that there are long periods where they are not asked to do any work, but just to sit and be quiet.9 Very often the work that the teachers assign is "easy," that is, not demanding, and thus receives less resistance. Some
This reminds me of my school site. The students were highly successful in resisting work. This resistance was usually misconstrued as unintelligence, struggle, slowness.