title: Under Running Laughter: Notes from a Renegade Classroom
author:  Quincy Howe 
description: After 15 years as a classics professor, Howe, "in dismay over the decline of humanistic education," took a job teaching inner-city adolescents remanded to a foster care agency in Yonkers, N. Y. Describing his experiences with his students--oppositional, undersocialized girls and boys, predominantly black--in unvarnished yet respectful tones, Howe briefly reviews the "psychoanalytic literature on the development of the dissocial child" that gave structure and coherence to his dealings with his charges. He examines their troubled home lives, the chaos of which may account for the intemperate behaviors that brought about their placement at the residential facility. Howe reveals conflicted feelings about his exhaustive, never boring labors and makes recommendations for improving the foster care system while remaining realistic about the youths' limited potentials. He is an unconventional teacher, and his dedication to his "throwaway" students is inspirational. <br />Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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  Chapter One - Benedict
  
  
  Blonde hair caught the midday light as the girl two rows down from me flicked
  her bouncy curls over her shoulder for the fifth time in the last two minutes.
  Her crystalline blue eyes slyly glanced over her shoulder, as if to check the
  time on the massive black clock behind me, and landed momentarily on my face.
  She curled her full, lipstick covered red lips up into a rather predatory
  smile. Then she turned back to the wobbly old lady at the front of the lecture
  hall and feigned interest in a speech on the classist laws of the Victorian
  era.
  
  
  She’d been repeating that motion for the last half hour of this class. All
  through the fifteen-minute lecture on the class syllabus, terribly boring, by
  the way, and now up through the doddery old professor’s speech.
  
  
  “Now, you see,” the elderly professor wheezed out as the blonde forced herself
  not to glance back at me too soon, “these laws separated the people into