Loving Well   The Return of Love and Other Virtues to the Classroom Lexicon BY JEAN HENNELLY KElTH   ON THE BLACKBOARD OF THE WELL WORN classroom lined with turquoise metal lockers are written psychoanalyst Erich Fromm's prerequisites for healthy relationships: responsibility, knowledge, care, respect. Anticipation and concentration are almost palpable as twenty-one eager eighth graders - grouped as prosecution and defense teams, judge, and jury -- prepare for a mock trial that will find the accused guilty or not guilty of being a bad father. The inner-city Thurgood Marshall Middle School in Lynn, Massachusetts, draws students from the middle, working and

underclasses and a multiplicity of ethnic and racial groups with diverse cultural mores. Janice Koskey's English class is embarking on the Art of Loving Well, a character education program developed at Boston University. Designed to be incorporated in eighth-grade language arts and health curricula, Loving Well engages young teens in a range of good literature that examines love relationships -- familial, friendship, romantic, and marital. The goal is to foster healthy, responsible sexual and social values in adolescents through insights gained from reading a culturally diverse selection of short stories, essays, and poems -- from Shakespeare and the Brothers Grimm to Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, and other contemporary authors -- and through participation in a variety of related activities offered in the course's text, The Art of Loving Well. Koskey's students are analyzing "Ancestor," an autobiographical poem by Jimmy Santiago Baca, in which the father is portrayed as a complex character of apparently conflicting traits. In addition to ferreting out the metaphors, meter, and meaning - a usual English class expectation - they explore what it takes to be a good father, examining and exchanging their personal values in the process. They discuss the requirements of parental responsibility, expressions of familial love and pride, and intangible parental gifts to children. They must support their views with "evidence" from the poem. Their arguments are made with conviction.

"He was selfish and childish; he just showed up for meals," claims a prosecutor of the Ancestor.

"Fathers are supposed to be there for you; to teach you," adds another.

"A responsible father would acknowledge his kids, and a good father would obviously show his love for his family," asserts a third.

The defenders counter, citing from the text:

"There was a mutual understanding between father and children . . . they loved one another and didn't need words."

"The father loved his children so much he didn't know how to express it."

The legal teams work cooperatively, reviewing their notes. Koskey moves among the groups -- consulting, questioning, encouraging. Several members of the: all-female prosecuting team say they want; to be real lawyers someday, to "argue and prove their points." The jury deliberates and ballots are handed to the foreman. The robed judge pronounces the verdict: the Ancestor is judged not guilty of being a bad father; the decision was dose.

Koskey, a Lynn teacher for twenty-four years, helped pilot the Loving Well project when it was launched in classrooms around the country in 1988. Her approach strongly emphasizes English language skills, writing, and literary analysis with her multiethnic group of students, 30 to 40 percent of whom are learning English as a second language. She guides her students gradually toward safe, comfortable discussions about loving/sexual relationships by building trust and cooperation. The sequence of sections in the text -- Early Loves and Losses," Romance," and "Commitment and Marriage" -- and the variety of suggested activities enable teachers to tailor the course, varying the intensity of the material and assignments, and to draw students into the heart of the matter carefully. Later i" her course, Koskey asks students to talk about the nature of femaleness and maleness by writing "something-I've- always-wanted-to-know" questions to classmates of the opposite sex. She says the students love it.

Last year some high school alumni of Koskey's Loving Well Classes were interviewed for ABC News with Peter Jennings. Although the segment didn't air, their candid responses to questions about Loving Well moved her. A male student said, "I used to think that when I grew up, some woman would fall in love with me, and everything would take care of itself. Loving Well taught me that we'll have to work at it." A female student said a story she read in Loving Well came alive for her in high school when a boy pressured her to have sex. Paraphrasing from the story, she told him,"No, my body is my own." Koskey believes that Loving Well ''plants seeds" for standards of behavior as adolescents mature. She says her students range from "very young kids to those who have been around, exposed to the possibilities. They want and need this guidance on how men and women are supposed to act. They are so engaged and responsive. The rewards are great."

In an affluent suburb twenty miles to the west,Wellesley Middle School English teacher Nancy Tarlin Flescher (CGS'64, SED'66) says that Loving Well's "Use of literature as a basis for discussion gives students safety to express ideas, feelings,and opinions about a subject very important to them." A teacher for nearly thirty years and, like Koskey, a Loving Well pioneer, Flescher approaches her eighth-grade Loving Well classes with a mix of humor and thought-provoking questions. She sees her role as trying to raise students' awareness of the sometimes-predictable consequences of their actions and of the choices they have in shaping their lives.

Her students examine the effects of media in manipulating attitudes toward love and sex. Says Flescher, "It's important to give kids a sense that TV, where everything is resolved within thirty minutes, including commercial breaks, is not reality. We try to scratch the surface of fantasy. " Students look at teen glamour magazines, analyzing peer pressure and cultural values about outer versus inner beauty and cosmetics, cosmetic surgery, and fashion fads to attract admiration. She uses props such as spiked high heels, which both girls and boys have fun trying to walk in, to spark conversation about media-driven standards of physical beauty.She asks students to question the advertising image that "if you smoke the right brand and wear the right clothes, you'll find true love and live happily ever after."

Flescher says that students love the course because they are asked to think in depth about their opinions on important personal matters, like loving relationships. Parents like it because course assignments encourage dialogue with their adolescent children. For example, students interview their parents or other interested adults about how parenting changed their lives. To create a trusting atmosphere, Flescher shares some personal experiences with her students. In connection with the short story If Only, a student favorite in which the main character is devastated when her young brother accidentally dies after an unreconciled quarrel between them, Flescher talks about her own bumpy teenage relationship with her mother, to whom she providentially apologized over a spat the day before her mother died in an auto accident. Flescher says the student discussions in her Loving Well classes, prompted by their reading, tend to be honest and healthy; "the kids feel fairly safe in what they have to say."

Flescher's students comment: "Although some of the stories have old-fashioned settings, the issues seem contemporary; the relationships are still relevant." "It's more fun to discuss these stories than what we usually discuss [in school] because the topics are closer to us." "Ms. Flescher told us a story about her mother that made us all feel that we need to try to be nicer to our own mothers." "A lot of kids are a lot more shy when it comes to discussing love and sex."

Flescher and Koskey were among hundreds of teachers trained in Loving Well Workshops run nationally by the School of Education over the last eight years. Funded by a five-year grant from the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Adolescent Programs in 1987, Loving Well is taught in public and private schools across the country, from Alaska to South Carolina, and receives increasing international interest. Schools in forty-seven states have purchased the textbook, and teacher workshops are planned in Colorado, New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, and California this year.

The curriculum's premise is that reading and careful thinking about stories "enable students to develop healthy relationships indispensable to productive adult life," says Stephen Ellenwood, SED chairman of curriculum and teaching and director of the Loving Well Program. He describes Loving Well as "anti-impulse," presenting students with "vicarious, vivid and vexing" experiences of a range of loving relationships that they can ponder and judge throughout the safe, anti-impulse activity of reading. "The goal is for students to grow in judgment and wisdom and to avoid rookie mistakes."

Program Coordinator Nancy McLaren, a former high school English teacher who collaborated on the literature selection, developed and wrote the activities, and oversaw the field testing, says there is support for Loving Well across the sociopolitical spectrum. McLaren says, "Kids tend to opt for immediate sexual gratification; they are focused on themselves...but they are also idealistic and impressionable at this stage of their lives. Relationships with friends and family and first romances are very important to them. They resist preaching but are responsive to stories. The richness of good literature reflects real life, and the credible characters and events in the Loving Well anthology raise issues central to the lives of young teens. By analyzing language and feelings in ever more refined terms, they are empowered to make healthier and happier choices. Loving Well teaches that reflection leads to better decision-making and that there is value in collective wisdom."