Remembering My Why – and Why My Why Is Completely at Odds With Education Today
Posted
My mother once saw me guest speak as an author and cartoonist at a young authors’ event at an elementary school near the house she once wintered in here in Florida. In my speech I spoke rather glowingly of my childhood full of feverish enthusiasms and creative endeavors: books, an attempted science fiction super 8 epic film, a musical play about a boy wizard, and comic strips (among other things). Afterwords, she told me she was surprised, because she’d had the impression that I thought of my childhood rather negatively. I assured her that there were a lot of great things in my childhood, along with the not-so-great things.
My childhood was often great. It was fun, full of imagination and play and creativity. But it was also rather dark at times. Like many things, it was a paradox.
A school counselor friend recently told me about the idea of ACES – Adverse Childhood Experiences. The more of the 10 experiences a child encounters growing up, the more likely the child is to experience ill effects in childhood and adulthood, including, according to the CDC, mental illness, addiction, depression, and suicide attempts. In children, ACES can interfere with learning in school.
Upon reading the list of these experiences, I realized, many of them applied to me. In fact, 7 out of 10 applied to me. That’s a pretty high number. I know other people have had far more trauma in their childhood than I did, but I still survived quite a bit of crap in my youth.
Several things helped me cope. One was my mom – the sane parent in my life. But the other things that saved me were my creativity, my writing, and my literacy; three things that were encouraged by teachers.
Mrs. Gottung let me teach cartooning to the other kids in 3rd grade. My elementary school art teacher, Mr. Ross, was a cartoonist and children’s book author and illustrator who encouraged my own early comic strips. Mr. Roach let my friends and me create a magazine in class to share with our classmates in 5th grade. Ms. Delvecchio, my junior high art teacher, encouraged my art and wrote a magazine article about me for School Arts Magazine. Mrs. Bronson, my 7th grade art teacher shared my science fiction story with the whole class – on dittos! I was encouraged to write more fiction in 8th grade and won the grade-level short story contest. In high school, I was allowed to write my own unique essays on the plays and novels we read – I wasn’t hemmed in by standardized prompts. I wrote about the musical Follies through the lens of the psychology books of M. Scott Peck. I wrote about Romeo and Juliet in terms of Kairos and Chronos time, terms I’d learned from Madeleine L’Engle’s memoirs. Mr. Jacobs read both my librettos for musicals, Gamyarie and Rev! during my time in his American Musical Theater class. During his Theater Arts class, we did a project where we wrote a puppet show, created puppets, and performed our show for elementary school students.
My reading life was encouraged by teachers as well. Mrs. Brew introduced me to Beverly Cleary, the first author whose entire opus I read in its entirety. A camp counselor named Rick introduced me to the Narnia books, which ignited my lifelong love of fantasy. Mrs. Meyers, my ninth-grade English teacher, helped me enjoy a non-fantasy book for the first time when we read To Kill a Mockingbird as a class. In eleventh grade, Mrs. Hughes encouraged me to talk about big ideas in books when we read The Count of Monte Cristo and The Bridge Over San Luis Rey. In high school, Mr. Jacobs encouraged me to study the musicals of Stephen Sondheim, an experience that broadened my horizons and heightened my own creativity. Once Mr. Jacobs knew I loved musicals, if he found any Broadway cast recording LPs on the cheap, he’d give them to me.
And all my English teachers took an interest in what I was reading outside of class – a riot of fantasy, science fiction, classics, comics, psychology, and popular science.
I cannot say enough about what these experiences – and others like them – meant to me, how much they made me feel good about my weird, creative self at a time when my dad had rejected me as a freak. My English teachers gave me the autonomy to be creative, to find my voice, and to freely interact with texts and books, finding my own unique insights – insights that helped me survive my childhood. English class probably played a large role in saving my life.
I know “Remember Your Why” has become a cliche that appears in hundreds of teacher memes by now. But I do remember my why. I want to pass my love of reading and writing on to my students because at the very least I hope to enrich their lives. At most, I hope to help them overcome their own ACES – to find a way forward in life by gaining wisdom from books as well as the inner wisdom they can discover in their own writing. I want to help them as human beings.
My teachers were true professionals. I don’t recall any of them using canned curriculum. I remember them building their year using the resources they had at hand. I remember them getting to know me and then fostering my potential, helping me overcome my childhood traumas even when they didn’t know about them. The teachers who did know about what I was going through at home helped me through it. Mrs. Wolf in 8th grade was completely understanding when my homework wasn’t done because we’d been chased out of the house by my father and had to spend the night with friends.
They were also, many of them, creatives themselves. Mrs. Myers ran the theater program at the school. Mr. Ross, as I mentioned, was a cartoonist, author, and illustrator. Mr. Jacobs wrote magazine articles, including an interview with cartoonist Al Hirschfeld.
Skip forward to today. We give lip service to that kind of teaching. But all the system really wants is higher test scores. Writing creatively? Not if it won’t raise scores. Reading to find or create meaning, to relate the words to your life, to find your life somehow changed by an author you will never meet? None of that matters. You may never meet your favorite author, but you’d better meet those benchmarks!
My teachers would not be allowed to teach in the ways that saved me these days. They would have been standardized. They would have been told not to allow students the crazy autonomy and creativity that they gave me.
They wouldn’t have been allowed to save me.
I remember my Why every day. I want to promote love of reading because it can change lives, help students cope with life, and enable them to engage in the big questions. I want to promote love of writing because writing can help students find ways forward, imagine better futures, find their voices, their passions, their paths in life.
But today the system wants them to correctly answer nitpicky multiple choice questions about how figurative language creates mood. It wants to limit their writing to reading three dull articles and creating a formulaic regurgitation of those ideas. Today’s system is actively stomping on my Why, is crushing the kind of teaching that saved my life.
I have to wonder, if I were a teenager today, would English class help me survive my childhood, or would it be a kind of trauma added to it? I have to wonder – would today’s English classes have helped save me?I think you know the answer.
I recently drew this strip as part of my Halloween “Beetledirth” series; I think it sort of encapsulates what is happening now:
We settle for easily tested skills. There is a price to pay for that. In my case, it might have been my future.