Numb Trolleybus

Quotables

"Only I wasn't steering anything, not even myself. I just bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolleybus. ... I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo."

-- Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

"On the surface, it sounds irresponsible, but to flourish in a rapidly changing world, you actually need to make more mistakes. Fail quickly. Fail often. If you do something and it doesn't work, just recover in a hurry and try something else. ... Help develop a culture that is willing to fail its way to the future."

-- Price Pritchett, Culture Shift

"There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. It's like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction -- every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and that excitement at about a million miles an hour."

-- Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

thirteen years of sorry excuses

Saturday, June 6, 2009

I was recently writing to a friend of mine, bemoaning my dreadfully inadequate primary and secondary education and citing things like shitty curriculum and undereducated/underequipped teachers as I told my sob story. I forget how we got on the topic, but it's true, the school I went to was absolutely terrible, and this week, I was reminded again.

A couple of days ago, we were inside a Barnes & Noble not far from Houston when I ran across a display table full of famous titles. The table featured a sign that indicated these titles were required reading for grades 6-12 at a nearby Houston school district, books like Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter, Lord of the Flies, Frankenstein, and The Sun Also Rises.

The first thing that popped into my mind? We didn't read any of that in high school. Not a single one. Why? Because our school sucked, and this was just one symptom.

It wasn't just the fact that we had no required reading list, although that is part of it. One year, we were supposed to read Of Mice and Men, and I remember we spent weeks and weeks on the thing because our teacher couldn't get anyone to actually read it. One of my English teachers reminded me a few years ago that she had Sylvia Plath's poem "Mirror" in the curriculum, but I have no memory of it.

But curriculum was a problem all around. For starters, our school was so small and had so little money to spend that we couldn't afford teachers who were really, truly qualified. Most of them, as I remember, only had a Bachelor's, and only some of them were even working on a Master's. Plus, so many of them pulled double duty (one guy taught social studies, current events, psychology, and geography in addition to coaching girls basketball) that it was a case of doing so many things at once that you're actually not doing anything at all.

Foreign language was a joke. Our 23-year-old teacher spoke Spanish pretty well, I thought, but I was the only student in Spanish II; the other five people in that class were all in Spanish I, and the teacher spent all her time with them. There was no Spanish III at the time, and no other foreign languages, either (German I was offered either my Senior year or the year after, I forget which).

One thing that really hit home for me was when I went off to college, a fellow Freshman asked me "which" drama classes I had taken in high school. And my response was, um... "which"? Because our school had "Drama." And it was one semester long, accompanied by "Speech" the semester before. That current events class I mentioned? Yeah, that was one semester long as well, and Psychology was the semester before it. It was a package deal. The one thing I took away from Psychology was a round of the Ungame in which I admitted to the class that I really, really liked this girl Veronica who sat several seats to my right in that very class.

No one teacher did just one thing and did it well. The town drunk was our driver's ed teacher; he also taught junior high science and coached high school football. English teachers were also responsible for the school paper and the yearbook. One particular unlucky teacher each school year didn't have a room at all -- they would be stuck piling their books and supplies onto a cart and wheeling it around to the next available empty classroom every hour to teach the next practical joke of a class we'd be subjected to.

The school library was tiny, useless, and lorded over by a screeching, demonic senior citizen with one swollen arm and no mortal soul. The band director filled up the (one) pop machine every morning. The school guidance counselor was about as user-friendly as a rattlesnake and freely shared student confidences with the typing teacher. The computers were ancient Apple IIe machines running AppleWorks, which was outdated even at the time. And while students at other schools were busy putting on "Guys & Dolls," we were stuck with such greats as "Krazy Kamp" and "The Ballad of Gopher Gap." I was the forensics team from my Junior year on. We had no debate team. Time, money, and effort were poured into football, basketball, and track programs in a vain attempt to gain Booster Club funding.

So... required reading? Yeah, that seems likely.

I went off to college about as green as anything you've ever seen. I sat through Freshman-level history classes and hardly understood a word the students said, let alone the instructors. I hadn't read anything. I had no real composition background. I had no frame of reference for anything, historical or otherwise, and to make matters worse, I had skated through high school so easily that I also had no study skills, and it showed in my first-semester GPA when I scored two Bs, two Cs, and the first D I ever got in my life. My second semester GPA was even worse.

So today, as my cousin Tyler walks across the stage and receives his high school diploma, I can only hope that he has gained more from the last thirteen years of school than I had at that same age. I was woefully unprepared for even the most basic of college classes, and it's a wonder among wonders that I ever amounted to anything or accumulated any significant education. People are quoted in our Senior yearbook as saying they felt they received a better education because of the school's size, but that size was the very reason we all got shafted to begin with. It's easy to blame the public education system as a whole, which is fundamentally flawed and needs to be either overhauled or abolished, but my high school in particular served as a prime example of what not to do, how not to educate children, and how to produce graduating classes full of chaw-spittin' rednecks who shed their caps and gowns and climb right back into their combines and John Deere tractors without an educational foundation to stand on. Those classmates of mine whose lives now amount to something only have themselves to thank; they certainly had no early help whatsoever. And I can only hope that my high school has changed with the times in the sixteen years since we left behind Mayberry and the egregious educational disservice we endured those thirteen years.

posted by N.T. @ 1:25 AM

1 Comments:

At June 11, 2009 6:07 AM, rechumor said…

I agree with your assessment of the public education system. Or at least half of it. I don't believe it can be overhauled.

It can't be fixed, because it's not broken. It does exactly what it was designed to do, and that is crank out automotons with no critical thinking skills who are good at following orders and working as unskilled laborers.