The Mock Turtle went on. “We had the best of educations . . . Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with, and then the different branches of Arithmetic—Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.”
Education pains me these days. No, not my own. It continues on to this day as I’ve never stopped learning.
I gained my love of learning while I was still in school. I had some amazing teachers who knew how to reach out to this once young man and show him how fun learning could be.
It was not an easy task. First, there was, and still is, my dyslexia. I still have a pretty good case of it, so much so that I have to have several sets of eyes check out the writing I do at work, for I am prone to adding in words and correcting spelling errors with my eyes as I read. After all, I know what I meant when I wrote something, it’s just that my brain, my eyes and fingers don’t always agree.
I shouldn’t even be a writer. I should be working at a Radio Shack somewhere. You see, I graduated from a school that was borderline at best. It was during the “will the last one leaving Seattle please turn out the lights,” era. We were in the grip of a recession and the good citizens of Renton, bless their hearts, handed the school district a double levy failure. This put the high schools, including my alma mater Hazen, on the brink of losing their accreditation, which would mean that our diplomas wouldn’t be worth the paper they were written on.
Morale was at an all time low among teachers, we had no supplies, class sizes were huge and there was no money for extra desks. It was pretty sad, really.
Still, I got a great education.
I know times have changed, but I find it hard to believe that today’s youth are so poorly educated these days. Yes, in Washington State we’ve been throwing all that lottery money that was supposed to go to schools into such silly things as fixing bridges and repairing earthquake damage. And now the McCleary decision mandates that we fix the problem by throwing tons of money at the schools without any promise that money will actually fix the problem.
Money isn’t the problem. Teaching to the test, poor parenting and uninspired students are.
I got a great education because the teachers I had loved to teach, they cared about their students and they had the latitude to teach us in any manner they could find to help us learn. People like Mr. Root, who came to class one day as a Russian, tore down the U.S. political system, then walked out, greeted himself in the hall, and came back in as himself to tear down the Soviet system. I learned more about these two world powers in that single hour than in all the years before.
The same could be said for many of my teachers. Mr. Gleason, who taught me to love music, Mr. McManus who found a way to make biology stick in this thick headed brain of mine, and Drs. Martinez and Kreugel who taught me to speak Spanish and write a term paper in two days, which sure came in handy in college.
I learned because I had great teachers, teachers who didn’t have to teach to some stupid standards test. Yes, that’s one of the big problems these days. The hands of really good teachers are tied so we can make sure that every student turned out of school thinks just the same and has the same level of knowledge as all the others. Mindless drones rather than free thinkers, as I was taught to be.
Sad. Of course, it’s not the teacher’s fault. We can blame the federal government and states for all that nonsense. And when it comes to students not wanting to learn, we can blame their parents as well.
Sorry, but when I was a kid my mom made sure I did my homework. I couldn’t do anything else until I did. To her, school was my full-time job and I had better be good at it. If it took bribery, so be it. She offered $5 for every ‘A’ I got each quarter.
Six classes, $5 each, even being math challenged I can see that’s $35. 🙂 Not bad in those days, at least not when it meant getting money for something I loved to do anyway.
Sure, my teachers were great and cared, they knew how to reach inspire us and teach us in such a way that we got it. They didn’t have to teach to any silly national or state tests and my mom, the drill sergeant she was, made sure my homework was done and done well.
But there was one little extra twist that led me to love learning and caused me to continue to learn all the rest of my life. I get a personal kick out of. Yes, learning inspires me. Understanding a difficult concept, mastering the chords of a song, finding out how to do something new or becoming aware of something I never knew before is an absolute thrill.
It’s deeply personal. I like to better myself. I like to get better at being a human being, learning more about myself in the process. Getting A’s was easy because I did it for me, not my mom or my teacher. Today, I still try to get that ‘A’ in every job I do, every piece I write, every project I tackle, whether it’s for work or just for giggles and grins.
Thanks to my teachers, my parents and my own initiative, I was given an empty canvas to learn upon, one in which I could learn to think for myself and not to be programmed to be a mindless, thoughtless drone, or learn such silly things as trigonometry, calculus, uglification or derision – the dominion of rocket scientists and geeks, not writers, artists and free thinkers.
In the Emerald City, still on the road of higher education,
– Robb