Write about how your family viewed education and how that impacted your relationship with it.

Prompt 10 of The Prompted Memoir

So back in the very first chapter that describes my first neighborhood, I wrote a lot about my first experiences with education at Seth Paine Elementary School. “Disappointing” would be one adjective to describe those experiences; another would maybe be “foreshadowing” because I struggled constantly in K-12, not with learning in and of itself so much as learning shit I had no interest in yet was forced to absorb.

And fuck me now, homework. 

In second grade, I discovered the joys of the library (see chapter two about hiding places. You will see that reading played a significant role there) and being allowed to check out books, lots of books! So one would think that such joy would influence my disposition toward school. But wait, we couldn’t just read for the sheer joy of stories on the page, cool information about how the world works. Oh, no, we had to do more than enjoy those books. A “Reader beware” warning would have been appreciated because we also had to write book reports. I mean, whatthefuck, read it yourself. How could I possibly share what was cool about a book? Such a subjective thing. But wait again, what we had to do was record facts about the books: title, author, number of pages, subject matter, and then finally why we liked it. Duh, I don’t know. Could you give me an example please? No? Okay, then I will just skip that last question because at seven, all I knew about books was that I really liked to read them. But nope, not good enough. “Please finish” was written on the top of the page, and I trudged home with the unfinished book report crumpled in my hand. 

“Well,” says my mom. “Just sit down and finish it.” 

“I can’t,” I whine. “I don’t know what to write.” 

“Well,” she says again, “Sit there and give it some thought,” and then off she goes to some other room where she will not have to listen to my laments.

I draw a blank. Millions of Cats it is titled and it’s about an old man who finds a shit ton of kitties, takes them all home only to be told by his wife that they can only keep one. They can’t decide which one, so they leave it up to the cats by asking them to figure out whichever one was prettiest; that one would be the cat who could stay. The next day all is eerily quiet and the old man and woman discover--wait for it--that the cats had fought over deciding who was prettiest and they ATE EACH OTHER. All but one scrawny little thing that the old man and woman kept. The End. I must now reveal the question begging to be asked and answered: if that one cat is the sole survivor, would it not be something other than scrawny after EATING ALL THE OTHER CATS? I must admit  that this incongruity did not come to mind at the time. 

Anyway, I sit there thinking that there must be some deeply significant meaning to the book that I am now tasked with uncovering, some existential life-lesson that I shall share in my book report and then carry to my end of days. Nope, nothing. I mean sure, it was cool that the old man found so many cats and yeah, asking them all to decide which one was the prettiest ended in what now seems as deeply macabre and wildly disturbing for a seven year old. (Did I mention that the book nonetheless won a Newbery Honor in 1929? No? Well, whatthefuck). But the secret of what the book report requires eludes me. I am squirming and whining and feeling not a little sorry for myself to be required to do what surely only someone who has studied the philosophy and symbolism of children’s books is capable of doing: uncovering why I liked the book. 

“I can’t do it,” I say through tears of self-pity. The torture has gone on for what seems an eternity.

“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” says my mom as she reenters the room, finally relenting to my dolefulness. “Just write that you liked the book because you like cats.”

Wait, what? That’s it? That’s the deep secret? Whatever. I do as I am told and the book report is now finished. Stupid, but finished.

Education was a requirement in my home and we were mandated to do our homework, all of it. But as the above pericope from my years of formal education shows, it was not about the joy of learning, nor was it a communal enterprise. No one sat with us; no one showed interest or a spirit of inquiry about what the bulk of our school days entailed. I can try to justify why this was so by saying my mom was just coming out of the fuckedupedness of one heartbreakingly failed marriage and into one she kind of didn’t really want along with surprise! twins as part of the bargain. Making it through the day was job one for her, and whatever her twins were doing in school was not a top priority, so long as no notes from teachers reporting bad behavior came through the door.

Where, one might ask, was my father during those early school years? Well, given the times, he was At Work, and when he came home, there was not much left of him to do stuff like Take an Interest. And once my sister and I were in the fourth grade, shit was hitting the fan with a godalmighty fury for him and for us as well, although we didn’t yet realize how deeply we were to be buried in it. An unexpected brain surgery to remove a blood clot left him addicted to painkillers, and once those were no longer available, his predilection for alcohol became a driving force of intense need that haunted him to the end of his days. 

But back to education. As I limped through fourth and fifth grade, my report cards were constantly peppered with this remark: “Holly does not work up to her potential.” That blank condemnation was reduced in my thinking to simply, “Holly does not work.” Back then, report cards were stiff paper things that followed us throughout the year, and every few months we had to take them home and get them signed by a parent. Whatever. Looking back, I can now see that I was not a lazy student; I was a disinterested student. And, apparently, my parents were also disinterested. They paid good lip service to the importance of doing homework and studying, but when faced with the evidence that my education was not going as it might have, no one sat with me checking homework or even checking to see what my homework was, and godforbid anyone find out what the actual fuck my teacher was doing to encourage me, other than writing those cryptic remarks about my potential. I did not know what that meant--“potential”-- and no one told me. Because of the shit job I knew I was doing on school work, I assumed the comment indicated that I was lazy and even better, inept. 

I now know, had my dad’s inability to live a sober and emotionally honest life not ruled every aspect of our home, that I maybe could have done better in school. Not because I would have Seen The Light about the Importance of Education, but because someone might have done a different job of parenting me as a student. I would maybe have resented the shit out of it, given my rebellious nature, along with a steep resentment for learning stuff that was uninteresting to me. However, it was my dad who placed the excitement of learning to read and write in my five year old heart; it was he who came home one day with kindergarten work books for my sister and me to plow through. He was also the man who took advantage of the GI bill and got his BA in English once WWII was over. I can only imagine what his early years as a student must have been. Having been passed around from one distant relative to another, clearly no one was helping him with anything so trivial as homework. And yet he was part of that first wave of non-elite men to enter the halls of higher ed, long before college was seen as a right for everyone rather than the privilege of the few. If only his degree in English had meant something to the world, if only it had opened doors for him that allowed his love of books, his love of words to be a part of his everyday life. But nope, his fine BA in English led him first to being a gardener and then once he had a family to support, to the horrid work of account collections for Sunbeam Products, the maker of small shit for the home. 

Have I digressed? Perhaps, but in my head I am faithfully answering the question. My family’s view on education was that it was important, but no one seemed to have a clear idea why. I mean, for four years my dad studied English, fell in love with Shakespeare and creative writing and of course Robert Frost and such. Education allowed him to touch beauty. I was he who instilled in my twin and me a sense that books matter, yet I was not able to see why very clearly. But the bill of goods that kind of haunted him was that an education would/should lead to better opportunities. Whatever. Not so much so for my dad.

And so how is this for deep irony: many decades later, well after I became a parent myself and settled into what was a pretty conventional middle-classed white people life, I too set off to university and got myself not only a BA but an MA and half way to a fucking PhD in--ta da!--English. I had finally recovered that child’s wonder, that beginner’s mind, of delighting in learning all kinds of cool stuff which led me back into the classroom as a student. So go ahead, ask me about rhetorics old and new, about Thing Theory and Transfer Theory, about Critical Literacy and about Foucault. 

Well, maybe don’t ask about Foucault because I didn’t understand him when I read his work; I had to have it explained to me. It is cool and everything, but thank god I did not have to write a book report on anything he wrote. 

So anyway, as I think about all that I wrote here, I am left pondering the differences between “learning” and “education.” I am for the first time in my life able to see that they are not synonyms. A beginner’s mind, indeed.