The Power of Place

                I think I missed out on some educational opportunities. The social current of school seemed to take me along for the ride, but I often found myself trapped in the limbo between cool kid on top of the world and outcast nerd vagabond forced to forge his own identity and sense of self. I wasn’t cool, wealthy, good-looking, athletic, or brave enough to feel like I belonged. But I also wasn’t able to dissociate myself from those kids entirely and go my own way as they were what passed for my friends. I was funny enough to be allowed to hang around on the fringe, and even the coolness on the outskirts of their lives was addictive.

                What I wasn’t was sure. That’s what I envied in my cool friends[1] and nerdy, outcast friends alike: their clear sense that they belonged where they were. Whether where they were was at the center of a spotlight during the homecoming dance, on top of a cornhusking parade float, standing in front of a locker room full of teammates, in a dingy basement watching and re-watching Monty Python’s The Life of Brian and The Meaning of Life, sitting at a kitchen table devouring pizza and playing role-playing games several orders of magnitude nerdier than Dungeons and Dragons, or nestled away in a tiny practice room perfecting  tuba skills, I wasn’t sure I belonged there. I didn’t like what I seemed to be good at and wasn’t good at what I liked.

                How did I get here? How did I get there? How have I gotten anywhere? The three things that pop into my mind as the catalysts for my current condition are disparate and don’t, honestly, hold together perfectly.

                In fourth grade I discovered three new friends, Monty, Curly, and Doc. Funny, energetic, imaginative, daring: these were my people. They entertained me and made me have genuine fun. I think it registered with me vaguely that they and their clothes were a bit dirty, but this was endearing to me. I was a kid who spilled and made messes with a clockwork regularity. I hated taking showers and baths. I loved spending my time in the “creek” near our house, crawling through tunnels and imagining battles and adventures along its length[2].

                Fourth grade was at Northwest. My teacher lived down the street from my family, and I spent days and weeks at her house. Her son was my proximal best friend[3]. Her classroom is the first place I ever misbehaved and where I discovered how much fun it is to make people laugh. Monty, Curly, Doc, and I paid much more attention to each than any lesson. My first school humiliation came from going into the class bathroom and having Monty follow me in as a joke. Mrs. Burns brought us both out. The class howled. I didn’t enjoy that. Maybe I decided that if a group was going to laugh at me, it would be on my terms. I wish it was that clear.

                But then Doc and Curly came to my house one day. I’m not sure if they’d walked across town or had been ditched by their families at the grocery store, McDonald’s , or Wal-Mart that was near our house, but here those dirty kids were. In this new context I was frightened of them. Frightened of what my parents would think of them (instinctively realizing we were different from each other) and frightened of what they were capable of outside of Mrs. Burns’s iron hand and rigid classroom control. Curly immediately ran into my neighbor’s yard and began hanging from a tree I was terrified to touch. Mr. Day was the meanest man I knew. I never touched his property. A baseball hit into his garden, even though it wasn’t fenced, was gone. Need a new one. We can’t get that one. And there’s Curly hanging from his tree, bending its branches dangerously and bouncing his full weight as he hooted like a monkey. Monty was digging through our garage for things to do. He came out with my dad’s pitching wedge. My stomach twisted in knots. You can’t do these things. How can you be so certain this is ok? I don’t know how to tell you not to do them. You should just know.

                My dad came out and their … somebodies … pulled up smoking in a wan yellow jalopy. It felt like they were being chased off, though the timing was coincidental. I followed my dad back into the house, and he asked me who those boys were. I remember getting all those anxious feelings I’m used to now: stomach in knots, cold, tongue thick and slow. There was nothing in my dad’s tone, expression, or demeanor to make me feel so defensive, so confessional. My dad was not looming over me with a booming voice demanding to know their identities. He was curious. Probably glad to see that someone seemed to like me[4]. He even drove me to Doc’s house one Saturday to hang out. Not one word was spoken against those boys.

                But I never felt right around them. Something was irreconcilably different between us. We didn’t live the same way, see the world the same way. They were smarter, braver, and funnier than I was, but they didn’t have nearly the success I had[5]. They were always on the edge of my consciousness and we could laugh together in the right moments, but they weren’t my friends. As we went through middle school, they got in fights[6]. And they attended special classes. Somehow all of these kids who I knew to be funny and smart were being pulled out of class for Special Ed. By high school, Curly had dropped out and Doc and Monty spent almost all of their time in the Special Ed rooms. When I’d walk by, I could see them in there. Humiliatingly condescending posters on the wall[7]. They never seemed to be doing much. The room was sparse and their faces were masks of frustration and apathy. Why wasn’t I in there?

                My parents had me tested for the gifted program, and I came back with the results I always came back with: not quite in, not quite out. I could be the dumbest kid in the gifted class or the smartest kid in the regular class. I don’t remember making that decision. I’m guessing my dad picked the second option for me. Sounds like him.

                But if I’m supposedly almost gifted, why was Monty in the Special Ed class? Why was Curly? I became and remain convinced that these boys socio-economic culture was mis-read. They were unruly, uninterested, and unapologetic. I watched teachers try again and again with me[8], calling me a success when it had taken me three weeks to master something it took other kids a few days. I felt like a phony. And when Monty would creep out of his seat to explore what mischief he could create, it was the sign of his bad upbringing. The sigh and the look on the teacher’s face was enough for me to see that she didn’t believe in Monty. And if she wasn’t going to, who would?

                So how does all this make me a teacher? Well, I certainly didn’t think I’d be one when I was in high school, but the gravity of the unfairness kept drawing me back. I became the critical, questioning a**hole that I am because I grew up around so much educational hypocrisy. What teacher would admit that he or she doesn’t believe in all of her kids? And yet I felt surrounded by them. They catered to the kids with the right last name, the right address, membership in the right church. They gave them chance after chance, the benefit of the doubt, filled in the blanks for them in their semi-coherent answers in discussion. But my friends from those other parts of town[9] either got with the program or were dismissed out of hand. Their disengagement seemed to fulfill an expectation. Kids like that aren’t interested in school. I’m not going to work harder than they do. I bristle when I hear my colleagues say these things and find myself challenged to remain professional in my comebacks[10].

                I’m here because being marginalized is so easy. I’m here because someone has to be the jerk who will challenge the status quo.

               

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[1] Should I call them associates? Acquaintances? Friends is certainly too strong a word.

[2] I’d rather ignore the fact that the current me realizes that it was a drainage ditch. These kids wouldn’t have even cared about the difference.

[3] A concept I discovered or invented in middle school.

[4] Sorry, too pitiful. People liked me.

[5] Not that I set the elementary or middle school world on fire academically.

[6] Sometimes ugly, bloody affairs that were the fodder of school legend. “Donny threw his cousin Carl into a telephone pole so hard, his face exploded!” I believed that until high school even though I had talked to Carl the next day. He had a black eye.

[7] “We can’t spell success without ‘u’!” one cartoon own screeched with an accusing finger-feather pointing at me.

[8] Two hardest things to learn in fourth grade? The 7 times tables and that a three-letter word for color is ‘hue’.

[9] Which I rode my bike to as often as possible, and, you know, I just realized, they were on the other side of the railroad tracks. Whoa.

[10] Him: “I’m not going to work harder than they do.” Me: “Not much risk of that.”