Category Archives: Education

• I liked the sciences pretty much.  I liked biology quite a bit.  I saw a TV show about a guy who traveled all over checking out the health of the world’s bat population.  I thought that was a pretty good job.  But my career in the sciences was screwed up by the Sputnik.  The Reds sent this up in 1957, an unmanned satellite that in pictures looked out as big as a basketball.  The Reds had got a jump on us.  We were behind in the technoscience race. And you’d have thought the sky was falling.

MSomebody got the bright idea that the reason the Reds had got the jump lay with the backwardness of America’s school children.  So the experts got together and decided to cook up a whole new science curriculum based, no doubt, on the most advanced principles.  This new curriculum arrived at my school, not in the form of books, but copied manuscripts tacked together with humongous staples.

The first time I got one of these books was in geometry.  We had a pretty good math teacher, but that whole year of geometry I never knew what was going on because the teacher didn’t know how to teach that stuff.  To scare us into trying, he told us our final grade for the course would be based on an exam the government was going to give us.  I got 28 right out of a 100 and was sure I had failed my first class.  But it turned out 28 right was pretty high and I got an A- for not understanding a damn thing the whole year.

Next year in chemistry was even worse.  We had another of those Xeroxed books and the teacher couldn’t make heads or tails of it.  All I remember about that class was staring at the periodic table above the teacher’s head.  At least in geometry I had learned about triangles and obtuse and acute angles and such, but chemistry I got nothing out of.  That’s too bad because now I understand, at least remotely, that the bridge between the animate and the inanimate, the living and deadness, consists of blind biochemical reactions and reductions.  I mean it could have been interesting.

 And my senior year trigonometry class—well, it didn’t have one of those new updated books.  We just had an idiot as a teacher.  We had maybe 15 people in that class; and again I struggled along trying my best to understand, but the teacher only seemed interested in telling us about what he had done the last weekend.

I guess even back then the world was getting smaller because something the Reds did fucked up my possible career in the sciences.  So when it came to college, I went with my strengths, with what I thought I could do well at, and became an English major, not having the slightest idea what that was, and did not become, like a number of people at my high school, an engineer, a sensible thing for a working class student to do.

The old lady said that in polite company three things were never discussed: religion, politics, and sex.  I guess we had an extremely polite family because none of these things were ever discussed; sex especially was not discussed.  I assume the old lady knew her four sons came equipped with penises.  But I don’t remember the word penis ever used.

Back in SC lacking bathroom facilities, we had a bath once a week whether we needed it or not.  In the summers, I remember we were lined up and one after another would step naked into a big wash tub and the old lady would more or less hose us down.  I can’t remember if she washed our male members; I am sort of glad I can’t.

When I arrived at the age of growing sexual interest, I knew I believe accurately how babies were made but that was about it.  And at that time, magazines and books on sexual subjects were remarkably absent.  “Playboy” magazine started coming out in the 50s, but it was kept in a special place in the drugstore and was covered with a plain brown paper wrapping.  Additionally, practicing safe sex could be awkward for a shy boy since condoms were not displayed out in the open but were locked up somewhere in the back and one had to ask the druggist for them explicitly and openly.

Being literarily inclined, I did more or less by accident lay my hands on Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, even though both were banned at the time for obsenity.  The latter was hard going, sort of murky, and hard to find the good parts.  Also there was stuff about sticking flowers in pubic hairs and the male figure had a number of names for this penis.  The book seemed a bit artsy-fartsy.  Personally, I have never named my penis.  Cancer was considerably better, clearer, more vivid and direct and I even liked reading some of the parts around the good parts.

But mostly I got my sex Ed. I think from taking Roman.  I mean Latin, but I like to call it Roman because learning Latin led me to learning about Rome.  You can learn a lot by learning Roman.  I came across Grave’s I, Cladius in the high school library; I read that and found it remotely titillating.  Unfortunately, the old lady who refused to recognize we had any right to privacy happened to pick up the book, read a bit of it, and got it banned from the school library because largely of its mention of Spanish Fly.

 This pissed me off.  In my edition of Claudius, Graves mentioned some of the sources for his book, so I went down to the public library and checked out a copy of Suetonius’ “Lives of the 12 Caesars.”  It had Latin on one page and English on the other, so my mother thought I was studying Roman.  Extra credit, I said.

I get the feeling Suetonius’ was sort of an early gossip columnist and spared no smut or filthy details in his biographical treatments.  Nero, for example, was a pig of the first water.  He killed his mother I think.  He raped women regularly and married boys.  He liked to dress up at night in the skin of a bear, prowl alleys, and commit sadistic acts of sexual violence upon both sexes.  This might not seem very arousing, but then lines like “he fondled and kissed her breasts” could send me to fantasy land.  And I learned a hell of a lot about other stuff from Suetonius about politics, and just plain murder.

I think in the Bible somebody says nothing is new under the sun.  The Romans ruled by panem et circenses.   The same as today, I think.  We’ve got so much bread people are getting bloated, and as for circuses there’s no end of them.

Everybody in high school complained about going to summer school.  “I am going to fucking summer school,” people would say and I would say it too.  Grumble, grumble, grumble.  But really I was quite happy to go since going got me out of the damn house for about 4 hours each day for six weeks as I recollect in the summers, and it was a sure fire way to get all my “solids,” as we used to call them back then–the courses needed for most colleges.

 One summer I took world history.  A guy I had never seen before and never saw after taught it; I think they must have brought him in for the summer.  Three to four hours a day for six weeks—that was a lot of world history for a class that really had no interest in it.  So at one point, he divided us into groups and gave each group a part of the large cork bulletin boards that went all along one wall, up to the blackboard, and then with another piece after that.  Each group was supposed to decorate its part with some “theme” about world history.

My group was all guys, five us that sat together on the far right side of the room, all guys in some sport or other. We got a lonely piece of bulletin board stuck off to the right of the blackboard.  The guys really didn’t have much interest and only one idea, “Hey, Nick, what should we do?”  So I said I would go home and think about it and bring something back to put up there.  They were OK with that.

So the next time, we got together to work on the bulletin board, I pulled out all of these pictures I had cut out of Time or Look magazine.  “Modern art,” I said to these guys, “and this here is Moandrayon.  He uses like these lines and colors.  So we will use this one here and use exactly the lines and colors he uses up there on the bulletin board; and like, here where he uses nothing but white, we will stick one of these pictures.”

And I pulled out a bunch of abstract expressionist stuff in bright, and dark, and murky colors.  And I pulled out a tape measure I had brought alone.  And they set to measuring and cutting up strips and tried it this way and that and figured out how wide the black strips should be, and a couple others starting cutting the letters to spell out Modern Art.

 And the next time we just stapled up what we had, stuck pictures in the various empty spots and we were done 1, 2, 3, way before anybody else.  The guys really didn’t know what to make of it—the other groups were like painting pictures of pyramids or cutting out covered wagons to go across the plains, and what we had was a bunch of bright color.  But Buddy, my catcher from Little League, eye balled it, cocking his head this way and that, and said, “Our’s the best.”

Later in the summer, I noticed the teacher had brought a camera and he was standing in the back taking pictures of our bulletin board.  And later he got the Principal in to show him the bulletin board.  And then when the class was over, the teacher asked if he could have the stuff we had made our project out of, and we said sure.  And then I heard from a guy who went to the principal’s office a lot that our bulletin board was up in the main offices.  So I went in there and walking down a hall saw they had stuck it up a bulletin board way too small and cramped it all up.

The rubes had no feel for modern art.

I know people who say that when they are feeling down or at wit’s end or at the end of their rope they perk themselves up by thinking of good things that have happened and they get a little warm glow that makes me feel better.  I don’t have any memories like that; but if I try I can almost feel warm about that bulletin board.  Things just sort of fit.  I got to use my brains and they did the work.  We did it and we all got an A for doing it.

That was cool.

Sophomore year of high school was a beast.  That was the year– my mother later said–that “they,” meaning her, had thought of sending me to a counselor because I had stopped talking.  That was the year too that I attacked Richards in the papers for my English class.  And towards the end of the basketball season, the coach came up and asked me if I wanted to quit the team.  Of course I didn’t; what the hell had made him think that I did?  Had I been screwing up or not trying?  I almost started bawling at the touch of personal attention he showed.  That was the year too I sat around thinking about killing my parents all the time.  I thought a lot about running away also as a less violent way to alter my situation.

I saw this vicious killer on TV who said his slide down hill started when he ran away from home.  You know, he said, I got a couple of miles from home and it started raining like hell and I hadn’t brought a jacket.  Man I was soaked.  And then a bit further down the road I got hungry but I’d only brought a quarter or something, so I went to this gas station and hit the attendant over the head with a brick and cleaned out the cash register.  And that was how he started his downhill slide to death row.

This killer simply didn’t know how to look before he leaped; or maybe he lacked impulse control.  My problem was that if I were to run away, I would be sure to check the weather forecast in the paper before I did so.  I was just too rational for my own good.  I had no money; I had no skills; and I was too thin to be any good at manual labor.  All and all, neither running away nor killing my parents seemed like a really good career choice.

I was glad I had done pretty well in school; I liked the attention and I even liked some of the stuff I was learning.  And if I didn’t do well my parents would be down my throat.  By sophomore year I began to realize there was such a thing as college and I more or less decided I would run away from home by making sure I went to college. Getting good grades was easy, but I had to make sure I didn’t rile my teachers.  So there in my sophomore year of high school, with no knowledge of the world and in many ways emotionally stunted, I decided what to do with the rest of my life.  I was going to college, get a degree, and make what they used to call a “decent living.”

Sophomore year was also the year I realized that they weren’t kidding about death.  I was walking home from school and was flooded with the realization of my morality.  It was a kind of mystical experience, not a rational realization; but one in depth.  The fuck of it was I felt almost, if not happy, at least free.  There had always been a way out right under their nose; I sort of put it into words at that time by thinking there was a part of me so small that they just couldn’t get to it.

Mr. Richards was my sophomore English teacher.  He wore bow ties.  And occasionally he would launch into a lecture, nearly a sermon, about the importance of being virtuous and how virtue was its own reward.  And how sometimes we might have to sacrifice stuff for the greater good.  Maybe he had been inspired by Kennedy—that turkey—; I don’t know.  But he got on my nerves

 Every year in home room, somebody would nominate me to represent the class on the Student Council.  I considered student government a complete joke.  I declined every time.  But this time Richards took me aside into his little office and gave me a lecture on how my fellow students looked up to me and that I should accept the role and the responsibilities of being a leader.  I thought the guy was full of shit.

So I started attacking him in my papers.  I’d write something like: if anybody thinks this particular character is virtuous and acts unselfishly, then he or she doesn’t know anything about the human race and should on such matters as these keep his or her mouth shut on things beyond his grasp of reality.  The he or she was Richards, of course; and I would always go on to back up my argument with intelligent counter evidence.

Things got pretty tense between us.  He liked to change the seating assignments.  So one week you’d be here and the next there.  Whenever I had any kind of choice, I gravitated to the back row or the sides.  I hated the front row; that’s where all the kiss ups and brown nosers sat.  So there I was sitting in the front row while he was going on about something, and very casually I stretched out my long legs and rested my feet on the edge of his typewriter stand.  Then I yawned.  Jesus, the look I got.  I pretended not to notice, till he whacked my foot and told me to put my feet down.

Those fuckers could always dish it out but they couldn’t take if for a second.

One day I was sitting in the back row—where I belonged—and when he launched into one of his moralizing monologues, I raised my hand.  He made the mistake of acknowledging me and for the next 10 minutes we went back and forth.  He tried to assert virtue; I asserted that people acted solely from fear—fear of punishment, fear of pain, fear of the law, fear of justice, fear of death, fear of failure.   There was nobody in the room but me and him; the rest turned their heads this way and that like they were watching a tennis match.  The bell rang, and my fellow students applauded.

I figured I had licked the fucker.  Still, I had to admit he had let me talk; in all my years in school up till that time I had never seen a teacher and student go back and forth like that.

I wrote another paper attacking the guy; I think it was on that damn Tale of Two Cities, with that idiot Sydney Carton—or something like that.  Mr. Richards stopped me after class, and said he hoped I knew he wasn’t an idiot and that, if I wrote another paper like the last one, he would kick me out of his class.

That gave me pause.  I had never heard of somebody kicking anybody out of his class before.  Out of the whole school, yes, but not out of a class. Where would I go?  And what for really—sticking my feet on his typewriter stand and telling the truth.  But something like that could get back to my parents and there would be hell to pay.

Looked like where ever I turned, the assholes had me by the throat.