insomnia: no real improvement. yet, i’ve somewhat come to terms with the beast. i don’t lay awake of nights now. instead i pursue the better angels of my craft. devoting the night to stride-piano. turns out my left hand is not AS BAD as i’d thought it was. its still NO GOOD. but, at least, i think if i make stride a priority in 2009, i may get somewhere.
but my last post reminds me, somewhat unsubtlely, of some other high school revelry. shapel and myself and the voyage didactic.
if the pseudo-religious order we created in sixth grade is something of mason-group/secret-society or some such, then i am likely to be giving something which could be called our secrets. its something of a give-away to even mention that we had secrets. or secret things. a secret sign, a secret inscription, secret handshake, maybe? certainly secret rituals and observances. we began in sixth grade praising out demi-deity, BOB, and formulating a philosphical regime around it. (truth be told: much of what i do today is still informed from the groundbreaking shit we came up with when we were thirteen and fourteen) . somewhere along the way our foursome became a kind of stranded pair of twosomes. Andrew entered a program and left for private school in the 7th grade. Anwar did it in the 8th grade. by ninth grade, it was just me and shapel and the great dark sea of public school.
its not that the teachers are bad in public school, or even that the adminstrators are bad (a thing harder for me to admit knowing so much of the politics as i do… having listen to my mother speak on it saturday and sunday mornings for a decade of my being astute enough to understand). moreso, it is a question of the philosophy of education. i’m shamed to say that Brooklyn Public Schools are truly impressive as regards their ability to NOT prepare their students for the world. i think of all the things that i did learn in school. and that was in the Eagle Program and the C.I.G program and at Brooklyn Technical High School and still: when i got to College i felt like i had an extraordinary amount of catching up to do. i had wonderful, fantastic, intelligent teachers (for the most part) and they taught me as much as they could in 40 minute incremements once a day, five days out of seven. but there is so much more i could have done.
sadly, i find my self now a full-fledged adult. 25 years old. working in the real world. and still when i launch into some new project my first step is always to do extensive background research in to things, i think, i should already know. not minutae or esoterica, but hardcore, straight-up knowledge.
i mean i read the Odyssey in High School, but not the Iliad. we study ancient rome and greece… as an antiquity section for the the regents. probably taking up about three measly weeks of time. i didn’t know about pericles, or thucydides, sparta, and the hot-gates, isocrates, socrates, plato, et al. ancient africa: was there even a section on that? i don’t recall any questions about africa on the regents. i learned math — but until i got to trig and calculus and physics… i didn’t know what the use of it was beyond addition and subtraction. i read shakespeare and learned what Iambic Pentameter was… but not really. i didn’t learn about other meters. i was forced, for 9 years, to take French as a language (not to worry: none of it stuck) and then offered french or spanish as a language in high school french or spanish. not even latin… the pater familial language. arabic? hebrew? swahili? sanskrit? german? (english is a germanic language… i can’t help but think if i’d learned german, perhaps i’d have found Rilke earlier. oh how much fuller i’d have been.) lets not even talk about the arts. i had the rare pleasure of being part of an insurgency at Brooklyn Tech. despite us all having to choose technical majors a hardy minority of us decided to add-on a de facto (so there’s a little latin, in him — and all the ladies say…) performing arts minor. a mixture of drama club, SING, the spring musical, DiBo’s Chamber Chorus training, and the various bands and orchestras. the school, i think, didn’t official seem to think that spending the equivalent of two or three periods a day doing music and drama meant much of anything in the overall scheme of things (too often we fought for the right to perform, to miss a class and take the NYSMA test or spend two days at BAM working with the Royal Shakespeare Co. on our abridged version of Taming of the Shrew).
ah well, i complain.
and i can go back further, you know. even though i was in the eagle program from Kindgarten through fifth grade, they had me in the lesser of the reading groups until the middle of second grade. this seems funny to me since i have been an avid read SINCE i could read. and i honestly don’t even know when that was? i couldn’t learned to read before i six, i think i remember learning letter in my first grade class… maybe it was cursive? but in second grade we were reading in class and out AND my mother’d starting leaving young adult biographies on my desk at home. [note about me: if i get started in a series, i generally cannot rest until i have exhausted the series. due to this peculiar condition i manage to read the complete: Beverly Cleary books, Pee Wee Scouts (even after they really were engaging books), BabySitters Club (yeah. i admit it. and what?), those biographies (they were like: American Heroes or something), all the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, Anne of Avonlea books, and its likely there are more... you can imagine what your boy did on weekend, dear reader? alone. in his room. with his books. and his glasses.]
anways, i was in the slow group. i know it was the slow group for three reasons. the first is, they would do a reading test at the beginning of the year (i bet they though i’d forgotten this shit) where you came up to the teacher’s desk. read aloud for a bit and then went back to your seat. and then, though they tried to make it seem arbitrary, they gave us reading books and accompanying workbooks. the books were the same brand, same covers, same everything — except colour. i think the “smart” kids got purple and the “less-smart” kids got orange or something. i remember knowing there was this divide, but not sure if or what i should do about it. i wonder, now, if my parents had to come in and talk with my teachers. it would be unironic that the teacher to put my in the “smart” group was my only black teacher until… from kindergarten to… dare i say?… high school? (ah! the subtle racism of: a lack of role models.)
that just an interesting anecdote. but more?
(i’m writing this in rondo form… so i’ll just palindrome it on out now…)
***
one day, in 4th grade, a woman came and pulled me and couple of other students out of class. she took us down into a room on the first floor or basement (i forget, but remember it as being a descent for some reason). and there, with about five or six kids, she had us write poetry for an hour or so, instead of doing whatever it was out class was doing. this was the closest i came to that feeling or experience of being in one of those prep-school movies, where just three or four students engage a professor who challenges them to be scholars. every couple of weeks… or maybe every week (i was 11 afterall… how was i to measure time. it was just school and not school, in those days.) she would bring us down stairs and have us write and talk to use about our poems. i remember only a few of the poems vaguely. one had to be about an animal (i did the Blue Whale, if i’m not mistaken) and one about a color (green was mine: “…it’s not easy being green / when there’s nothing to do / its not easy being green / …when you’re always blue.”). that was fun for a while. in fifth grade it was abandoned, as far as i know. it was the end of poetry. and i had JUST started to like it.
i really do wonder if my parents came in for a conference and my teachers told them i was a dull boy. and that i might not last long in eagle. that i was in the lesser of the two reading groups. and so forth. i was unengaged in such politics. knowing my mother, she would not have told me they thought so low of me anyways. i just know from later experiences that, perhaps, she had had to go to bat for me because my intelligence may not have been: apparent. (get it?! ha.)
***
all this is to say, shapel and i made a pact to question everything (in keeping with the general oeuvre of B.O.B.) and to look outside of the curriculum for knowledge. to be skeptical of any superlative or generalized statement. and to work out anything that was told to us to be true for ourselves before believing it.
it was by this route — by being academically combative with the institution of education — that we were able to more round-out our learning. still i am envious of my friends who were taught such things. who had the opportunity to learn a little latin, or linguistics, thoeretical physics, philosophy, culture, government (i took Honor Gov’t for a term in high school… turns out it had very little to do with reading and discussing the Constitution or Declaration of Independance or laws or supreme court decisions… and much more to do with memorizing the names and locations of states and their capitals… got an 80-tops, if i got anything, and the teacher thought me an underacheiver)… we managed to cobble together some Plato, Baldwin, Einstein, Aristotle, Malcolm X, Ralph Ellison, and W. E. B DeBoise (among others) to create a rugged, revolutionary frankestein monster of a dogma… and run around on that for about four years.
why is it the greater part of our learning had to take place outside of school? the result was mixed. Shapel just cut class for a straight year and half/two years and read on the train and in McDonalds. i cut gym and lunch… pretended to be sick or unprepared and read and wrote instead. got up early for school and sat around reading before class, debating with shapel over Minute Maid juice in my kitchen until eight or nine o’clock at night. a general distrust of authority and a mean rebelliousness where purported “intelligence” is concerned. i paraphrase T.S. Eliot… quoted to me by Prof. William Mullen of Bard College: What wisdom have we lost in knowledge? What knowledge have we lost in information?
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so — to wrap it up. i guess i’m teaching myself poetry again. can’t afford to have someone teach me write. not now, anyway. its always nice to learn about craft. humbling, too, that there 15 year-olds who have mastered what i am still have trouble to be pronouncing. sometimes, its a long, miserable voyage on choppy seas to get from the question to the better question.
