Tuesday, March 18, 2014

New Beginning

Imagine the answered problems as black pixels and the unanswered ones as white.

The child gets his fill of language, more than he understands at the time, from the local bookstore. He made the jump to adult-level novels the summer after kindergarten and never stopped inhaling the prose. He loves the action and adventure of Mike Stackpole's X-Wing series and never loses his love of a galaxy far far away.

The math is the worst. With no outlet in life outside of school the timed tests and emphasis on arithmetic he had mastered a year prior, he stagnates. He doesn't pass a single test for the first 8 months of the school year. His teacher assumes the problem is ability, not seeing the pictures. His imagination, well-nourished by the solitary play of an only child and the fantasy stylings of his favorite books, draws simple nine-by-eleven-pixel bitmap pictures on the tests, using them as a creative outlet rather than a demonstration of aptitude. Circles, Stars, Spirals – on one he leaves a single blank space, dead center.

The teacher and his parents disagree on the cause.

The teacher argues that there is a lack of skill, not seeing her student working quickly on the test and finishing early, nor that every problem that is answered is correct.

The parents argue that the cause is a boredom with the material, not seeing the child's innate imaginative expression come out in the test, nor that the child is not in fact bored by these tests.

They are both wrong.

He is quite entertained by his own version of the testing game. It is mental exercise of the best kind, stretching both the concrete arithmetic skills and the abstract imagination. He enjoys his version to the exclusion of most activities he has access to in school. He prefers only the open-ended, unstructured games of the playground to it, games he can play with his friends while subtly playing separate games altogether. The first-grader version of hide-and-seek gets old quickly, but moving from hiding place to hiding place, following the seeker without being seen, now that is joy. Eschewing objects to hide behind in favor of darting into the hilltop fog and dropping to the ground, that is cleverness.

Nearing the end of the year, he begins to fear being held back. He wishes for new games to play with the rigid, overly-structured schoolwork he is given and that will not happen if he is forced to repeat the first grade. Moreover, he will lose his friends, whom he values dearly.

He begrudgingly paints his entire canvas black for weeks to make sure he finishes the course of addition and subtraction testing. He still finds ways to make pictures and patterns, but they are fleeting and ephemeral, filled in mere minutes later with no one to appreciate but their creator.

He passes every one and advances to the next grade.

During the summer, the results from the standardized tests arrive at the school. His mother gets a call from the teacher. “I'm sorry”, she says. “You were right”. His mother goes into the school at the request of the principal for a meeting. He has conferred with both the kindergarten and first-grade teachers and examined the test results. “We can't accommodate him”, he tells the mother.

And thus the child loses his friends anyway as he moves to the neighborhood public school for the beginning of second grade. The world is never the same.

The new school is hell. He has blocked most of the memory of second grade out entirely, though his mother tells him in his adulthood about the battles waged and the tears shed. What he remembers vividly is not the emotional abuse from a twisted teacher, but the feeling of his mind betraying him.

You see, this teacher was a believer in the educational power of rote copying of information from the teacher to the student. She uses the pair of small whiteboards on the side wall rather than the large one at the front of the room, alternating back and forth as she fills each in turn.

She erases the writing on the first board as soon as the second is full. The young boy does not copy fast enough and finds that he cannot keep up, falling behind quickly and consistently through the year. His pleas for more time to copy the information fall on deaf ears. To make matters worse, he is isolated, without his friends and in a hostile place with no chance to establish new friendships.

He convinces himself, the boy who just months ago was told he reads at a level unmatched by students three times his age, that language is not his realm. The thoughts whirling about in his head come too fast for his young hands to give them form. The hands that sit idly, disobediently, as he tries to coax them into giving life to those thoughts.

The mother draws a connection from a galaxy far far away to low earth orbit and the space shuttle. The boy soaks up every bit of relevant learning he can. Math, science – his bedroom wall is painted a mural of space and his night ceiling mirrors the night sky he sees through a telescope. He sees the feature film Apollo 13 and is enthralled, watching it countless times as fast as the VCR can rewind. He builds a Saturn V replica from Lego blocks that he plays with while watching. Having had the abstract arts torn from him he clings to the concrete math and sciences. He interprets his inability to write in the way that the schools require as an inability to write, for he is never taught another way.

He spends the years from eighth grade onward delving deeply into the sciences, then five years of undergraduate university getting a Bachelor of Science in chemistry.

He emerges from university in 2012 amidst the worst economy in the United States since the Great Depression He goes into the job market only to find that even entry-level positions demand five to seven years of experience and the meaning of the phrase “résumé black hole”. He spends a year serially unemployed, first pumping gas, then doing tech support in a call center, and finally as a delivery driver. Most companies he applies to don't even bother with a “dear applicant” letter.

After a year, he enters a graduate program. Engineering this time in the hopes of finding his way into a more healthy job market upon graduation. It is during this year that the realization is made of the mistake he had made in choosing his path all those years ago. The realization that thirteen years of training to be a scientist has been his second-best and not something he enjoyed for any more reason than that he had ability in the field. The thought of making a career in the sciences is now gone. He is not a scientist.

He is a storyteller.

He begins by telling the story he knows best.

This is his story.

This is my story.

I don't know the future I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it's going to begin. I'm going to go out into the world and tell the stories of the invisible, the overlooked. I'm going to give a voice to those who the world at large denies any measure of empathy. I'm going to show these people that they are not alone. I'm going to tell their stories to anyone who will listen.

Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you.

3 comments:

  1. You are a fantastic writer and your story - your life, is good. I am glad you are choosing your own path. I am so proud of you - immensely proud. Do what makes you happy. Live your life for you. You will make a difference in the lives of others and will make the world a better place.

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  2. I know this is an old post, Trevor, but I hope you are keeping up with sharing your thoughts. You are a gifted writer who has much to say to the world!
    Aunt Beth

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