Adventures in Education

I’m just getting started here on Vocal and I was checking out some of the writers. I came across an article by AUTUMN GRAVES titled, I Wish More of My Teachers Had Said "I Don't Know”.

It’s a very well written piece that I found myself smiling and laughing about, while at the same time, fighting back tears.

Rather than tell you what she wrote, brilliantly I must add, I go to the opposite end of the spectrum.

I am Black. When I was in school, I didn’t like history and I didn’t have science.

In the beginning, history made no sense to me. My parents had an extremely diverse group of friends and together, they, my parents and other family members would tell us amazing stories of grandparents and great grandparents. Some of the stories were hilarious and others, absolutely horrific.

I learned the material easily, but it always “felt” wrong. One day while doing homework, I became frustrated for some unknown reason and screamed at the top of my lungs, “I HATE HISTORY”, and I knocked my books on the floor.

My dad came in the room, laughing and said, “I was wondering when you would get to this point.”

Confused and angry, I picked up my paper and books and plopped down in my chair. My dad had grabbed a couple of encyclopedias and sat down beside me. He said, “Glen, it’s not that you don’t like history, it’s that you don’t understand why you aren’t seeing people who look like you in history.”

I hadn’t thought about it, but he was absolutely right and it wasn’t just people who looked like me. Where were the people who looked like Rico, who was Puerto Rican, or Charlie who was Asian, or Wilma who was part Native American?

How could they teach me history about the same White people every year, but somehow, the people of color were brief moments of toned down abuse or presented as ignorant? So my father began teaching me real history that included everyone at the same time. I still hated history because I saw cruel, brutal monsters that were being called great in school while learning what they actually did at home.

Science is a bitter sweet pill for me. I had little to no science education in school. My junior year of high school, I took biology. We had no biology books, no equipment of any kind. My biology teacher was Mr. Ginsberg. I hated him.

I was an “A” student, but I was a little lazy. Mr. Ginsberg rarely gave out “A”s and the only way to get an “A” was to do extra credit. Time that would cut into my social life (LOL).

He had one standard extra credit assignment, watch Nova and write a report. I didn’t like Nova, but I needed my “A” for my little ego, so I watched Nova and wrote his stupid reports.

I spent years believing that I hated science as well because my only references to science were Jacques Cousteau and Star Trek, which I passionately hated.

About six years later, I find myself flipping channels and I stumble across Nova. To my surprise, without the added chore of writing a report, I enjoyed the show. So I tuned in next week, and the week after that and so forth.

A decade later, I was still regularly watching Nova and thinking about Mr. Ginsberg, who did the best he could with nothing. By then, my son was five or six years old. He grew up on Nova, as did his cousins and friends. They all loved it, thanks to Mr. Ginsberg. The years trickled by and my son, younger cousins and their friends watch Nova with their kids.

There are close to one hundred of us, three generations of people, that watch Nova and I attribute it to a science teacher I hated who cared enough about the responsibility he had taken on to find a way to teach his students despite only having a blackboard and a piece of chalk.

But life is funny. My counselors all discouraged me from doing any of the things I was actually interested in doing and I naively believed they were thinking of my best interest. Since everything I was interested in, seemed to be off the table (writing, psychiatry, acting and music) and I didn't want ot be an accountant, teacher or nurse, I went into a field I felt I could at the very least find a job. I became a computer scientist in the 1980s.

I could only smile as Ms. Graves talked about math, my favorite subject. I love math and have been having fun teaching Trachtenberg math to my grandchildren. She used terminology I hadn’t heard in years and the memory of playing with numbers came back like a flood.

Why did I like math? Because you either get the answer right or wrong, no tricks, no games, no gotchas.

I worry about my granddaughter. She’s an average kid, nothing special, except she’s hungry for science. Science I never learned and can't teach. Science her parents never learned and can't teach. Science her school does not teach and won't teach, even when asked to.

Thank you Ms. Graves.