Hildegarde

I was looking at Mike Fisher’s comment this morning, and thinking that it fit in so well with what I’ve been messing with lately, I ought to use it.

So I will, but it’s going to have to be in layers.

The first layer is in the obvious and the straightforward.

My memories are, obviously, different in a lot of ways than Mike’s, but in some ways less different than you’d think.

First, that picture of Vassar was in the Funk and Wagnalls Encyclopedia, which were the only books in our house available to me except for the Little Golden Books my Aunt Mary sometimes sent me.

There were other books, in my father’s “den,” behind the hinged glass doors of ancient bookcases in the classic sense of the word, but they weren’t the kind of thing I was likely to get at, or be interested in getting at, at that stage.

My father was one of those people who knew the blood type of every soldier who fought at Gettysburg, and the books were all Civil War histories, incredibly academic and professional biographies of Civil War figures, and books on Civil War military tactics.

My mother didn’t read.  At all.  In fact, she hated it when other people read, including my father.  Later, when I started reading everything in sight, she really hated it when I read. 

I did know about Vassar and Yale and Harvard, because grow up in Fairfield County and you will.  Even the kids whose parents seemed to spend all their time drinking beer knew that.

In my case, my mother had grown up in and around New Haven, and we went to New Haven to visit her side of the family, so Yale was in my face all the time.

But nobody mentored me or told me what to read.  The one person in the family who really liked to read (my father) wasn’t home much, and my mother and my brother were sort of anti-help. 

I had a crossed eye and my mother took me to a doctor in New Haven to deal with it–eventually, I had surgery–and as a treat she would take me to the old Malley’s department store and let me pick out anything I wanted.

From the first, I infuriated her by bypassing the dolls and going for the children’s books.  I can even remember the very first one I got.  It was Carolyn Keene’s Nancy Drew number 25:  The Ghost of Blackwood Hall.

After that, I just took out everything I could find for the library.  At some point, somebody must have told the librarian it was okay for me to use the adult section, because by the time I was in third grade or so I was reading my way through this little room that had only classic novels in it:  Dickens, Dostoyevski, Austen, Brontes of both varieties. 

My father owned a property in the center of town with a barn on it, and he rented the barn to this guy who was a book distributor for paperbacks on their way to train stations and drug stores.  The guy would give my father big boxes of books that weren’t moving, so after a while I read some of those.

There were a lot of murder mysteries.  That was good.  There was some stuff that blew the top off my mother’s head.  Understanding Human Sexual Response was one of those.  She took that away from me, so I complained to my father when he came home.

He got the book, brought it back to me, and said to her–in front of me–“You never take away books.”

Eventually, one of the books in those boxes was Atlas Shrugged.  It was Atlas Shrugged that told me there was such a thing as philosophy in the world, and then once I got started, I couldn’t stop.

But I had no more mentoring than Mike did (well, unless you count Ayn Rand), and since my father was nearly never home, the atmosphere around our place about books was relentlessly negative most of the time I was growing up.  I tended to respond to this by hiding in my room.

When we went to visit my mother’s people, I would lie down on the floor of the back seat of my father’s car to get away from the cousins and read until I froze, which wasn’t difficult in February.

 Conversation at home tended to run with what was wrong with me.  When my father was home for dinner, he and my mother ate separately.   So there was no conversation about political affairs or books.

I found all of that kind of thing–the possibility of that kind of thing–in my reading.  And when I got older and was allowed to eat with the adults, we managed some of it then, although it always annoyed my mother.

Of course, my grandmother, my father’s mother, was tell me I had to go to college by the time I was three.  So there was that.

I’ve always said, on this blog and elsewhere, that what goes on in a family makes an enormous difference.  It’s what always bothers me about talk of “leveling the playing field” in education.  I’m all for spending tons of money to ensure good teachers and first rate facilities for everybody, but in the end the parents are going to matter.

And some parents are a bigger hindrance to their children than any school is going to be able to help.

But–and this but is important–although growing up in the place I did probably increases your chances of going on to a “good” college and getting an education, it doesn’t guarantee it. 

A larger percentage of the kids in Fairfield County may go on to college, and a larger percentage of those may go on to a name college, but most of them don’t make that second category and only about half of them made that first.

If the parents are wealthy enough, they can always force the kid into some college somewhere.  When I was growing up, we all knew which colleges those were, “junior colleges” meant for girls who just wanted to go to parties four-year places with no entry requirements to speak of but lots of shiny new graduation gift cars in the parking lots.

Directionlessness–is that a word?–occurs across the classes. 

What I deal with with my kids, though, is not directionlessness. 

Well, there may be some of it, but it’s not likely.

When all I’ve got to contend with is a kid who wants something but thinks there’s  no way to get it–well, there I can help.  I know where the financial aid is, I know what recruiters want, I’ve got a good idea of what needs to happen in interviews, I know the internship programs. 

If all that’s missing is the knowledge that something they want is possible and a few pointers on how to go after it–hell, with that, we can do a whole lot.

What bothers me about the kids who scare me is something much worse, and something I don’t understand how to reach.

And, you’ve got to remember, the kids who make it into my program is as good as it gets. Back home, there are hundreds more kids who don’t go into a program, who don’t do much of anything.  If they’re girls, they have a baby and go on welfare for the five years it’s allowed in this state.  Then the state places them in “jobs” that are often make-work because the kids won’t work up the energy to be competent as a convenience store clerk.

And it does feel like energy is what is lacking. 

But one of the things they can do to get themselves out of this mess they’re in is to come into a program like mine–so I’ve got a fair number of kids who, in order to go on receiving benefits, have to be in school.

So they’re in school.  They don’t do the work.  They come to class only sometimes.  They resent the whole thing like hell and in the end, they rely on passive resistance.

If you ask them to get their essay in, they tell you yes, yes, it’s on its way, and then they just don’t do anything.

What keeps hammering at me, lately, is that I’m not sure it is possibly to run a program like mine successfully if the kids in it are forced to be there.  If they don’t want to be there.  If they resent having to be there. 

I’m not sure it’s possible to make this work by sheer force of will.

And, trust me, I have a significant sheer force of will.  And I do use it.

The other thing I’m not sure of is that there’s a one-to-one relationship between bad experiences and this particular attitude.  Some of the best kids I’ve got have come through hell and back again, seen their entire families slaughtered in wars and revolutions, grown up in totalitarian countries–and, wham, give them the chance and they’re off.

There was a point when I thought there must be something in the water in the Ivory Coast, because every kid I got from there was nearly crazy-ambitious, and this in spite of the fact that their families had lost everything and come to the US by raft, as far as I could figure out.  One of those kids is now at Mount Holyoke and another is at Cornell.

But there is one thing I’ve settled on–we’ve really got to stop that thing where we allow inner city schools to give dumbed-down versions of everything to most of their students. 

If you’ve got a bunch of kids who think that everything comes down to fate, never letting them know that there’s an actual reason why the kids from across town are doing better than they are–that there’s real work that those kids are doing but you’re not–is not going to help.

I think I may have put that badly.

Ack.  Yesterday, I was putting my stuff together to get ready for the fall, and maybe I’m just in a bad mood.