One of the lines from Paul
Simon’s hit song Kodachrome is “When I look back on all the crap I learned in
high school, it’s a wonder I can think at all.
So true.
Having received my grammar school
education at a Catholic school I can safely say I was well prepared for high
school, primarily because they beat the living hell out of you until you knew by
heart whatever they taught. Had I known there were high schools that catered to
the arts, I would have applied since I was already a fairly good illustrator
and had written a couple of songs.
But I didn’t know they existed.
So I followed the other lemmings into a
catholic high school and promptly wasted 4 years of my life. I knew what I wanted to learn. The school had a course
on learning to speak Russian, which I was very much interested in as it was
during the Cold War. They also taught classical music, another thing I was very
interested in. They also had a drama class that would perform several plays a
year, which I felt was another thing I could excel at.
Except I wasn’t allowed to take
any of those courses.
You see, another thing that I
didn’t know was that freshmen were assigned their courses according to their
scores on their aptitude tests. I scored very well in math and languages. It’s fairly well known today that musicians
are generally good at math because both use and develop the same area of the
brain. The fact that I became a novelist verifies a certain talent for
language.
But my requests to take Russian
and Classical music were immediately turned down. Instead of taking Russian,
which I was very enthusiastic about, I was given Latin, a dead language and one
I had come to hate having had to learn to recite literally pages of text back
when I was an altar boy. And instead of Classical music, I was put in the
accelerated math class. Math was a subject I was never interested in and never
studied, yet I always managed to maintain a mid-eighties grade.
So in my freshman year I, of
course, flunked Latin and had to go to summer school. In sophomore year I again
applied for Russian and had managed to learn a bit of it on my own to show I
would do well in the class.
Nope. I was assigned French,
another language I had absolutely no interest in. And although I never paid
much attention in Algebra class or bothered to learn the formulas, I still
managed to maintain mid-eighties grades.
Here’s an ironic story for you. I
scored an 88% on my freshman Algebra finals having never studied. The thing is
with the Algebra final is that you are required to show how you came to your
answer, which involved using the correct Algebraic formulas.
I didn’t know any of them.
However, I still managed to figure out and correctly answer those, ‘If a car
leaves Boston and is traveling at 55 miles an hour and another car… type
questions as well as most of the others.
Because I hadn’t shown my work, I
was accused of cheating and they threatened to fail me for the year. I said I
hadn’t cheated and to prove it I would take another test, alone and in the front
desk while the teacher watched. They figured I was bluffing so they agreed.
I got a 92% on the second test
and explained to the teacher how I had figured out the answers. I was sure I would be removed from the
accelerated math group as I plainly had no interest, knowledge or skills
whatsoever. Instead, I was assigned to the Trigonometry class and later
Calculus.
By senior year I was a physical
and emotional mess. Why? Because they decided, they would decide what I
needed to learn. Not me. The fact that my final average dropped every year
following freshman year might have indicated a problem. The fact that I was
doing poorly in the maths and sciences (chemistry nearly killed me) and was at
the top on my class in English, Social Studies and strangely enough Economics,
(at the time Economics was the study of how businesses worked, how product were
marketed and the like, which I found very interesting,) might have pointed to a
change in strategy.
Nope. So by graduation I had
bleeding ulcers, chronic anxiety attacks and had to take anxiety meds just to
make it over the finish line. I didn’t bother to attend my graduation, and
although I had been accepted by two very good colleges, there was no way in
hell I was going to spend another minute in school. So I never went.
Now here’s thing. I can play
seven musical instruments. I have written over 300 songs. I have written eight
novels, 50 short stories, and wrote and illustrated 30 of my own comic books
when I was a kid. I designed my band’s logo as well as Ari Publishing’s logo.
If you’re a regular reader of my weekly blog you know that I have offered
various solutions to our nation’s current problems.
So you would probably assume that
a person blessed with so many God given abilities would have done well in
college.
I guess we’ll never know.
So would you like to know what needs to be taught in school? Click this link to my other blog for the breakdown.
