The following year we had separate class periods for each academic subject. As the delivery of knowledge became more siloized, so did my strengths and weaknesses in each subject become more starkly realized.
Eugene Doherty, my seventh-grade English teacher at the Valley Road School in Princeton, New Jersey, was a grizzled, crewcut World War II veteran who had a metal hook for a hand. Despite his disability, he carried on bravely and enthusiastically with his teaching and with his favorite sport, fly fishing.
He also loved to tell stories. Like the time, after completing the physical rehabilitation from his war injury, he presented his wife with a hat he had decorated with flies laboriously but proudly tied with the help of his metal hand. She wasn't much of a fisher, I guess, because whenever he needed an extra fly for his next fishing trip, he would poach one from the unworn hat. He eventually stripped it bare of its decorations.
I'm still scratching my head on that one. I know there's a moral in there somewhere; I just don't know where.
Meanwhile, the administration had decided that we were now ready to read Real Literature. No more kid stuff, no more elementary-school stories involving Dick, Jane, and their dog, Spot. Our first book in that class was Homer's Odyssey. They might as well have presented it in the original Greek, for all I understood of it. While I was able to understand most of the individual words, I couldn't grasp the whole, the story line. That is, I could see each of the individual dots, but, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't connect them.
Mr Doherty's style of teaching by publicly ridiculing those who were falling behind only added to my misery.
Around that time, I started to read a little on my own, mostly in popular science, mathematical puzzles and games, and hobbies like coin collecting — activities that require a minimum of socialization. I also read the World Book, an encyclopedia aimed at younger readers, which I believe a door-to-door salesman had sold to my parents. Sometimes I think that if the Britannica salesman had arrived first, I might have ended up at Harvard.
Fiction, however, continued to baffle me. To date, I've read and understood only a handful of fiction books, such as the James Bond series. On those rare occasions when I do read fiction, it's usually for the atmospherics, the settings, or in the case of 007, the escapism and the two-dimensional, cartoon-like characters. I have trouble with books that have a more complex plot or character development. I have no clue as to why the characters might be doing what they do or saying what they say.
Around puberty, a time when I and the world around me were changing rapidly, I had a moment of clarity. I knew then that my developing sexuality would become a major source of frustration for me over the course of my life. This realization filled me with sadness, because I had always valued my sexual feelings as beautiful, special, and precious. I guess I must have been ill the day they taught you in school or church to hate or fear your sexuality.
In about the ninth or tenth grade, we had to memorize a poem in English class. I think I was able to memorize enough of it to pass the assignment, but I can now recall neither the name of the poet, nor the title of the poem, nor its subject. My guess is that the teacher's motivation was to give us the gift of the remembrance of some beautiful or meaningful words. I applaud the impulse, but it didn't work for me.
To me, the poem was a more-or-less random collection of words and phrases. As far as I could tell, even after dozens of re-readings and recitations, there was nothing beautiful or meaningful there to memorize, only separate, disconnected words. The memorization exercise only made me hate poetry and words even more.
You couldn't say these kinds of things to an English teacher, however. You might as well tell a priest that religion is a fraud.
In addition, I had special trouble with rhetoric that was more than about one hundred years old. To this day, I think that Shakespeare should be taught as a foreign language.
Speaking of Shakespeare, on one occasion much later in life, when I was in my mid-forties, I went to see a movie version of Romeo and Juliet with a friend and another couple. The action on screen took place in modern-day Verona, Italy, but the language was Shakespearean. I had flattered myself by then into believing that now that I was an adult, was holding down a good job, and had behind me a world of experience, surely I'd be able to follow the plot of this most familiar of love stories. Movie storytelling is, after all, mostly visual.
After the show we went to a cafe where we chatted and discussed the film. I'm ashamed to say that, much to my friends' amazement, I said something that betrayed my lack of comprehension of the plot. This is how deep these developmental issues are.
I've also discovered that the issue isn't visual information versus verbal information. Rather, it's about having had the life experiences that would allow you to enter into the action on the screen, and sympathize or empathize, or not, with the actors and the situations they find themselves in.
Despite my failure as a schoolboy to unravel the mysteries of poetry, literature, and composition, I never failed an English class, thank God. Perhaps this was so because I was a little better with the rules-based mechanics of writing, such as grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Nevertheless, the quirkiness of the English language and its lack of strict rules frustrated the mathematician in me. (Some of my readers in writing groups have said that my writing is mathematically precise.)
I wondered why all subjects couldn't be as simple and straightforward as math.
While in school, I was like George Herbert Walker Bush — at war with the English language. Tongue-tied. Whenever I tried to say something, it came out as something else — an immensely frustrating experience. My difficulties with language only made me want to shut up even more. I did my best to wrestle most of my sentences to the deck, trying to make them behave by brute force. As far as I was concerned, language was an impediment to communication. There were far too many uncontrollable variables, too many ambiguities, for my taste.
My experience of assigned readings for English class in junior high school (now called middle school) and beyond was as follows: Starting with the first word of the assignment, I'd move my eyes from one word or phrase to the next, as I'd been taught in the earlier grades. Meanwhile, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't keep my mind from wandering. Reading was, therefore, exceptionally hard work. My word-by-word and phrase-by-phrase method of reading was so tedious that it took me several hours to complete a routine daily assignment.
I knew you weren't supposed to compare yourself to others, and that each person was unique and special and learns at their own pace. It seemed to me, however, that most of my classmates were completing their assignments in less time, with less effort, and with greater comprehension, than I.
At the end of each reading assignment, I recalled nothing of what I had supposedly just read. It was like this night after night throughout my school years. I couldn't tell you then and can't tell you now much about the plots or characters of any of the books we read in those classes.
I give myself credit for plowing all the way through those long, tiresome fiction books. It was like trying to till barren rock instead of fertile soil — a jarring, physically demanding, and ultimately unrewarding experience. In the end, there were no emotional or intellectual fruits.
The movie actress JoBeth Williams (Poltergeist, The Big Chill, Kramer vs Kramer), who was in my class at Brown University, and whom I didn't know, tells a story that illustrates this point. Soon after college, she joined the local repertory theater company there in Providence, Rhode Island. On one occasion, they were performing a Shakespearean play in a high school auditorium that had no formal stage with wings. When she finished her part, she needed to walk past some students on her way out. One of them grabbed her by the arm, and said, "Don't LEAVE him! He's a GOOD man, and he LOVES you!"
The student had understood what the play was about. I was like the other students, bored to the point of despair by their lack of comprehension.
As far as my parents and teachers were concerned, the only explanation for my repeated pattern of failure in English class was a lack of effort. This infuriated me, as I knew I was fruitlessly spending a great deal of time trying to read and understand the assignments.
To this day, nearly fifty years later, I'm still livid that no one took the time to evaluate, much less to help, me with my reading. What's more basic to one's educational development than reading? Teachers talk about evaluation as a necessary first step in education. That is, knowing up front where the student is in his or her educational development. Perhaps there's nothing they could have done for me, even if they had known that I had a problem. I don't know.
Here's what it would have taken: Someone, anyone, with an interest in me or my education — a teacher, counselor, parent, relative, or friend of the family. Any interested adult and fifteen minutes. Sit down with me and a fiction book written at my chronological grade level. Ask me to read two or three pages silently or aloud. Then close the book and ask, "What did you just read?" And wait for a response.
It's cruel to say to a child that no one is interested in your development as a person.
The usual excuse is a lack of time or money. I don't mind it if, for practical purposes, the system dedicates the bulk of its resources to the majority of students who fall into the middle of the curve — so long as it also makes adequate provisions for those who don't fall there.
I now know that I have a special ability — not disability: the ability to read without comprehension. I wouldn't necessarily list it among my top ten skills on a job application, but I've never met anyone with such a capability.
§ § §
On the quantitative side, my experience varied from year to year and teacher to teacher.
In the seventh grade, I had a math teacher who taught us about numeral systems other than decimal, which I loved. This was my first encounter with what would within a few years become one component of a formal program of scholastic study called the New Math. (The term is something of a misnomer, as most of the concepts weren't new.)
The following year I had a drill sergeant teacher whom I hated.
I did eventually encounter the ideas presented in the New Math, but I needed to wait until college. I believe that learning these basic concepts while still in school would have saved me years of lost time.
For a science project in the seventh grade, I designed a simple electrical circuit that my classmate, collaborator, and neighbor Jan Konigsberg and I called an odd/even computer.
Our project wasn't a general-purpose computer, as the components needed to build such a machine wouldn't become available to hobbyists and teenagers for at least another decade.
This was happening before I had heard the terms computer hardware and software. The latter term had in fact just been coined the previous school year. At the time of our project, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were still in preschool and the first advanced degrees in computer science had yet to be awarded.
The general-purpose digital computers of the day were the size of a room and were attended to by serious-looking technicians in white lab coats. Only large organizations like big businesses and government agencies could afford them. The word around the schoolyard was that there was a computer up the street at Princeton University, but you needed to be at least a graduate student to share time on it.
The work-around was to have a parent who was on the engineering faculty at the university or who worked at one of the nearby research laboratories like RCA or Bell Labs. This applied to neither Jan nor me.
Input to our little hard-wired analog battery-powered calculating machine was accomplished by way of mechanical switches. The output was two light bulbs, one for an odd result and one for an even result.
I remember trying to keep the design as simple as possible, mainly because I wanted to get the project done quickly and have my afternoons to myself again.
I went to the local hardware store and told the clerk what kind of switches I needed. A graying older man, he rolled his eyes wearily and complained that all the schoolboys these days were trying to build a computer.
Jan followed along carefully during the construction phase and did the write-up.
The science teacher, Mrs Scagg, asked me where I got the circuit. I told her I designed it myself. My heart sank when she said, no, I hadn't, as everyone knows that circuits come from books.
Realizing that the teacher had placed me in a position of having to prove my own innocence — an impossible task — I walked away.
Mrs Scagg may have had her shortcomings as an inspirational and supportive mentor, but she did understand enough science and technology to know that the machine wasn't its physical components, its wires and switches.
We both knew that it was a circuit.
Many years later, I had the good fortune to attend a university that not only allowed undergraduate students to use its computer but also went out of its way to encourage their precociousness. The faculty had learned, some of them perhaps the hard way, how to get out of the way of their students.
§ § §
The occasional after-school project aside, my middle school days consisted of rising in the morning and going through the required repetitive motions, while avoiding as much social contact as possible. A neat trick, given that school seems to be designed to maximize forced intimacy and continuous social contact.
The scheduling in the schools I attended lent itself to a mechanistic approach to learning. At 8:05 you do this, at 8:25 you do that, exactly ten minutes between classes, all day, every day.
You tell me where the sun and stars are in the sky, and I'll tell you what you're doing — and even thinking — at any particular moment. Human beings are machines, according to people who call themselves educators. It appears that in the early Twentieth Century, when the American economy was still largely agrarian and when school as we now know it was invented, psychologists believed that learning in animals and humans happened by way of rote repetition and punishment/reward conditioning. I'm told that the inspiration for the school bell came from Ivan Pavlov's experiments with salivating dogs.
To me a perfect day was one in which I didn't need to do any of those ridiculous dances with people. I simply couldn't dance. I never knew where to put my feet. Even if I could memorize a step, a how-dee-do, a left-right-left, a do-si-do, it never felt right. On the contrary, it felt like what it was — the mechanical repetition of some movements I had memorized.
I now know that avoiding all social contact isn't a perfection to which one should aspire. On the contrary, it's sad.
I didn't know until much later that learning was about anything other than following instructions. I must have been sick, for example, the day they announced in homeroom that it was important for your development as a person to form relationships with your peers. I may well have been sick — I hated school that much.
My life as a schoolchild consisted of an uneasy sequence of troubled interactions with figureheads, like teachers and parents, whom you couldn't easily avoid. They were distant in the sense of being upwardly removed in a social structure of their own creation. They were near, however, in that it was they who exercised direct observational control over most aspects of your life. At least my peers didn't try to dictate to me when to get up in the morning, which school to attend, and what to "be" when I grew up.
What I hated most about school was the regimentation, the need to conform, and the requirement that you think and act as you're told. I figured that the only way to fit my square peg into their round hole was to take an axe and chop off a little elbow here and a little foot there. It was painful, to say the least.
To me, conformity is for hockey helmets, girdles, and astronaut couches, not for people. That is, things and institutions should conform to, and serve, people, not the other way around.
School rewards you for the lower-level exercises of memorizing and repeating facts, and punishes you for the higher-level exercises of thinking for yourself and challenging the assumptions on which the so-called facts are based. Their reasoning seems to be, you can't expect students at the current level to think for themselves these days. This is the vicious and self-defeating cycle of dumbing down. We're asked to come to the nonsensical conclusion that the more you dumb everything down, the better the outcomes will be.
Thinking, truly thinking for yourself, only happens at the next higher level, be it middle school, high school, college, graduate school, postdoc, junior faculty, or senior tenured faculty. It saddens me to think that most people never arrive at the point of thinking for themselves, not even in the memoir-writing stage of their lives. By then it's too late.
The most you can expect of students these days is for them to memorize a few facts or learn how to use a few standard, well-tested methods. Or so we're told. The few who have superior ability you can train to become clones of yourself.
At home, my brothers and I had some good times together, but as puberty approached, our bickering became more rancorous and mean-spirited and our fights more frequent. Having attended elementary school near Philadelphia, I can remember hearing the phrase, brotherly love. It seemed like an oxymoron to me. The only people in the world I truly hated were my brothers. I had no feelings one way or another toward those who weren't my blood brothers.
On one occasion I remember looking in the bathroom mirror and wishing I were dead. I never made plans to kill myself, but neither was I particularly enthusiastic about living. That was the last time I felt such deep despair until well into middle age.
As a child I hated being asked what I wanted to do or be when I grew up. My future was then, and is now, a blank, a dark hole. Others may have wanted to be an astronaut, a ballet dancer, or a movie star, but I wanted to be twenty-one. Someone must have told me that at the age of majority, you could leave home, be your own person, and have your own life. That was the only goal I had then, and it's the only goal I have today.
It wasn't so much that I disliked people; it was that I was afraid of them. When I was walking down the street and saw someone I knew walking in the opposite direction, my body would become tense with fear, and my mind would go blank. I wanted to disappear or find a way to escape the impending confrontation, the need to be social, to say the right things, and to pretend to be one of them.
As an adult, I'm a little cagier at masking my fears and pretending that I'm not feeling my feelings. I now know that however unpleasant my interactions with people may be, they aren't going to kill me.
That was the dilemma. On the one hand, I understood from observation that good relationships were based on a certain amount of emotional honesty. On the other, I knew that any outward show of my actual emotion — fear — would ruin any chance of a real relationship. No one wants to be in a relationship with someone who is afraid of them. I know I wouldn't.
If I couldn't avoid the person, I'd have to deal with the "How are you?" question. No matter how many times people ask me this, it always comes as a shock. I never know how to answer. The question is invasive and intrusive and presumes a level of intimacy I don't feel.
Okay, if you must know, here's how I feel. I feel like my body is filled with concrete. Not solid, set concrete, but rather the heavy, sludge-like mixture of gravel, sand, chemicals, and water you see coming down the chute of a cement mixer. Some days the mixture is a little more fluid than others, but sludge is always sludge.
Aren't you glad you asked?
Getting back to my school experience, due to my deficits in English class, I had to repeat the ninth grade. I went from being a little young for my class to being a little old.
Childhood | Early Teens | Later Teens | Adulthood | Therapy | Autism | Final Thoughts | Bibliography