Here’s a column from THIS WEEK, April 26, 1989. Something I realized decades later, I can get manic when propped in front of an audience. – JDW
I’ve just returned from playing a lead role in an extravaganza which might have been entitled “Columnist-Visits-School-and-The Kids-Touch-A-Writer Day” at an exurban learning facility in a small town that could’ve been Forest Grove, but whose actual location must remain unidentified to protect the innocents. The parents.
I can remember high school like it was five minutes ago. It’s one wound which has yet to completely heal. High school – at least it was for me – has got to be the stupidest way to expend four years of prime adolescence. Isn’t there a better place to be sixteen? Isn’t there a better time to learn than when the most important parts of your body, one of which is your brain, have only one thing on their minds?
And was it me or what?, but did any of you also notice the ninth year of school was just like the eighth year, which had, in turn, looked just like the seventh. I mean, really… END THE PAIN ALREADY!
With that in mind, I naively arrived at the school fully expecting to be greeted like they were pleased to meet me. I hoped they’d see me as the personification of Norm Thompson’s slogan – An Escape From The Ordinary. But, nooooooooooo.
I am so humbled.
It was Steve Harloff’s fault I was part of a language arts workshop. He invited me. Any, the focus was THE WORKING WORLD (Subtitled “How Professionals Utilize Their Language Arts Skills.”) I first knew I was in big trouble when I had to look up Language Arts skills. Huh? Say what?
I titled my presentation “Personal Ads: How to read them. How to write them. What they really mean.” I figured that might whet some literary interests. But I planned mostly to rap with them in an entertaining manner. Let them hear that words are magic and that everyone of them is a writer inside and those who believe that should let the music come out.
Figured we’d enjoy a conversation. Listen to what they had to say.
Do you know how the victims in those slasher movies – where the giant maniac wears a white hockey mask – look at The Psychotic Killer From Hell? Well, they look at the psycho slasher the same way some of those kids looked at me.
It was so humbling.
I gave them some of my best language arts material. I taught one class how to say “Kiss my posterior” in Czechoslovakian.
I recited my own translation of my family’s ancestral motto from the original Welsh, which goes something like this. I memorized it. “Outside of a dog, a man’s best friend is a book. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” Later stolen by Groucho Marx.
Nothing worked. Told them a lot of stories. Gave them two-sided copies – twelve cents at Kinko’s, a hundred of them, tax-deductible – of wise sayings by other people. Actually, and this is true, got down on my knees and implored, beseeched, begged that last class to open up a little.
Nothing.
So, I am telling Norma Louise the story just like I am telling you here, and she offers this. “Don’t blame the kids,” she said. “You didn’t go in there to teach. You went in to do a stand-up comedy routine, and you bombed. B-O-M-B-E-D.”
Easy for her to say. Sometimes that woman really frosts my shorts. You know what I mean? I work on this dark funk for an entire day, looking for somewhere to place the blame, and she instantly plunges through all the compost and points the finger at moi.
In my defense, I figured I could loosen these kids up a little, have some fun and maybe teach a couple of them something.
Don’t worry. Not sentence structure.
I am so humbled. I learned so much.
Like from that little guy the first day. I had spent fully two-thirds of the past hour telling the kids not to conform, to break the rules and embrace iconoclasm.
And then I put down this young man in front of his peers for his spelling errors. At the end of class, he walks right up to me, looks me straight in the belt buckle, and says, “I do not have to learn to spell better.” Then he stormed out the door.
I was horrified. I rushed into the hallway and hollered after him. “You’re right. I’m sorry. You don’t have to spell better.”
Then there was Lisa. She doesn’t have word three to say to me in class, but I step outside Room 114, and she unloads.
“I don’t mean to offend you,” she says, preparing me for the worst. You seem like a kicked-back dude, but the words you use, whew!” And she gestures over her head. “Why do you use so many words that people don’t understand?”
Impacted, if not stunned. I told these stories to anybody I could corral at the faculty reception. I was quite willing to agree with the young man philosophically, but the werds att leest musk be rekognysble.
The young lady’s criticism cost me some sleep. I love big words and foreign words and new words and madeup words and lost words and the sounds they make and the way they look. And if that bothers people, then about all I can say is BUY A DICTIONARY.
There was one more thing I wanted to share with those kids. Something Kerouac said I think has great significance for all language arts students. Here it is.
“The only people for me are the mad ones – the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous red, white and blue roman candles like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!'”
But I didn’t. I didn’t share that. Didn’t seem prudent.
Thinking back to high school, I realized I probably wouldn’t have listened to somebody like me either.
Some things you just have to learn for yourself, and sometimes it takes a few years.