Informal Learning

I recently had a conversation with my mom about my experience with school. We were talking about a book Rowan and I had read, in which the main character rode the bus to school on the first day of 8th grade, got off the bus, turned around, and went home. She just couldn't take one more minute of school. The word she used to describe how she felt there was "stupified".

I was horribly, mind-numbingly, stupifyingly bored from the third grade on. By fifth grade (during which year I was often sent to the hallway with an algebra book in what I believe was a well-meaning effort by my teacher to deal with my boredom) I was beginning to feel an overwhelming sense of doom whenever I entered the school building. By high school I was regularly skipping classes, intercepting mail, and changing the grades on my report card. I spent days at the town library, snuck home and hung out in the yard if I knew no one was there, went to friends' houses, went to the beach if I could get a ride. I walked to school, and some days I made it all the way there before the sinking feeling became too much to bear and I turned around not even knowing where I'd end up for the day. If I had missed one more day of high school I would not have graduated. My parents had no idea.

If I was a 'gifted' child no one ever told me, but this paper, titled To produce or not to produce? Understanding boredom and the honor in underachievement (On Gifted Students in School) pretty much sums up how I felt for 10 years of my life. I would have been thrilled in high school to have someone acknowledge the idea that there was honor in my 'underachievement'. Choosing not to produce, to disengage, certainly felt to me like the only way to keep my integrity intact, even at the price of lying to my parents.

Here's a poem I wrote on one of the days I spent at Needham Public Library when I was 15 or 16. Not great literature, by any means, but I can't tell you how clearly I remember this feeling.

Boredom lurks and then it pounces
As I sit, my mind a blank
So I draw a crazy picture
Of a ship that sailed, and sank.
Heading nowhere on a journey
To a place that's far away
Looking back at old, lost friendships
When I left, they chose to stay
In a place that's cold and lonely
While I head for sun and sand
On my ship that's made of daydreams
Sailing to a distant land.

This is not why my kids don't go to school. They don't go to school because they don't want to, for reasons of their own. But I am grateful there is nothing stupifying about their lives.

In the past couple of years I've become a lot better acquainted with loss. Family members and friends-who-became-family-members, leaving spaces behind that can't be filled.

One of those gaping spaces belongs to my friend Lisa Heyman, who died in February 2008. Months before, our families had visited Plimoth Plantation, and Lisa and I had spent some happy time in the gift shop picking out a crochet hook for me and some yarn and knitting needles for her. The last few times I visited with her she was using those purchases to make a very long scarf for her husband, Larry.

A few weeks ago Larry, Roxy, and Fire came to our house, and brought along the almost-completed scarf so that I can finish it.


As I began to work on it, weaving in the loose ends, I found myself thinking about the loose ends that are inevitable in any life. In some ways, we don't get to choose what things will be left undone. But by carefully choosing and living our priorities, as Lisa did, we can be sure to leave the important ends tied up.

This was written by Rudy Rucker. He was talking about writing a novel, but I think it applies nicely to learning and life.

"How precise, after all, is an outline? If, as William Burroughs used to say, a novel is but a map of a territory, an outline is but a map of a map. In the end, only the novel itself is the perfect outline of the novel. Only the territory itself can be the perfect map."

My kids are a perfect outline of themselves. Gnarly.

Let's not have a sniffle,
Let's have a bloody good cry
And always remember the longer you live,
The sooner you'll bloody well die

Uncle Mo brought out his sketchpad and quickly, deftly, drew the dolphins leaping in the air. He said, "They remind you of being a child, with all that curiosity and energy. They remind you that this is what you could be, not what you should grow out of."

~The Wanderer, by Sharon Creech

I saw this article on boingboing. I've come to realize over the past couple of years that I feel the same way about taking care of the dead as I do about taking care of children. It should be done by people who love them.

Valerie Fitzenreiter commanded that I watch Surfwise. I always do what she says. (Everyone's read her book, right? Go here.)

You can watch the movie on Instant Netflix. I found it really sad. This family could've had it (It. You know what that is, right?) and what they do have is so completely opposite of it.

It is good.

I recently watched To Be and To Have, a documentary about a one room school in rural France. The teacher is obviously well-intentioned and seems to care very much about the children he's responsible for on a day-to-day basis.

Me being me, though, I was struck most by how alive the children seem when they are doing something meaningful and how dramatically they shrink into themselves when forced to do something they have no interest in.

There's a heartbreaking scene where a very tiny boy visiting the school cries for his mama, but the quieter heartbreak of another boy being made to color was equally disturbing to me.

The casual quality of this conversation was also very striking for me:

Student: We don’t give the orders, you give them sir.

Another Student: Yes, but when we grow up, we’ll order our children around.

Teacher: Exactly! Maybe you’ll be a teacher one day too. You’ll order your pupils around. Would you like that?

I remember wondering when I was a kid if I saw the same thing other people did when we saw a color. As time has passed I've come to wonder more and more if I see the same thing other people do when we see a child.

People say you can see into a person’s soul by looking into his eyes, but I think you’d do just as well to look at his hands.

I started memorizing my dad’s hands when I was pretty little. I’m not sure why, but I remember doing it. I’ve always had this weird system of memory-keeping that involves taking snapshots in my mind. I’d think, “Look at the little white moons under his nails. Remember them.” “Look at the nicks and scrapes on his knuckles. Remember them.” “Look at the way he uses his fingernail to crease his dollar bill. Remember it.” "Look at the way his fingers flutter on the steering wheel. Remember it."

My dad’s hands built and comforted and fixed and cooked and turned pages and folded things and played catch and drew pictures and rattled candy before popping it into his mouth and planted and banged and whistled and spread birdseed and straightened and painted and wrote and cleaned and patted and loved. They were not perfect, but were caring and strong and capable and gentle.

And they are remembered.