IHT Ep 010 School

Fresh Notebooks

When I was a kid, the best thing about school was getting new notebooks. Man, I loved ‘em. All those crisp, blank pages just called out to be filled. Some kids like to draw, and yeah, I had a fair number of doodles in the lined leaves of my Steno 5-subject, but that wasn't the real reason I loved all that fresh paper. And, yeah, I also wrote the occasional story in the back pages of my math or my science notebooks, but that wasn’t really it either. The big reason I got so stoked every August for back to school shopping was  … for actually taking notes.

I know, right? Nerd from the womb.

But it's true. I took notes on everything--my classes, of course, but not just them. I'd take notes on library books about the rise of the Roman Empire, on the birds I saw at the feeder. I took notes on what Garfield did in the Sunday comics, and schemes for the most efficient way to clean my room … and dinosaurs, of course, lots and lots of dinosaurs.

That might seem like a weird thing to love, I know, but it’s not that different from those fans of Mary Kondo or the self-help section of Barnes and Noble. There is something deeply satisfying, about everything having its place, something seductive about the thought that this wild and contradictory and complicated life could all somehow make sense if we could just get it organized. I just happen to have always been the guy who liked to organize ideas into instead of towels and linens into closets. 

After buying fresh office supplies, my second favorite thing about school was getting textbooks, especially if they were new, and I was the first person to write my name on the little plate on the inside front cover. “Name Ben Lord, Condition: new.” I had barely gotten them covered with those trusty paper shopping bags before I’d start flipping through the pages, looking at the math symbols I didn't understand, or the diagrams of a cell or the timelines of world history. Now here were some programs you could sink your teeth into. You could learn everything there was to know, all you had to do was start at page one and work your way through step-by-step. 

All of this is to say, I guess, that if anyone was ever set up to love school, it was me. Maybe it’s destiny or maybe it’s DNA but there is something in me that is uniquely and inherently built for school. What better place for a guy who loved programs and systems and step-by-step directions. 

So why for most of my schooling was I so abjectly miserable?

This episode of “I Heart This,” like all of our episodes, is a love story--the story of my love affair with school. But this story is a troubled one. It’s not just the feel-good rom-com kind of tale; it's less Bridget Jones diary and more Charles and Camilla. It’s a story of youthful dreams and disappointment. Of being excluded and of finding my place. And it’s a story about what happens when one of your favorite things … is taking notes. It took me a long time to appreciate school for what it really was. Here’s how I got there. I’m Ben Lord. You’re listening to “I Heart This.”

Middle School

On my first day at Joseph A. DePaulo Junior High School, eleven-year-old me walked into an auditorium so full that I couldn't see an open place to sit. My last school had been a tiny affair. Its entire student body would have easily fit in the first few rows here. And, on top of that, it had been in another town. So … in all of that giant room’s hormonal pandemonium … in that crowd of hundreds and hundreds of teenagers, I saw not a single  … familiar  … face. I knew nobody. I’m sure I was standing there, frozen, wondering what to do, when a deep-voiced teacher bellowed over at me to hurry up and find a seat instead of clogging up the aisle. 

Once the staff had finally gotten everyone’s attention, an administrator in a suit welcomed us from a podium on the stage and proceeded to lay down the law. Junior high school was different, he informed us. It was more serious. And we were expected to step up. No irresponsibility would be tolerated. This junior high school had rules to encourage us to do what was right. And if you didn’t do what you were supposed to, there were punishments. Fail to bring a pencil to class? Detention. Homework not turned in? Detention. Late to class? Detention. And to be clear, you were late to class if you weren’t in your seat ready to go when the bell rang. Maybe this approach actually worked to curb the delinquency of my peers. I don't know. What I do know is that the terrified gerbil of my heart was so scared that for all of 7th grade I ran through the halls to my next class for fear of being late.

To be honest, I don't remember much of seventh grade … at least, not in terms of actual events. What I do remember is the tight, writhing, clawing anxiety that radiated out from my abdomen for six and half hours straight almost every single day. And I remember how much energy it took to hide just how frightened I really was. It wasn’t the fact that there were rules that made me anxious. I liked a program. I was so with the program. The problem was the draconian punishment for making mistakes that I knew I would inevitably make. I lost my pencils all the time. And sometimes I left my homework on my desk at home instead of remembering to put it in my backpack. I was eleven, after all! 

And that’s why I ran from class to class. And everybody else noticed. 

I’d always been a social misfit. In elementary school, I was the kind of kid who tried so hard to make friends that I tended to make a fool of myself. But in 7th grade, I reached a new pinnacle of awkwardness. I was nearly a year younger than any other 7th graders and six inches shorter than most. I wore glasses and was in desperate need of orthodontics that I wouldn't wear until high school. And most damningly, I’d spent the last seven years wearing a button down dress shirt and clip-on tie to school as part of Our Lady of Mercy’s uniform. So, in the early days, I wore collared shirts and plaids and sweatshirts with wolves on them. I had no idea how to dress myself like an American teenager in the late 1980s. And everybody noticed that too.  

There were a million reasons to make fun of me and my fellow students who found every goddamn one.

The cruelty that these things inspired in the kids around me was on a scale that I had a hard time comprehending. It was like a vast conspiracy. Somehow, every single one of the six hundred kids in that school seemed to know that I was an acceptable target for whatever frustration they were feeling. How that could happen when most of them didn’t even know my name still mystifies me. 

Kids would point and laugh and jeer at me in the halls for no reason I could fathom. They would grab my backpack as I raced through the halls to trip me up. They would knock piles of textbooks out of my hands. Name your stereotype of a bullied kit, and I experienced it. Right down to the kick me sign taped to my backpack and the thumbtacks on my chair

I was so friendless and alone that in 8th grade … when, for the first time in over a year, a few kids started talking to me like I was a human being … at first, I didn't even answer them because I was so sure that they were just setting me up for some kind of torment.

I should have been loving school. It was a well-equipped school on a nice campus in a prosperous town. My classes were mostly good. My teachers were mostly kind. I was working hard and learning a lot. But a school isn’t a building or a curriculum. It’s a group of people. No matter how good your attitude or how much you’re a team player … no matter how much you might love to learn, or how willing you are to go with the program … school is miserable if people are cruel to you. It is its own kind of hell.

Another Reason

But even though that isolation was the most painful part of junior high school, there was another conflict growing between me and school as well. One that would grow over time. One that would cut right to the very purpose of school. 

It started with types of conversation that adults would have with me. Neighbors and extended family and acquaintances of my parents who would ask me about school, and then, in short order, ask me “So what are you thinking about doing?” And by this they only meant one thing. What are you going to be doing for work? 

This wasn’t unique to me, of course. The messages were everywhere. Some classmates would get paid for every A they earned. Parents exhorted kids to take school seriously because, they said, “school is your job right now.” The message was clear … all of those classes and rules were there for one thing--to turn us into workers. I was awakening to a suspicion that school was just one incarnation, one facet, of a society that destroyed its environment and treated its members like cogs in a great money-making machine. 

I don't really know what my fellow students felt about this plan, but I found this collective obsession about my work destiny to be maddening. I was not excited to join the workforce. Most of the adults around me seemed stuck in lives of meaningless drudgery. They were consumed by worries and schedules and responsibilities. It was like a hypnotic spell that had somehow captured all the grown-ups around me. 

But I didn’t want to grow up only to molder away in a soulless job to pay for an oversized house, only to spend the weekend mowing the lawn and worrying about what the neighbors might think. I wanted to travel light. I wanted to follow my heart. I wanted to see beautiful places. I would stay true to myself. I wanted to read great books and maybe write some of my own. I wanted to find a life of adventure. 

If school was about the terribly serious business of making a living, I wasn’t sure that I wanted much to do with it. 

Tom Brown 

As you can probably tell, my relationship with school about halfway through my 7th grade year, was at a low point. That’s when I was admitted to the school's gifted and talented program. I’m not exactly sure how it was determined that I was gifted, or what I was gifted with. But the fact that I was had ramifications for the rest of my life. Practically what it meant was that I could go twice a week to hang out with Mr. Cipollini, (whom everyone called Cip) a good humored computer geek who would give us codes and ciphers and math puzzles to solve. Or Mrs. Bourjian, who would help me write stories, and tell me about how much she loved Mark Twain.

It was Cip who gave me a copy of the book that would have the most profound influence on my young life, and most importantly for this tale, deeply affect the way I thought and felt about school. 

“I bet this would be right up your alley,” he said one spring day and handed me Tom Brown's field guide to nature observation and tracking

That night, I settled into bed to read it. By the second paragraph of the introduction, I had thrown off my covers. And … omigosh … By the third, I was jumping up and down like I had found a secret map to Shangri La.

The book was a wild mix of tall tales, old fashioned natural history, Boy Scout skills, and homespun new age philosophy, all dressed up in a bunch of appropriated Indian tropes. But the way Tom Brown tells it, he was taken on as an apprentice by an Apache tracker who he met in the pine barrens of southern New Jersey. He studied under this mentor for ten years, and learned from him how to stalk so stealthily that he could creep up on and touch a deer … how to track animals and people so well that he could find the traces of their passage across bare rock … and how to survive so effortlessly in the wild that he could be at home anywhere with nothing but a pocketknife. And by following the exercises in his books and putting in enough dirt time, I could learn all of that too. 

Someone else might have read that same introduction and written him off as a huckster or a cult leader. But I was not someone else. I was a lonely outcast 12 year old boy who loved nature and books and notetaking and methods. And here was this method, this perfect method. As badass as any secret shaolin kung fu training. 

If I followed this method I could become a magician. I could be the Daniel-san to Tom Brown’s, Mr Miyagi or the young Skywalker to a master Yoda … and I could climb my way out of an ordinary life to become somebody wise and powerful. But this wasn’t just about mastery. It was also about purpose and meaning and … most of all … freedom. 

Freedom. 

This was an escape route from the soulless destiny of the Connecticut suburbs. If I could live “at one with the Earth” as Tom promised I could, then I’d never need to get a job. I would always be able to get what I needed. I would be free in a way that the people around me could scarcely imagine. 

Over the next few weeks a plan formed in my mind. 

With Tom Brown’s magical books in hand, I would practice my outdoor skills until I became the veritable Kwai Chang Cain of wilderness lore. I would free myself of the wage slavery that everyone else assumed was destiny. I'd use the woods behind my house as a training group and build secret, camouflaged shelters back there and learn to hunt and forage for my food. And then, when it came time for me to leave home, just like the David Karradine character from the old Kung Fu series, I would wander like the wind wherever my heart was moved to go. 

And I wouldn’t just do this for myself. I would do it like some wilderness bodhisattva for the liberation of all. I would be a wilderness evangelist, a traveling missionary of the woods, teaching people the things that would make them just as free as I was. 

I asked my mom to buy every single one of his field guides, and then the books that were sold as memoirs and, as you do, I filled notebook after notebook with outlines of each one.

I recognized this as a kind of education too, but the education that Tom Brown described was so different from what I was experiencing in school. This wasn’t about earning a mark or remembering some words for a quiz. This wasn’t about bells or schedules or course sequences or prerequisites. According to the stories, Tom’s mentor guided him with hints and tricks. He would teach Tom only when he was certain that he burned with a need to know. As Tom says in the Tracker, “When [he] gave us a test, it was not a test in the sense that it could be graded. It was a way of knowing what to work on next. The importance of the test was not the results, but what we did with them.” 

As you might guess, this new aesthetic was not exactly sympatico with the reality of my school life. And as junior high school gave way to high school, the tension between my view of education and society’s view of schooling would grow into one of the biggest fights of my life. 

School as Control & Domestication

With this new perspective, I began to notice all kinds of things about school that I’d previously taken for granted. 

And I began to see that school wasn’t just about learning. It was also about control Its bells. Its hall passes. It’s prison-like plan for exactly where every single student would be at every second of the day. Its endless lists of rules which were as inflexible as they were absurd. When my wife, Laura, was in school, she ended up in detention because she'd been absent when the new sign in procedure to the library had been introduced. And so she hadn’t signed the right paper at the right time while she was there, she’d was marked as having “cut” her class. Which, I have to point out, wasn’t even a class. It was the freaking library. And despite the fact that 10 other students and both librarians could testify to the fact that she was there and had been there for the whole period … no exceptions could be made. While serving this detention, she sat next to a kid who was there because he was setting the pocket of his lacrosse stick with a butter knife to hold the ball in place. He was there … Get this … for bringing a weapon to school.

My brother, one of the quietest and most compliant kids who has probably ever lived. Once got detention for being late to school … when he had taken the bus. I have no idea if the bus-driver had to serve a detention for this, but everyone else on the bus he drove had to serve one … despite the incredulous calls of our frustrated parents … rules are rules you know. 

Meanwhile, in an act of Orwellian doublespeak that would have made Big Brother proud.The high school administration instituted a program for continuous school improvement called Q + … designed to “give students a voice in their school.” This radical and progressive policy basically amounted to … a glorified suggestion box, which of course students stuffed with profane and frivolous suggestions. A few heartfelt ones that called for sensible changes (like maybe it would be nice if students could eat their lunch outside once in a while) were summarily ignored without official comment, and one idea (I think about motorcycle parking) which.was easy because it only involved painting some lines in the parking lot was actually implemented. Our principal could trot it out every time he talked to the school board about our blue ribbon school.

School, it turned out, was easy to criticize. It would have been so simple just to hate school in a storm of teenaged pique. But as my high school career progressed, it was a place that I increasingly enjoyed … despite myself … and for reasons that I could scarcely have predicted. First, high school just wasn’t junior high school. It was huge and anonymous. But now these very things that had terrified me about junior high were now golden opportunities to remake myself. Suddenly I was surrounded by kids who didn't know that I was the designated nerd and whipping post. And in high school, gods be praised, all of my classes were tracked. AP. honors. standard. and  remedial. We all got sorted into levels based on test scores and last year's grades. Say what you want about the classist injustices of the system. I have no doubt that they are true, but being in honors classes saved my life. Most of the bullies who had tormented me for three long years (20% of my short life) ended up somewhere else. And I found myself in classrooms full of smart, ambitious kids who weren't afraid to take school seriously and didn't see those things as a fault in me. For the first time since the 6th grade, I had people who would talk to me, whose company I enjoyed, and as the semesters went by, I even came to call friends. 

And on top of it  … I loved learning things and reading and writing essays and taking notes. I was good at learning. And that, as it does for most people, it made me feel good about myself. 

My heart was perplexed on the matter. On the one hand, what a sublime delight it was to have friends after years of being shunned and humiliated. On the other hand, we were also stuck in this atmosphere of rigid...