Mostly I've gone through life unconsciously, thinking about something I wasn't supposed to, or not thinking at all. I sort of drifted and felt my way along. People took charge of me according to the stereotypes they believed.
1953-57: my high school class was about 500 students. We were tested a lot, I think partly because this was post-WWII and people were still trying to figure out what peacetime might be like. I was 17th in the class per grade point average. I was 500th in manual dexterity. I was a finalist for the National Merit Scholarship. There were four of us, two were boys. And I was a finalist for the National Honor Society Scholarship. There were two of us. The other was Carolyn Schrag. I hardly knew her.
Carolyn and I took the final test in the psych dept of Reed College with a hatch of chicks peeping in the next room, waiting for some experiment. She was very rich and drove us there in her sports car. Afterwards we went to find her a prom dress, an idea for which I was totally unequipped. The dress she chose was embroidered organdy, strapless, virginal. Maybe a little deceptive. For a "date" for the prom I asked the adviser for my Presbyterian Sunday school. He was very nice about it. We double-dated for my Chinese friend who married her date.
The last time I found Carolyn on Google she was not married and working for a Washington Coast Indian tribe as a fish marketing advisor. (She was not NA.) I don't know whether she went to college or which one it would have been. She had not been in the "enriched" English classes I was assigned. We thought we must be the best of the best, in the top 1% of students in the nation, forgetting that we were only finalists, not winners. And 1% of zillions of people is a LOT of people.
Northwestern University gave me a full-scholarship anyway. Lucky they did, because I was a zombie. I went there because my dramatics teacher went there. As for the two national tests, everyone on my floor in my freshman dorm had been finalists and some had won. I got my degree in Speech Education but took my classes as though for theatre. I got 2 C grades (considered equivalent to flunking): "acting" and "philosophy of religion" They are still the most deeply affecting and useful classes I ever took.
Two things broke there, the idea that any paper test could detect merit and the idea that a grade in a class had anything to do with what one learned there and used. I graduated with no job and no prospects. I had gone into the placement bureau and asked for a list of high school teaching jobs that were West of the Mississippi but not in California. The counselor was astounded. "But there's nothing THERE!" she exclaimed. I picked up the Browning, MT. job by accident while traveling through on the way home.
But the idea of "merit" stuck with me and also an inextinguishable idealism. Now I lit on the idea of the University of Chicago. I was doing well in the Unitarian Universalist context, which insists that all its members are above average. And I was sleeping with my boss (not the minister). I must be pretty hot stuff. (It was 1978.)
My minister helped me apply to the UU seminary which at the time was part of a cluster of seminaries around the U of C and if one were admitted by one of the small denominational schools, one had access to the whole complex. The catch was meeting the requirements for an MA in Religious Studies. Basic French test, three stiff exams on religious basics (history, prominent figures). I did that. But I couldn't qualify for the small UU degree until years later because they didn't like me. I didn't seem like what they thought UU's should be like. And I had spent as much time as possible taking classes from Richard Stern, novelist.
But they let me be a circuit-riding minister living in a van and growing four little Montana fellowships. I did that for three years. I was over forty, living dangerously on the edge, and thinking it showed great merit to sacrifice like this. Gradually that wore off. I had to admit that I was really lousy at doing minister stuff, like reassuring everyone.
This second education put me on the edge of a thinking world that really IS elite -- maybe. The French and Algerian thought that killed God and set sex free was just beginning, but I picked up well enough to follow everyone but Paul Ricoeur. For the next half-dozen years I did a Civil Service job for the City of Portland, observing the Trumpisms everywhere, reading as fast as I could, and living near my mother (dying of cancer) and my brother (disabled by a concussion). My mother died -- she was 89 and had a good life -- a little lonesome -- and had no idea at all what my second episode of college was about. It is a reframing of everything and seemed to her like atheism. Defiance.
With my third of her estate, I came back to the edge of the Blackfeet rez, where I had been young. Bob Scriver died as I arrived. He had remarried and been changed by success. The fourth wife inherited millions of dollars, hated everyone, soon died in Canada. I bought a ramshackle house and sat down to write, following that merit script from the movies when Anne Shirley and the Brontes finally are confirmed by some crabbed old publisher. Then I began to get smart.
There is no merit. There is no success. There is doing worthwhile work long enough to develop some skill. Publication, prizes, high sales, starring at conferences, etc. -- all that means nothing at all. It helps to be in a place with a lot of people (city) because the chances of finding someone like oneself are better and that will help.
Then came the Internet. And blogging. Northwestern University theatre department has been overwhelmed by other "communications" departments, some of them based on that French/Algerian love of theory, esp. if it will overthrow the past. The little seminary I attended has dwindled to a rental space in the Loop and has a tenuous relationship to the Cluster -- if that exists now. The U of Chicago is hanging on to its goals and reputation as much as it can and mostly succeeding. The Unitarian Universalist denomination is under siege. The brilliant handsome men I knew are aged out.
So what's this thing rich people are buying for their children, fake educations, empty degrees? I read that straight-A students (mostly girls) from high schools across the country cannot handle college work. It seems they played angles to get their grades because it interfered too much with their lives to do the work.
The first year I taught high school English on the rez, I flunked two girls in the senior class, blocking their graduation. The principal simply changed the grades to D minus. One became a beloved nurse, the other one committed murder and spent most of her life in prison. That's is, you see. Fifty-fifty. But after that I put in grades with India ink.
No comments:
Post a Comment