the ungifted

Bill Barowy (wbarowy who-is-at lesley.edu)
Fri, 7 Aug 1998 16:24:22 -0400

"Crappuccino." He thought in a solid working-class register. Then,
switching modes fluidly, "The list has not seen so much self-indulgence.
Some doors open, others do not, others are opened for you. There is no
going back. Mostly there isn't a choice, and the door leads to a passage
with only one exit. Huh. So it also goes with the privileged."

You could not put him is such a small box.

It had almost happened to him in eighth grade. Some IQ test and a
demonstrated ability to memorize the year earlier placed him in the school
play and the academically talented class. The play was a wash. He did
not want to do it. And then in teenage male rebellion to a teacher who
took control too seriously, he and two others from the class organized a
raid on her house one night. Weeks earlier they had conducted a beer-can
drive with citizens across the town collecting cans from roadways and the
trash. When they had gathered about 12 trash bags full, they covered her
lawn with the cans and played various other pranks.

Of course they were caught. They knew they would be. The details of the
situation are irrelevant. The town's most leading citizens, and half the
eighth grade class had participated in the beer-can collection, and were
implicated. That was the beautiful irony of the whole situation.

Freshman year in high school found one of the three going to a private
college-preparatory school. The second attended vocational school after
studying calculus his sophomore year. He was the brightest. He had
quickly recognized the irrelevance of academic study. He now works
supervising milling machine operators. The third found himself in
non-college prep classes. After all, the guidance counselor knew his
father as a manual laborer with limited communication skills, and the kid
was clearly a trouble-maker.

"Dollars to donuts, he thought the IQ test was a fluke." It was not him
nevertheless. Not gifted, just hard-working, and determined to get out of
that little town, to escape the control, the abuse, the arguments. Reading
was how he had escaped the boredom of school, had escaped the pain of
growing up, and was the ticket to college. The way out.

"Dysfunctional families. Such euphemistic crap."

A physicist because his physics teacher said he would never make it. An
engineer because it was economically necessary. An academician because it
is escape. Proving to himself that all of this is not him. The lyrics to
the Jethro Tull song play in his head, "How they dare to tell me that I'm
my father's son, when that is just an accident of birth?" while he hears
another voice "We cannot help making one another, and being made by others,
we have the possibility of continuing their part in us, for others living
and to come." That is the beautiful irony of the whole situation.

The list has not seen so much self-indulgence.

Bill Barowy, Associate Professor
Technology in Education
Lesley College, 29 Everett Street, Cambridge, MA 02138-2790
Phone: 617-349-8168 / Fax: 617-349-8169
http://www.lesley.edu/faculty/wbarowy/Barowy.html
_______________________
"One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself
and watch yourself softly become the author of something beautiful."
[Norman Maclean in "A river runs through it."]