Frustration and remenisces

Lately I've been very frustrated by a project I've been working on. It's been taking me forever and I've been getting more and more anxious and depressed as its dragged on and on. It's not that I'm not used to working hard; it's that to work so hard and get such minimal results is so demoralizing. It makes me feel downright stupid, which I haven't felt in a long while. It doesn't feel particularly good.

When I was in the eighth grade, we read The Chosen for English class. I loved the book and couldn't put it down; I finished it in two days. I was electrified, and not just because I was into Jews, beards and Brooklyn. I also related to the feeling of cloisteredness and confinement that the Hasidic boy was straining against.

I didn't go to a yeshiva, but the isolation I felt from my school was very similar. I attended a small private school that ran from Kindergarten through High School. The school's big draw was its bilingualism, immersing American kids in a European language that was next to useless for everyday purposes. I'll call it the Swedish School. I had been sent there straight from preschool, and stayed for nine years.

I had been precocious as a child, and had been identified as "gifted" at three. I taught myself to read and liked to learn. If I had been at another school, things might have been different...

My parents were called into school one day, summoned by my Kindergarten teacher. She was angry and confused. "I caught him doing this as we were making our letters!" she shrieked. She pretended to hold a pen in her right hand and cupped it with her left. I had apparently been pushing my writing hand along, as someone might have used a two-handed broadsword to slay a particularly nasty dragon. When she had confronted me and asked me what I was doing, I had apparently nonchalantly replied, "This is how I write."

But that wouldn't do. I had to make my letters in "nice, pretty" cursive, just like everyone else. It made no difference that my letters always came out shaky, or that I could never remember which capital letters were which- I confused Ts and Ss endlessly, and from third grade onward, defiantly wrote my capitals in print, accepting the check marks I would receive as punishment. I was a doomed perfectionist, and would spend hours at the kitchen table, tearfully trying to make my assignments look the way they were supposed to, already knowing what my teachers would say, seeing the mistakes I was making but unable to do anything about them.

No one knew what learning disabilities were. We thought "dislexia" was some horrible disease, since no one who ever found out they had it stayed at the school very long afterward. It wasn't just that the teachers (American and Swedish) didn't know how to deal with "different" kids. Many of them also didn't care, and some were even deliberately cruel. My handwriting never improved, and the faster I had to write notes, the worse it became. I could either write legibly, or quickly. Never both. I had teachers hand me back assignments in class, dropping them to the floor and declaring, "I can't read that chicken scratch. Do it over." I had a math teacher who regularly announced that the class "should be ashamed" for its low test scores. She once commented after handing back a quiz that she was amazed I could tie my shoes.

I became used to feeling bad about myself for long hours every day. Eventually I became numb to it, lost in a cloud of miserableness. Having almost every subject taught in both Swedish and English didn't help (I didn't learn a lick of U.S. history until eighth grade, though I knew a fair amount about European geography and the incestuous family trees of half-a-dozen royal lineages).

It wasn't all bad. There were a few teachers who really understood me, and they meant the world to me. They kept me going for the last three years, they reminded me that there were still things I was good at. Eventually I got a "learning disability" coach, who became another liferaft- she fought for me against the teachers and administration. When it got really bad, she would sit down with me. "I can't believe they keep sending you here," she'd whisper. "You'd be an honor student anywhere else."

I thought she was crazy. I had never gotten above a B-minus in math (in any language), and had been getting straight Ds for a year. English and history were fine, and Swedish and Swedish history were decent (I had stopped being graded exclusively on penmanship). And then there was Chinese. The school demanded that you choose a third language in the sixth grade (not counting Latin, which was mandatory for one semester, taught in Swedish). For reasons still unclear to me, I chose Chinese- which, given my horrible aptitude for short-term memory, auditory processing, and handwriting, was a recipie for disaster. I forgot how to write my name on the final- but the teacher had known I was trying, so I got a B.

Eighth grade was the year I broke away. It started with me telling my parents I wanted to quit Chinese. I was seeing a tutor multiple times a week and my grades in every other class were suffering. They knew I was trying, I just wasn't suceeding.

My mother met with the principal:

"Friar wants to drop Chinese."
"He can't!"
"Why not?"
"Then the other children will want to quit their third languages too, just because they're failing them!"

It was like a bad joke. My mother continued.

"So what should he do?"
"Well, I have a suggestion. He should stick with it for one more year, and then, who knows? He might not even decide to come here for High School?"

My mother stood up and walked out. The next day I quit the class and applied to high schools. At that time the Swedish school automatically accepted graduates from the Middle School to the High School. Out of 40 children, only 15 applied out. To do so was viewed as a betrayal. I was chastized in class by teachers who demanded to know why I had missed tests.

"I was interviewing at another school."

I was scared shitless. I had spent most of my life in that place, and had no idea what I would find outside it. All my friends were there, almost everyone I knew was connected with it. But I also knew I would be miserable if I had stayed. So I left, and never regretted it. It turns out I did become an honor student after all.

But I've never forgotten the humiliation of feeling stupid, the fear that people would figure out I didn't know something. It followed me in college, it followed me to the workplace, and to personal interactions as well. I've become better at recognizing when I'm having trouble and asking people to repeat things or explain something differently, but every once in a while, like an old injury, it flares up.

This is why I'm becoming a teacher, and, among other things, why The Chosen is one of my favorite books. I knew what it was like to feel lost, trapped by the same community that gave you comfort, holding on to the only thing you knew and terrfied of leaving it. I knew Danny Saunders. I was him.