High School English

An Essay

I was in grade twelve and thought I knew everything about English literature. I certainly thought I knew more than my English teacher. I was also lazy and more than the usual seventeen-year-old mess.

In high school, I was totally blind and took full advantage of the fact. It was true that I needed accommodations in the classroom: I needed to get books on cassette tape or in braille, and I often needed longer to finish assignments. But I was also lazy, and a big part of me didn’t actually want to do the work.

For the first while that September, I went to my classes. I liked Biology, which meant remembering stuff; I liked Social Studies, mostly because of the teacher; I tolerated psychology, which felt mostly like putting in time; and I loathed Math, which I had always found difficult and laborious. As for my English class, I didn’t like it.

English was about reading and talking about books and stories and plays, which I loved. I was a reader in my own life, and I’m sure I had read more than anyone else in that class. But I didn’t like my English teacher. Mrs. Manson was direct and strict, and she wasn’t fooled by my attitude. She expected me to do the work. Some of my other teachers were taken in by my blind-kid routine, which I used shamelessly to get out of work, yet I was smart enough to not always take advantage of my teachers.

In Bio 30, I went to all the classes and did the readings. I scored high on all of the in-class quizzes, but I blew off the two major assignments. I got by with a 50%. But I genuinely liked the class and the teacher.

English was different. It was a power struggle from the first day. Mrs. Manson expected us to work, and that included me. For some reason, I took it personally. Here was someone who held me to the same expectations as anyone else in the class. It offended me.

***

I certainly had reasons for my attitude in high school, which I had no ability to articulate to myself. I felt cut off and isolated much of the time, even among those I called friends. I was struggling with depression, and I hadn’t even begun to address the trauma of the accident that took my sight at the age of eleven. Everyone thought I just needed to accept my blindness; if I would just accept the fact that I was blind, then everything would be much better. My so-called best friend told me this more than once. Some of my former itinerant teachers thought I just felt sorry for myself. Admittedly, I didn’t understand what was happening with me, but the judgements of my friends and my teachers were a little self-righteous, more than a little uninformed, and entirely dismissive. All of this simply worsened my already bad attitude.

***

There were three other blind kids in the school that year. Ross and Karim, who both had enough vision to get around; and Janet, who like me was totally blind. Of all of us, Janet was the best student. Ross and Karim needed extra help from Brian Hential, our itinerant teacher at the time. I didn’t need the extra help—I just needed to do the work.

The four of us shared an office. It was in the main administration area, and we used the space to read books on tape, do homework, and meet with Brian. More often than not we used the space to gather and do nothing. We also invited in people we knew. One afternoon, we had nearly twenty people crammed into that room. We were fast becoming a nuisance. It was never Janet who instigated the trouble—it was always the rest of us.

It was maybe October, and Mrs. Manson paid me a visit in the office. I had been skipping classes. She told me in no uncertain terms that I was failing her class, and that if I didn’t come to class and work harder, I wasn’t going to pass the course.

I didn’t do the work, and I failed the class with a 35%.

***

That was the fall. The new semester for us started in February. Somehow, at some point between that visit from Mrs. Manson and the start of the winter semester, I found a better attitude. I was determined to work harder. I needed English 30 if I was going to graduate, so I enrolled for the winter. And for some inexplicable reason, I took Mrs. Manson’s course once again. I didn’t have to, something the school counsellor pointed out; but I had something to prove, and I was determined to do so.

That winter, I went to class. I tried to participate, even during our study of Hamlet; I thought it would kill me. I had to memorize one of Hamlet’s speeches, his “To be or not to be” soliloquy. And I did all right.

Then we did a unit on short stories, and Mrs. Manson stood there and told us about

James Thurber’s “The Catbird Seat”

and its use of irony. She explained how Mr. Martin, a mild and predictable little man in charge of the filing department at F&S, initially sets out to murder his bullying coworker, Mrs. Barrows, who is intent on reorganizing his department. He plans carefully, then one evening visits Mrs. Barrows at her apartment. Instead of rubbing her out, Mr. Martin smokes and drinks and fools Mrs. Barrows into thinking he is not the man he professes to be at the office. When Mrs. Barrows reports Mr. Martin’s behaviour the next day, everyone at F&S thinks her mad and she is taken away. Mr. Martin solves his problem and returns contentedly to his beloved filing department. Mrs. Manson explained the reversal in the story, and that Mr. Martin’s name, taken from the small but aggressive purple martin, was enough to justify his protective behaviour.

It was here my stubbornness kicked in. I didn’t agree with her about Mr. Martin, and I wanted to let her know. It perhaps wasn’t so much that I disagreed with her; I wanted to show her I thought she was wrong. My motivation was no doubt misplaced, but I plowed ahead out of sheer bloody mindedness.

I wrote a paper. It wasn’t long—maybe seven hundred and fifty words. I set out to show that Mr. Martin, in spite of his name, was a mousy little man who wasn’t capable of playing such a trick on Mrs. Barrows. His life was too habitual, too organized, too careful; his character was such that he simply could not have done such a thing. I don’t remember what I wrote, but I’m sure it was obnoxious. In those days I wrote on an electric typewriter, which meant someone, usually my mother, always had to proofread and correct all the errors I inevitably made. So I’m sure my writing wasn’t very good. I handed in the paper and waited.

The paper came back. I got a C. By this time, I was feeling less sure of myself. I had been openly confrontational, and I was left feeling a little embarrassed, more than a little uncertain, and somewhere a little hurt: I had done what Mrs. Manson wanted, maybe not in the way she asked, and yet my work still wasn’t good enough.

I settled on thinking that the grade I received meant Mrs. Manson just didn’t agree with me. Maybe she didn’t, but thinking about it now, I’m sure I would have received a higher grade if my writing had been better. But I didn’t understand at the time, and my act of defiance only earned me a very mediocre grade.

But I stuck with the course. And later that year, I went to see her. I wanted to ask about another essay—we were studying Death of a Salesman. She had an office in one of the second-floor rooms that were set aside for teachers. I sat and told her what I was thinking about for my paper. I felt nervous because I was still certain she didn’t like me, but I was still determined to pass the course.

She sat there, smoking and listening. Finally she said, “You have some good ideas about the play, but you will need to put in the work. You can decide that Manson’s a bitch and you don’t agree with her, but you still need to figure out what you think.”

I was abashed. I didn’t think that way about her, but I left her office feeling as though I had been called out.

***

I don’t recall now what I wrote for that paper. But I passed the course, and I graduated high school. Within another year, I was at college and questioning everything about my life. I lasted two weeks at college, then I worked for two years before deciding I needed to change my life once again and go to university. I stuck with university and became an English major. I managed to get through an undergrad, an M.A., then a PhD, trying the whole time to figure out ways to work better, become less lazy, and find some discipline. I eventually got work at two universities, and finally landed a full-time gig as an English professor in my forties.

I would like to think that failing that grade twelve English class had something to do with the direction of my life. I’m sure it did in some ways. But high school had been a battleground for me. I was a disaster as a teenager, and I managed to leave with enough to get me into a university but little else.

After having taught for thirty years, I have a better sense of what Mrs. Manson was dealing with—a kid with a bad attitude, who thought he knew better and didn’t want to put in the work. I’m sure she found me exasperating.

But the truth was that I had been a reader for years before I took that class. I knew how to read, if nothing else. And I had endless opinions about what I read. I was also something of a contrarian, disagreeing for disagreement’s sake. So despite my attitude, it was natural enough for me to disagree with Mrs. Manson about Thurber and his short story. What I lacked in high school and found in university was a desire to learn. I didn’t begin with English at university. I wanted to major in political science—God help me. I thought about majoring in psychology and even philosophy.

But invariably, like being drawn to my magnetic North, I returned to the thing I most loved, the thing that saved my life over and over again. Reading books.

In my undergrad, I learned about the history of English literature. I read Chaucer, Milton, the Romantics; I even came to appreciate Shakespeare. And as part of my degree, I discovered the study of children’s and young adult books—that’s where I eventually stayed, and that’s where I have lived as a teacher and researcher ever since.

But as I think back, I’m sure that grade twelve English class with Mrs. Manson did something for me. I was already in love with books and reading, so it wasn’t that. Maybe what the course and the interactions with my teacher taught me was a different way to talk and write about literature. Maybe the experience taught me I could complete something if I put in the work. I’m still not sure. I just know at the time I was a lonely, desperate teenager who just wanted to be heard and to receive some approval.

I was in my fifties when I ran into Mrs. Manson. She must have been in her seventies at that point. She was volunteering as an usher for a concert at our downtown theatre. We didn’t really have time to talk, but she seemed very pleased to see me, and I managed to tell her that I worked as an English professor at a downtown university. Even then, even in such a setting and with all those years between, I could feel part of myself still back there in the past, a painfully awkward seventeen-year-old with a bad attitude, no discipline, and desperately wanting, in some way, a modicum of approval from this woman who never seemed to like me very much.

(Inside Magdalen College, Oxford)