A couple years ago, my stepdaughter came home from school announcing she needed a large Styrofoam ball, some bulletin board tacks with various-colored little barrel-shaped plastic heads, and some pipe cleaners, to make a model of a molecule for a science project. I think she also needed some “tag board,” or “poster board,” and a few markers. We found all of these items at one of those “Marts.” I was a little surprised that it totaled about $10.
At home, she assembled the model. She knew exactly what she was doing; she took only about five minutes to build it, and it was beautiful. She found some information and illustrations on the internet for the poster board display. Her mother, a librarian, kept an eye on her to make certain she paraphrased language and used and documented sources properly.
My stepdaughter also insisted on spending a little extra time on the poster board headlines. She selected an interesting font and multiple colors for the letters. She sized and re-sized several versions of the various headings and subheadings and printed them out a couple times to make them look just right. She used scissors and a tube of school glue to cut out and attach the illustrations, headlines, captions, and blocks of printed script. The poster, too was beautiful.
The total time spent on the project, including the trip to Kmart to pick up supplies, was about an hour and a half to two hours. The rest of the evening she watched some of her favorite episodes of Lost on rented DVD’s. Educational mission accomplished by a typical middle class American family.
The whole experience planted the seed of a thought in me. It sprouted, took root, and spread. It is now an infestation in my brain! It is a frightening truth. This story is my best effort to gather it up, process, package, and tell that truth.
This thought began with a memory from my adolescence when I had to complete a project of similar importance for my English class. I was about fourteen years old. We were doing a journalism unit and were instructed to find samples of different sorts of writing in various newspapers (editorial pieces, feature stories, entertainment columns, comics, and so forth), cut them out, paste them onto pages, label them, and write brief descriptions of them. I believe we had to find a minimum of three examples of each.
Times were not good at home financially. They hadn’t always been that way, but it so happened that things were particularly difficult then. Dad had been laid off his job in the iron mines. He was trying to make our farm into a paying venture, but money was scarce. If he had three and a half bucks in his pocket from cream checks, he would spend two and a half of it on groceries and put a dollar’s worth of gas in the car. That would sometimes boost the gas gauge needle very near to the half full mark. It was enough to get him where he had to go.
We didn’t expect Christmas presents that year, and then someone from a church who knew of our situation put us on a list, and we were given a box of groceries, some clothing items, and even toys for the younger two kids and me. We were all surprised and extremely grateful. We didn’t usually eat much ice cream or candy, and we didn’t go to movies during those days. We didn’t get a newspaper, but neighbors and relatives would drop off the Sunday paper after reading it. Sometimes we’d end up with two or three copies of papers brought over during the week. They were good for reading and starting fires in the wood stove. (That purpose for newspapers, along with wrapping fish and masking for painting projects, is not commonly found among the “seven purposes” listed in journalism textbooks.) Most of the papers were weeks old by the time I sat down to cut out stories, but that did not matter in the least.
I had procrastinated; I admit it. I could have started the project a couple days earlier, but I’d had other schoolwork too, and I really never realized how complicated this project could turn out to be for a kid in my situation. It sounded simple enough. I was confident I could finish this in one evening. I set to work finding the various items. I knew the virtues of brevity for a project like this one, and I sought out the shortest possible editorials, the tiniest cartoons, and the littlest straight features and news stories. I organized them and piled them up.
I had to arrange these on pages, but I couldn’t find a clean sheet of unlined paper in the house anywhere. I did have an old notebook with about twenty empty pages of college ruled lines left in it. The corners of the pages were rounded, and I knew the lines and those corners, which reduced the size of the pages, would create a mess for my teacher as he put my project in the pile with the other kids’, but it was going to have to do. I tore them out, very carefully, and cut the torn fringes and holes off the sides of the pages as straight as I could.
The project required a cover page and a table of contents. We could use only one side of each page, and we were encouraged to arrange the articles in appealing ways. We were shown how to add a brief description. We were allowed to use terminology from out textbooks in describing the articles, but we were warned that plagiarism would be graded down severely, and that paraphrasing was essential.
We were also told to type our descriptions, or print very clearly, in black ink.
We had no typewriter, but I found three pens. The black ink pen was low on ink and skipped, so I couldn’t use it. The other two wrote in shades of blue, so I chose the one that wrote darker blue. It would have to do.
I set to work writing my descriptions. I began, as kids that age do, by reading the descriptions in the book, paraphrasing with synonyms inside my head, and attempting to ink draft directly to the page. When you make a mistake in ink, you have only a few choices: throw away and start over, use white-out, or erase carefully by putting a little drop of spit on the end of an eraser and rubbing softly, but be careful! Rub too hard or use too much spit, and you’ll make holes.
I wore out an eraser and tore a couple of my limited number of precious pages and had to throw them away. I was more careful how much spit I used on the rest of them, and did a little better. Toward the end, I got much smarter. I began writing my descriptions out in pencil on other scraps of used paper, on the cover of the notebook, inside and out, on an old envelope or two, on anything, creating rough drafts first. Then I’d try to copy those onto my pages. I completed all of these brief descriptions, arranging them on the lower right corner of each page. I can’t remember how many pages the project required, exactly. I think we had to include ads of certain kinds, and I think news stories were subdivided into categories such as “local,” “state,” “regional,” “national,” and “international.” But it seems to me that the final project was about twelve pages long.
I decided it would be best to wait and paste my articles on the pages only after the descriptions were finished. Each page needed a heading, thus: “EDITORIALS,” “FEATURES,” “STRAIGHT NEWS,” etc. I wasted a couple more sheets of paper trying to write fancy, outlined, block letters and coloring them in with ink at first, but I gave up on that eventually. I had to rewrite the descriptions from pages I had ruined onto my dwindling supply of blank sheets of notebook paper, and just printed the headings carefully. They were poorly centered for the most part, not to mention clumsy and out of proportion. And they were in blue ink, but they would have to do.
It came time to paste the articles onto the pages. I might have used cellophane tape if we’d had some, but we didn’t. And we didn’t have “store-bought” paste, so I mixed up some flour paste. Now you see where this is going, don’t you?
Perhaps you don’t. Try it sometime. Put a little flour in a bowl and add water. Try to make the paste as creamy smooth as you can. Paste paper onto paper, let it dry, and see what you get. It will look something like the original copy of the Magna Carta, right after King John scribbled his name on it and crumpled it into a little ball before throwing it at the people who’d forced him to sign. It is a little known story, but thus was the Magna Carta forever disfigured.
Well, OK, I don’t know if King John did that exactly, but if he did, the Magna Carta, crumpled and re-straightened, is exactly how every single page looked when it dried out. That alone was enough to make a junior high kid cry. The stack of twelve sheets was going to be over an inch tall. I was a big kid, though. It was just going to have to do. I refused to cry.
But then I did when I pasted the editorials onto the page I’d painstakingly labeled “FEATURES.” It was three o’clock in the morning by that time. I sobbed. I couldn’t help it. So as not to wake Mom and Dad, I sobbed very quietly, but very, very hard, and stained a number of pages with spit and snot and tears, including the cover page of my un-crumpled Magna Carta.
After I gathered what little was left of my senses, I cut out my mistake and pasted it onto the last clean page of notebook paper in the house. And I labeled it correctly, and I copied the description again, and it looked pretty good until it dried. Then that page looked like the Magna Carta worked over twice. I cleaned up my mess and went to bed about four o’clock.
I was unbelievably fortunate back then because I was ignorant. But I’m not anymore.
When I saw the beautifully stenciled headings and the immaculate typing on the pages being handed in by the other kids, I was fortunate, because I didn’t know how their advantages, having a typewriter and white-out and many, many clean sheets of typing paper to start over on after they’d made mistakes, and good paste, and someone in the house to maybe type a couple of the descriptions for you after you’d drafted them, made their work much easier, so they could watch a little TV after dinner and get to bed before eleven o’clock.
I was ignorant enough not to recognize any of that. So I was very fortunate to feel, not angry, and not even jealous of the other kids’ advantages, but merely ashamed.
Some lunatics today would tell you that I was fortunate for other reasons, that my experience was a true learning experience; that, in fact, I learned more than the other kids because I was forced to work independently and use my imagination and ingenuity, while they were not. Some would even tell you that, even if I’d given up and quit and never handed the project in, I’d still be ahead of them all because I’d have learned more, and that it wouldn’t have mattered, because life is not about a grade or advantages enjoyed by some. Let’s extend this stupidity: The lunatics would say that, as long as you engage in quality learning, even if you don’t graduate from high school, you’ll be fine.
People who say so are lunatics indeed. Life in this country is all about advantages and disadvantages. It’s all about grades; it’s all about graduating. Most importantly, it’s all about self-respect.
When I was asked to pass my work forward, I decided I just wouldn’t. I didn’t want the other kids seeing what a mess I’d made of my project. I thought about taking my work out of the room and throwing it in the nearest garbage can, but I hung around at the end of class, after most kids had left the room, walked up to Mr. Hall’s desk, and handed my paper to him. “Thanks,” he said.
That response is a remarkable detail to me now. He just took my work and said “Thanks,” with absolutely nothing further. I don’t know why he didn’t joke about the Magna Carta styled parchment. He must have known. He must have been aware of my poverty and my lack of resources and the efforts I was making. Maybe he’d been poor once. Maybe as a young kid, he’d found it necessary to use a little flour paste himself. I was lucky to have Mr. Hall as a teacher.
The following week, the projects were handed back. There was a little red “B-” written on the front cover, in between a couple stains. I wonder if Mr. Hall ever guessed the origin of those stains.
My stepdaughter’s project was a mild inconvenience for a middle class household. She did beautiful work. I was glad for her, and glad for myself, too. I was a middle class parent. I had been a long time getting there. (I count my arrival in the middle to have occurred only recently, incidentally, within the past five years or so.)
But I also thought to myself, what do the poor kids do nowadays when an extra dollar or two in the family is always spent on essentials like milk or bread, and there’s no computer or printer at home, and the library is a mile or two away, and it’s five below zero outside? And, from among the teachers and other professionals that claim to be part of today’s so-called “middle class,” who really cares anyway?
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