Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Education on Mango Street.

At 1 a.m. this morning I finished those tricky-sticky essays, and after stuff strenuous reading, I daresay think that I can admit how bad the education system really is. I have never seen so many spelling errors, grammatical errors, mechanics errors. Must I say that I actually read something were the word "I" was used over and over (given that is is academic writing the word I was prohibited) and this is what gets me even more, the person even forgot to capitalize sometime.

What is happening? Yes, I will admit there were a outstanding essays that brightened up the long night of reading, but they were few and far between. I don't know what happened . . . or maybe the problem has been that it has always been happening and we fail to notice it through our blindness. Either way here is a great essay on the topic . . . well it is essentially on the topic . . . and I like it enough so that I don't care if it is on topic. The essay is by Sandra Cisneros and is an excerpt from her introduction to her own book The House on Mango Street, so shoot:

It’s been ten year since The House on Mango Street was first published. I began writing it in graduate school, the spring of 1977, in Iowa City. I was twenty-two years old.

When I began writing The House on Mango Street, I thought I was writing a memoir. By the time I finished it, my memoir was no longer a memoir, no longer autobiographical. It had evolved into a collective story people with several lives from my past and present, placed in one fictional time and neighborhood—Mango Street.

A story is like a Giacometti Sculpture. The farther it is away from you, the clearer you can see it. In Iowa City, I was undergoing several changes of identity. For the first time I was living alone, in a community very different in class and culture from the one where I was raised. This caused so much unrest I could barely speak, let alone write about it. The story I was living at twenty-two would have to wait, but I could take the story of the earlier place, an earlier voice, and record that on paper.

The voice of Mango Street and all my work was born at one moment, when I realized I was different. This sounds absurd and simple, but until Iowa City, I assumed the world was like Chicago, made up of people of many cultures all living together—albeit not happily at times but still coexisting. In Iowa, I was suddenly aware of feeling odd when I spoke, as if I were a foreigner. But this was my land too. This is not to say I hadn’t felt it quite as keenly as I did in graduate school. I couldn’t quite articulate what it was that was happening, except I knew that I felt ashamed when I spoke in class, so I chose not to speak.

I can say my political consciousness began the moment I recognized my otherness. I was in a graduate seminar on memory and imagination. The books required were Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak Memory, Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa, and Gaston Bachelard’s Poetic or Space. I enjoyed the first two, but as usual I said nothing, just listened to the dialogue around me, too afraid to speak. The third book, though, left me baffled. I assumed I just didn’t get it because I wasn’t as smart as everyone else, and if I didn’t say anything, maybe no one else would notice.

The conversation, I remember, was about the house of memory—the attic, the stairwells, the cellar. Attic? My family lived in third-floor flats for the most part, because noise traveled down. Stairwells reeked of Pine Sol from the Saturday scrubbing. We shared them with the people downstairs, they were public zones no one except us thought to clean. We moped them all right, but not with resentment for cleaning up some other people’s trash. And as for cellars, we had a basement, but who’s want to hide in there? Basements were filled with urban fauna. Everyone was so scared to go in there including the meter reader and the landlord. What was this guy Bachelard talking about when he mentioned familiar and comforting homes of memory? It was obvious he never had to clean one or pay the landlord rent for one like ours.

Then it occurred to me that none of the books in this class or in any of my classes, in all the years of my education, had ever discussed a house like mine. Not in books or magazines or films. My classmates had comes from real houses, real neighborhoods, ones they could point to , but what did I know?

I went home that evening and realized my education had been a lie—had made presumptions about what was “normal,” what was American, what was valuable—I wanted to quit school right then and there, but I didn’t. Instead, I got angry, and anger when it is used to act, when it is used nonviolently, has power. I asked myself what I could write about that my classmates could not. I didn’t know what I wanted exactly, but I did have enough sense to know what I didn’t want. I didn’t want to sound like my classmates; I didn’t want to keep imitating the writers I had been reading. Their voices were right for them but not for me.

Instead, I searched for the “ugliest” subjects I could find, the most un-“poetic”—slang, monologues in which waitresses or kids talked about their own lives. I was trying as best I could to write the kind of book I had never seen in a library or in a school, the kind of book not even my professors could write. Each week I ingested the class readings and then went off and did the opposite. It was a quiet revolution, perhaps a reaction taken to extremes, but it was out of this negative experience that I found something positive: my voice.

At one time or another, we all have felt other. When I teach writing, I tell the story of the moment of discovering and naming my otherness. It is not enough simply to sense it; it has to be named, and then written about from there. Once I could name it, I ceased being ashamed and silent. I could speak up and celebrate my otherness as a woman, as a working-class person, as an American of Mexican descent. When I recognized the place where I departed from my neighbors, my classmates, my family, my town, my brothers, when I discovered what I knew that no one else in the room knew, and then spoke it in a voice that was my own voice, the voice I used when I was sitting in the kitchen, dressed in my pajamas, talking over the table littered with cups and dishes, when I could give myself permission to speak from that intimate space, then I could talk and sound like myself, not like me trying to sound like someone I wasn’t. Then I could speak, shout, laugh from a place that was uniquely mine, that was no one else’s in the history of the universe, that would never be anyone else’s, ever.


So how was it enjoyable? I thought so and it also make you think about the own quality of your education, because I think she points out quite effectively that does not make exceptions for the cultural differences of our backgrounds.

Hmmm. . . well, I liked it and I suppose that is all that matters.

7 comments:

Unknown said...

I must say bravo- How did you know I loved Cisneros? Her writing is beautiful and poignant. . . and yeah, the whole education thing, she nailed it with every word.

Gin said...

I have to say that I agree with John/you? on this Ev Cisneros totally hit the point of cultural separation within the school system. Now, what you need to do is write an essay on how to fix it. I also read so great stuff by Gatto on the subject, it focuses on the issue even more by eying in on the public school systems and their 'faults.'

Eve said...

I appriceate both of your comments, Gin's more and John's, as she wasn't writing something for the sake of writing. I'll look into finding that Gatto article. What was his first name? John? If so, I think I might have read it already, nonetheless, I still think it would be a good addition, because if I remember correctly it was definately a very good article. A little satirical, but not too much. . . just enough to make the piece thoroughly enjoyable.

B.Pagano said...

Neat post. . . I liked how you used Cisernos, as The House on Mango Street was, beautiful . . . and your own experience with education was, not beautiful. Ha.

Andy Rayner said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Andy Rayner said...

Eve. You’re turning up the intensity of your blog I see :-)
Personal revelation. Everything I did not understand in the crucial areas of math and Science, not one teacher ever sat with me to help get it right.

I only learned to enjoy reading after secondary education. Public school did the best job at teaching me to hate reading. The majority of the books were not interesting to me at all. However, because everyone else had to read them, I had to, thanks to some unnamed person in the education department.

When I challenged a teacher in high school about substituting some useless book for another more interesting book. I got the usual, “It’s good for you to work through books you don’t like!” Here is the funny thing about fiction particularly, most adults I know read fiction for enjoyment and stimulation. If they hate a book they toss it out and read another one. Public education does not permit variety. I would rather kids read 10 equally good literature works they are glued, to to force them to wade slowly through 2 they hate.


Now here is where I’m a nut. We had to Home School our kids out of necessity, not by choice, when we worked in Africa. The notion of Home School (HS) was crazy to us when we first heard it. How? What do you use? Etc. We soon realized that HS is not like school at home. It is more relaxed, fun, and oh so flexible. If the kids get really interested is something we ran with it. If not interested in another topic right now, we would table it till another day. With 1-2 hours of work each day in grades 1-4 our kids where at the top of their classes in Public School (PS) when we moved home. After seeing the kids so under stimulated in PS for 4 years, we just had to come back to HSing again for JR and Sr High. The best family decision we have ever made.

Our kids all love reading. If they really dislike a book we assign, we give them many other good options to choose from. Making reading a chore is the single best way to hamper a person’s education and enlightenment for life. The kids now work 3-4 hours a day following a daily schedule we have set up. Most programs are self teaching with Parental interjection. (Our involvement is a max 2 hours per day. Usually 1 hour does it) Home School helped all three sons progress rapidly again. No our kids are not gifted, it’s the methodology.

My Oldest son was taking University English and Chemistry in Grade 11. He could be taking University Physics and Calculus this grade 12 year. But we though, “NA!”, let him enjoy his last year home with us, what’s the rush. Our youngest son has only 3 programs left to do, but his age says he should have 5 years of school left. This is not intended as personal bragging, nor is it a plug for home schooling. HS is certainly not for every child or every parent. However, it has given us the flexibility to do school different. I know Christians, atheists, agnostics, and PS teachers who HS. The bottom line is this; we all do so because they have seen the box Public School puts kids in. Stepping outside the box has worked for us. One can find exceptions to the rule, but they are the minority, and there is this huge assumption that if the child were in PS the PS system would have fixed the problem. That is a big “what if”.

Sadly, teachers and unions see us as the enemy. They can’t imagine how a person who is not trained in “education” could possibly teach as effectively as they do.(though I personally am) They assume then that PS has to be more balanced in the socializing department. However, all the studies have shown that kids HS’ed by parents with a High School diploma (when compared with HS parents possessing University Graduate degrees) score only about 2 percentile points lower. Also, HS kids are more involved in activities outside the home than PS kids, with an average of 5 events per week.
Since the quality of the education can not be questioned, they zoom in on the quality of environment. But both have proven a non issue. My kids will sit and have conversations with small kids, or grey haired grannies, and are more comfortable with a diversity of people in public gatherings. When other teens all huddle in a peer dependent google in the corner, looking like their parents made them come, my kids are in conversation with groups of adults of every age engaged in many topics of discussion, and genuinely enjoying people.
Anyway, the quote you posted… Well, like, Ya! So much of the routine and semantics of education are a drudgery for no reason. What to do about the non relevant things in school? Now, I suppose the other option is to rise up and start a ground swell of reform in the PS system. I could not win this battle of reform in the life time of my kids. So I am not prepared to sacrifice my kids for the long duration of many small battles that might eventually with the war of PS reform. They would have still suffered under the slow changes. Besides, I personally have never had a PS teacher listen to anything I had to say in my life. If I disagreed with anything they said, I was dismissed and shut out, period. They are not paid to listen to me anyway.

Finally, as for books relating to my background? I don’t even expect the books I read to talk about people and places I’m familiar with. Books take us around the world through imagination. However, if a book is like pulling teeth for a kid to read, for mercy sakes give them other options to choose from so they can take the imaginary flight into new places and cultures etc. The mind soars nowhere when a person hates what he is reading.

I wish had the freedom to be taught and learn how my kids are learning. I might be writing better than this :-)
Anyway, yes our family is nuts – or more positively- “operating outside the box”.

Sorry I deleted the first post. I had to fix a few typo's there - Poor public school education:-)

Eve said...

Andy-
Thank you for your comment. I have actually been thinking about writing about the education system for quite some time, and now through work I was pushed over the edge. I think it needed to be addressed how children through public education aren't being taught the essentials to thoroughly understand their material. Furthermore, they are not taught to experience and learn anything about themselves, as is evident through their writing: the stale words made as mechanic as breathing. The Cisneros essay dealt with writing specifically and how her own experience cut her short on being able to express herself through both verbal and written communication. However, I think next I will be posting a Gatto essay that deals with all realms of the system.

It was nice to hear your comment on home schooing. It provided a nice look into a different alternative that I was not entirely aware.

I suppose the biggest thing for me is that my own education did not feel like a sham. It was in a public school, and I did alright. Of course, now I reevaluate that because for the most part this was due to a rigorous honors program that my school luckily offered. My senior year I was in all honors and AP classes besides two: orchestra and geography, which I essentially dropped after two weeks and traded for an open study course because it was not stimulating at all. I sat in the class bored to tears, "learning" something I had been taught when I was in grade school, and I was always amazed and frustrated when people would say 'I dont get it.'

Furthermore, there are definately flaws in the system and they need to be worked out in the near future. In public schools we have the recent "No Child Left Behind" legislation that I believe is leaving more children behind than ever before. What schools needs is a reform in material, not another test to show them how their material is failing students.