Educational Journeys

JENN McKINLAY: Hooligan 1 graduated from Arizona State University yesterday and the Hub and I could not be prouder, obviously. It's a particularly poignant achievement because H1 was not a natural born academic. 

Proof? In fifth grade I was called to a parent-teacher conference because my darling boy would frequently just get up and leave the classroom when he was bored. To say that I did not see him graduating Magna Cum Laude twelve years later is a vast understatement (not bragging, I swear, we were so surprised)!

This got me to thinking about how we all change (or not) during our academic years. In elementary school, I was one of the top students and had an absolute fit when I got a B-. 

By middle school, I had become a social butterfly and school was just a means to see my friends.

High school? Maintained the grades just enough to not get in called out. B's get degrees! 

College? The first two years were spent on alcohol fueled shenanigans (endless shenanigans--some of which required community service in the dorm). The final two years, I found my major, locked in, and graduated on time by the skin of my teeth (and a lot of summer school).

So, how about you, Reds and Readers? What was your academic journey like? Stellar student? Hated school? A little bit of both? 

Final note: I was unfamiliar with the ritual of the Stole of Gratitude (we didn't have that in 1989), so when H1 presented me with his Stole of Gratitude as the person who has supported him the most during his academic journey, well, my heart was full, y'all, and, yeah, I cried but just a little. 

I Think That I Shall Never See, A School Project on the Life Cycle of A Tree...

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Last night, I stayed up very late (or early) because Youngest was doing A Project. Those of you who aren't parents may not recognize the unholy terror that rises in the breast when you hear those words. Those who are may be having PTSD-like flashbacks to pouring baking soda into a funnel.

We all remember doing A Project as a kid. The sugar-cube igloo, the papier-mâché volcano, the poster illustrating the life cycle of a butterfly, complete with a real cocoon found on a bush. First off, let's posit this: no Project ever taught you anything you couldn't learn from reading a paragraph in an encyclopedia (1). I learned more about volcanoes from watching Tommy Lee Jones tracking lava flow down La Cienega Boulevard than I ever did from making a clay model of Mount Vesuvius (2). I know about Iroquois family structure because I read a book about it, not because I made a model of a long house.(3) 

Reminiscing about the Projects of your youth, you will see a shadowy figure in the background. Look closer. Is it coming into focus? Yes, it's your mother or father (4). It was, in fact, your mother who tore 500 strips of newspaper and dunked them in runny wheat paste until her fingers turned gray that enabled you to get an A on that dinosaur model. It was your father who found that moth cocoon in the back yard and told you it belonged to a butterfly. It was MY mother who sat up until 2am cutting out pictures of flowers from magazines (5) for a poster whose content and purpose I can't recall. Pistils and stamen, maybe? The parts of which, by the way, I still can't identify. One of my kids asked me one time in the garden and I said, "All that with the pollen is the flower's naughty bits."

Yes, much of the real work of The Project is done by good old Mom or Dad. I'm not talking about helicopter parents who design posters that look as if they should be hanging in the MOMA. Even those of us who believe our kids ought to be the moving force behind The Project still wind up as unheralded laborers. It's like admiring, say, Vita Sackville-West's garden. The creative design is hers, sure, but there still wouldn't be anything to look at without some poor old sod digging in 500 pounds of manure by hand. You, the parent, are the poor old sod in this case (6).

Why is this? Mostly, its due to the Universal Law of School Projects, which states a child will tell its parents about a project no more than 24 hours before it is due (7). The Universal Law also states there will be at least one ingredient to the project that will require a trip to Michael's or Jo-Ann's (8), or, if your child is older, a dash to Staples to replace your color ink cartridges (9). Because your kid will have to do five hours of work between the time he told you about The Project and bedtime - not to mention his other homework for the next day - you inevitably wind up doing the scut work while he does his math sheets.

How has this worked out in my own life as a parent? Well, there was the time Youngest came up with a magnificently creative Project on Oskar Schindler, featuring a life-sized cut out of Schindler with the name of every person he saved from the Holocaust written inside the outline of his body. Schindler was truly worthy of being recognized as Righteous Among Nations, because he saved hundreds and hundreds of people, and The Smithie (bless her heart) and I wrote down every one of their names. By hand. 

Or there was the time The Sailor had to collect ten different leaves for a leaf and seed board (10). Unfortunately, it was autumn, and Ross and I still worked in our office jobs, meaning we and the children got home well after the sun had already set. Guess who spent an hour casing the yard with a flashlight to find suitable specimens? (11) Or, for each of my three kids, the traditional State O' Maine trifold board presentation, featuring lobsters, blueberries, fish, pine trees and chickadees. (12) Or the Smithie's dioramas - I had a entire room in my barn dedicated to saving cardboard boxes for dioramas. They always required small plastic figurines (13), paint (14) and some three-dimensional sky element like cotton ball clouds or glow in the dark stars (15). Then I had to save them as precious mementos for about a decade until the Smithie forgot about them and I could throw them out.

I admit, I was surprised when Youngest told me she had a Project (16). My exact words were, "For God's sake, you're a junior in high school taking AP classes! Why are you wasting your time making a poster?" It's a very nice one, however, with thirty French sentences about Rwanda neatly written in the colors of the national flag along an outline of the country (17). It was good to know I could step up my Project game when necessary - and all I had to do was help with a couple verbs and give my opinion on the graphic design. This had better be the last one, however (18).

How about you, dear readers? Tell us about the posters, papier-mâché and potting clay of your Projects past and present!

-----------
(1) For younger readers, an encyclopedia was like Wikipedia, but set down on paper. It also served as a decorative accent on your parents' teak Danish modern bookcase.

(2) Also awesome? The 1959 Last Days of Pompeii. History AND vulcanology in one! You really can't beat Steve Reeves in a skimpy toga.

(3) It was a bitchin' model, though. I used real bark and moss and had a little plastic deer standing right outside. Which, when I think about it, was not a safe place for the deer. Oh, well.

(4) If the Shadowy Figure is not your mother or father, you may be a character in a dark psychological thriller.

(5) In the olden days, children, we had no printers at home, and our parents had to stockpile magazines as a sort of graphic image library. You were allowed to cut up any magazine except National Geographic, which was a Serious Reference that you kept on the bookcase, cf. note (1) 

(6) And in so many others.

(7) In many cases, the notification of The Project happens at 8pm, right after you ask your child if his homework is all done. "Oh," he will say. "I forgot. I have to make a poster labeling all the parts of a starfish. Can you get me some colored pencils and a poster board?"

(8) It doesn't matter how much craft material you have stored in a closet. If you have crepe paper, your child will need ribbons. If you have buttons, she will need tiny mirrors. If you have little plastic animals, she will need little felt animals.

(9) Because he needs 20 color pictures representing the cultural life of Senegal. Which you will wind up finding, downloading, cropping, printing and trimming. I think the magazine thing was easier.

(10) Trip to Michael's for rigid foam board.

(11) Me.

(12) I wanted to include double-wides and meth teeth, but Ross wouldn't let me.

(13) Michael's

(14) Michael's

(15) CVS or Michael's depending on if it was a daytime or nighttime scene.

(16) When I dropped her off at the high school yesterday, The Project was due today.

(17) Poster board and markers from Wal-Mart. I was in the area.

(18) Because at the start of the school year I threw out all the other materials I had been saving. She's a junior! Taking AP classes!

Captain, My Captain, a guest blog by Megan Abbott

 

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Thrillers are books involving two-fisted he-men saving the world (and a few women at the same time) right?  Well, sure, if you're Clive Cussler. Not to diss Dirk, but here on Jungle Red Writers, we like smart, subtle crime fiction that keeps us awake at night while slicing us with human insight and razor-fine writing. In other words, we like Megan Abbott.

Megan is an Edgar-Award-winning (and everything-else-nominated)  author whose fiction routinely makes it onto Best Book of the Year Lists. Whether she's writing neo-noir novels like Die A Little and Bury Me Deep, or intensely literary psychological thrillers, like The End of Everything or the upcoming Dare Me, Megan puts women's lives and their relationships with one another at the center of her work. Today, she's going to shed some personal light on the relationship between mentor and  protegee; teacher and student.

 

When I was in eighth grade, I was obsessed with the movie The Breakfast Club, which seemed to speak to my life in deep, resonant ways. I must have conveyed these feelings with great intensity to my beloved Advanced English teacher, Mrs. B, because somehow it came to pass that she spent one of her Sunday afternoons taking me to see the movie with her—a first viewing for her, a second for me. (It was rated R, so this was a particular coup).

I remember the experience powerfully, remember feeling so flattered by all of it. I guess I’ll never know what made her suggest it. It was not something I’d ever heard of any other teacher doing for a student. It stuck with me. It felt like I had been singled out, was special.

A few years later, while absorbed in all the mysteries and terrors of high school (far more harrowing than The Breakfast Club had warned), I learned that Mrs. B had died from breast cancer. It turned out she had been sick for several years, including when I was in her class, when we went to the movies that day. It seemed impossible—she was very young (my mom tells me now that she was only in her late thirties)—and unspeakably sad.

I vividly remember my parents telling me the news because it was during that same conversation that my dad confided that Mrs. B’s husband had died a few years before. “She’d been unhappy,” he said, probably trying to make me feel better, “for a long time.”

The surprise I felt was acute. Mrs. B was unhappy? I’d never really thought about teachers being unhappy. About grown women’s unhappiness. And I certainly never imagined any of their private struggles. Mrs. B was cool, lively, loved books and paid attention to me. That was all I’d cared about, apparently. What an awful feeling, to realize how self-absorbed you were, or are.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about Mrs. B. My novel, Dare Me, is in large part about the complexities of female mentor-protégée relationship and I guess I’ve been trying to figure out why that subject has always interested me so much, even as far back as age eleven, when I was enraptured by Lois Duncan’s Daughters of Eve (a book whose twisty attitudes towards feminism you could spend a lifetime unraveling), and leading up to Dare Me, which centers on a high school cheerleading squad and their charismatic new coach

All the girls in Dare Me are fascinated by Coach, especially the main character, Addy, who idolizes her. “She was the one who showed me all the dark wonders of life,” says Addy. “Did I ever feel anything at all until she showed me what feeling meant? Pushing at the corners of her cramped world with curled fists, the fists of a little girl, she showed me what it meant to live.”

To Addy, Coach, who is young and pretty but also demanding and aloof, is a mystery she wants to unlock. She wants to be like her, wants to be her. It’s a powerful yearning, almost like a crush—maybe stronger because it’s safer. You never think you’ll get your heart broken. And you never, ever really know her life.

At age 12 or 13, I was too young (at least in the ways that matter) to think of Mrs. B as anything other than this person who gave me books, who encouraged me, who took me to see The Breakfast Club that time. There’s an inherent selfishness, greediness of the protégée, which is, I guess, about being young. Everything is about you: she’s taking me to the movies, she’s interested in me, me, me. And I never thought twice about what her life might really be like, her pains and sorrows and heartache.

But these mentors, they matter so much, don’t they? It’s the way we figure out ourselves, by imagining their lives, imagining ourselves in their lives. And then, eventually, realizing that their lives are not what we pictured, that life isn’t.

A painful revelation, usually. Because it’s one of the moments you first realize how complicated life is, how hard. But we need those moments, like we need these women (and they need us, they need to see us believing in them). It’s how we become ourselves. 

Tell us about your mentor-protegee relationship, and you may be one of two lucky commenters to win an Advance Readers Copy of Dare Me!

You can find out more about Megan Abbott and read excerpts of her books at her website. She also blogs with Sara Gran at the Abbott Gran Old Tyme Medicine Show. You can friend her on Facebook and follow her on Twitter as @MeganEAbbott.