Burro Genius

by Victor Villaseñor

  Some of us screeched! This was so funny—he and his wife were going to have two and a half kids! But I could also see that not all of us were laughing. Some kids didn’t know what to make of him.

  “There,” he said, grinning to us from cheek to cheek, “in a nutshell, I’ve just shared with you what I love to do. Now I want you to share with me what you love to do,” he said, getting to his feet. “And I don’t care about spelling and punctuation. What my wife and I found out when we were ski instructors in Colorado was that the most important thing was to get our students on the slopes and get them all excited about skiing. Technique, we found out, comes later. Fun and excitement come first, then people learn a hundred times faster.

  “Get it? It’s not normal or healthy to keep energetic young kids like you closed up in a classroom. By nature, you want to play and run and jump and have fun, so that’s why I don’t care about periods or commas or misspellings at this time, even though this is English class. What I want to do is to get you so excited about reading and writing that the love of learning will be with you for the rest of your lives. I don’t want to hinder your natural joy of wanting to venture into a world of books and writing and wanting to learn.” He stopped and looked around at all of us. “Who likes what I’ve just said?” he now asked with a big grin.

  I shot my hand up, and I thought that everyone else had shot up theirs. But I was wrong. A few cadets didn’t raise their hands.

  “All right,” he said, “for you that don’t feel comfortable with this method of teaching, I’ll keep you off the slope, and grade your papers for grammar and punctuation, too,” he added.

  I found this very interesting. The cadets who hadn’t put up their hands were our three regular A students and one of our C students. Myself, I was mostly a D student, but I also got some Cs and C-pluses now and then.

  “All right,” he said, “start writing. And I repeat that the key point is, I shared with you what it is that I love to do, so now I want you to share with me what it is that you love to do. And I don’t care about what it is. It can be about anything. All I want is to be able to FEEL the EXCITEMENT of what it is that you love to do!” he added with such vigor, that I thought he would burst.

  Hearing that I didn’t have to worry about misspellings and punctuation marks, I was given wings. My God, I’d never heard a teacher call himself a bum before, and then share with us stories about his own life with such passion. Quickly, I started writing about what it was that I had always liked to do the most when I’d been a kid. It was going horseback riding in the hills behind our home, taking my trusty Red Rider BB gun or my big, tall bow and arrows, so I could hunt squirrels and rabbits. But I could see that some of my fellow cadets didn’t start writing right away. One of them wanted to know how much time we had. Another wanted to know how long our papers should be.

  Mr. Swift told us that we had the whole session to write, and our papers could be two to ten pages long. That he’d collect our work at the end of the period, grade them tonight, and give them back to us tomorrow.

  Our top A student, Wallrick, who also happened to be our class leader, wanted to know if we’d get higher grades if our papers were closer to ten pages than two.

  “Yes and no,” said Mr. Swift. “I’ll be grading on quality first, but quantity will also influence me. A hundred-yard dash—like my wife used to run—is a thing of beauty, but a full marathon is—” he added, shaking his head. “—beyond belief!”

  They continued talking, but I was already writing, so I didn’t pay much attention to them anymore. I then began to write about my big, older brother Joseph, who we’d always called José or Chavavoy in Spanish at home, and I wrote that he’d died when I was in the third grade. That was the first time that I flunked a grade.

  Finally, I heard our substitute instructor tell Wallrick, who continued asking questions, that discussion wasn’t always a sign of an inquisitive mind, but could also be interpreted as procrastination. Then he told us to all get started, right now.

  I was on fire. I was already into my second page. My God, without the shackles of spelling and punctuation, I was flying! All these things were coming out of me. Now, I was writing about how my big brother Joseph had been sick and in the hospital for a long time before he’d died. My parents were gone a lot of the time, visiting him down at Scripps Hospital in La Jolla, so I was very happy that my brother’s dog Shep had started to spend a lot more time with me. Because, you see, dogs, like cats and horses, wouldn’t spend time with you unless they really liked you.

  I’d been eight years old at this time, I wrote, and in the third grade, and every afternoon after school, I’d go hunting with my bow and arrows and my brother Joseph’s dog Shep. Shep had been on the ranch when we’d moved from the barrio of Carlsbad to South Oceanside. Shep wasn’t very big. He was half coyote and half sheepdog. And when we’d go hunting behind our ranch up the railroad tracks that ran inland from Oceanside to Vista, Shep never chased the rabbits or the squirrels like other dogs. No, he’d watch which way the squirrels or rabbits were headed, then he’d race around, circling them real fast, beating a few of them to their holes. And those that didn’t make it to their holes, he’d chase up a tree or fence post.

  Then—I saw him do this hundreds of times—Shep would get under the old tree or fence post, make eye contact with the squirrel, then he’d begin to circle with his tongue hanging out, salivating. That squirrel up in the tree or on a fence post would get so nervous watching him circling about below that he’d turn around and around, trying to keep his eyes on Shep.

  Then suddenly, Shep would change his direction and run really fast around the tree or fence post in the opposite direction and that old squirrel would now get so dizzy that he’d fall out of the tree or off of the fence post. Instantly, Shep would be on that squirrel, expertly grabbing him by the back of the neck and giving him one or two shakes with such force that he’d break the squirrel’s neck, killing him. Everytime we’d go hunting, Shep would get more squirrels than I could with my BB gun or bow and arrows. In fact, if the truth be told, my BB gun was so weak that the BBs wouldn’t even penetrate the skin of a rabbit or squirrel unless I was super close, and with my big long bow I was still so slow and clumsy, that when I was in the third grade, I never got any game.

  I then concluded my paper by saying that for months, I’d hunted with my brother’s dog Shep before and after school, but then when my brother died, Shep ran off into the hills, never to be seen again. I couldn’t believe it, I’d handwritten nine and a half pages. Boy, I’d been flying down that slope at a hundred miles an hour! But I didn’t want to stop, even though class was over, and Mr. Swift was now collecting our papers. I still wanted to tell our teacher about how the Indian people who’d worked on the ranch for us had explained to me that Shep, who’d always loved my brother more than life itself, had disappeared, because he’d run off to the highest hilltop to intercept my brother’s soul so he could lead my brother’s soul back to heaven.

  Dog, cats, horses, all animals could do this at will much easier than us humans, Rosa and her husband Emilio, had explained to me, because animals were much closer to God than we humans were. This was why Jesus had been born in a manger, to learn about love from the animals in the barn so that He could then do His Most Holy Earthly Work when He got big.

  I turned in my story, entitling it “The Smartest Human I Ever Met, My Brother’s Dog, Shep,” and the next day, when I got my paper back, I had an A.

  Instantly, I knew that there was something really wrong with this substitute teacher. I’d never gotten an A in all of my life, so I took Mr. Swift aside to speak to him, so he wouldn’t get in trouble.

  “Look,” I said to him, “you might know a lot about going down cliffs of snow and surfing, sir, but I don’t think that you know too much about teaching.”

  “Why do you say that?” he asked.

  My heart was pounding like a mighty drum. I knew that I’d be cutting my own throat by saying what I w
as going to say, but I had to. I didn’t want Mr. Swift to get in trouble. I liked him. I really did. “Because, you see, sir,” I said, my corazón beat, beat, beating, “I’m a Mexican, and so you can’t be giving me an A. You got to give me a D or C, or maybe you can get away with giving me a C+.” Tears burst forth from my eyes, “Because I’ve had a few of those, but you can’t,” I added, feeling so tight in my chest that I could hardly breathe, “give me an A. That’s wrong, sir.”

  He looked at me like he didn’t know what I was talking about, took a deep breath, and gently put his hand on my shoulder. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “All I know is that I never saw animals as being so smart and special until I read your story.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really. And I’m now also convinced that your brother’s dog Shep is the smartest human I’ve ever met. Tell me, is it part of your Indian upbringing to refer to animals as being human?” he asked.

  I shrugged. I didn’t know how to answer his question. It was still very hard for me to sometimes know where my Catholic–Christian upbringing stopped and my grandmother’s Indian teachings began. For me it was all like one big river running together with all these different waters. By the time our local San Luis Rey River got to the sea, who could tell which water had come out of which canyon, especially when you realized that the San Luis Rey River didn’t just start at our towering Palomar Mountain some thirty miles inland, but actually started beyond Palomar in all that huge, open eastern country, where my dad and my uncle Archie liked to go deer hunting with Archie’s relatives from the Pala Indian Reservation.

  “Okay, you don’t need to know,” he said, “just keep writing as pure and honest as you wrote yesterday. I’m looking forward to reading what you’ll write today. The A remains.”

  I was double, triple, quadruple SHOCKED! I’d never had an A in all my life! My heart was beat, beat, beating a million miles an hour! I wrote that day in class as I’d never written before, expanding on the story that I’d written about Shep and how on the night of my brother’s death, Shep had howled all night long at the moon, and then he’d disappeared in the early-morning hours of the night.

  Then I wrote that when our dad and mom came home that morning from Scripps Hospital in La Jolla and informed my little sister Linda and me that our brother Joseph had died, we weren’t surprised, because Rosa and her husband Emilio had already told us. I began crying as I wrote. Mr. Swift came by and stroked me on the shoulder when he saw me crying. Class was over, but I’d been so far away in my writing that I hadn’t even realized that class was over, and the rest of the cadets were getting up so we could be marched to our next class. My God, Mr. Swift had been right; once we got out of the confines of spelling and punctuation, writing and reading could be so exciting!

  Sleeping, dreaming here in my hotel room in Long Beach, I remembered all this like it had happened in a far away, foggy dream. My God, I really hadn’t realized it, but I owed so much of my joy of reading and writing to that substitute teacher in the seventh grade who, in three tiny days, had touched my heart and soul.

  My eyes filled with tears. My God, how I’d like to find that teacher and give him a copy of my book Macho! I breathed, and breathed again. Teaching didn’t have to be long and boring and laborious. No, teaching could be done as fast as a lightning bolt. He’d cut across the valleys of my deepest doubts, giving light to the darkest crevices of my beaten-down, inhibited mind, accessing a natural storytelling ability within me that was utterly profound! Oh, how I wished that I’d told those teachers yesterday about this Mr. Swift, or Mr. Smith—I couldn’t really remember his name—but I knew that it had started with an S, followed by an All-American-sounding name.

  Wiping the tears out of my eyes, I stretched and breathed and I woke up some more, hoping to God that I could at least find that man from the teachers’ union today and tell him that yes, he’d been right, and I’d found a wonderful teacher in my life who’d helped me along my way.

  I stretched some more, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes. I could now hear the quiet surf of the Long Beach Harbor outside of my window. I was on the tenth floor, and I could see that the light of the new day was just beginning to paint the eastern sky with colors of orange and yellow and streaks of pink. It was going to be another gorgeous day…here in the paradise of Southern California.

  I could now very clearly see that that man from the teachers’ union had been brilliant when he’d told me that “wake-up talks” were good, but that teachers also needed to know what worked in our system. Yesterday, when I gave my talk, I’d been so hot with rage that I hadn’t been able to remember anything good that had ever happened to me in school. But now, this morning, after a goodnight’s rest, I remembered some very good things, too.

  I could now remember so clearly that this substitute teacher—who I’ll continue calling Mr. Swift—gave me not just wings, but asked me some questions that would provoke my mind for years. I’ll never forget that day when I walked out of the classroom with the first A of my entire life. Instantly, the real A students, who’d been waiting for me, knocked my books out of my hand and they grabbed my A paper away from me and started saying, “You didn’t spell this right! You didn’t use punctuation! How could he give you an A?”

  “What did you guys get?” I asked.

  They mumbled, but not very clearly, and crumbled up my A paper and threw it on the ground. I almost started to cry, but didn’t, and when I bent down to pick up my books and my crumbled-up paper, I found two hands helping me. I looked up and saw that the two hands belonged to George Hillam. He was a day student like me, meaning that we got to go home every afternoon and sleep at our own homes. We didn’t live on the school grounds like the other students.

  “They got Bs,” said Hillam to me. “That’s why they’re pissed. And Wallrick, he even got a D, and the teacher wrote on his paper that he knows where he got a lot of his story.”

  “You mean that Wallrick copied?” I asked quietly as we picked up all my books and other stuff.

  “No, he didn’t copy, but he used material that wasn’t his.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “Look,” said Hillam very patiently, “we were told to write about what we loved to do, and he wrote about what someone else had written that they love to do, which was boating. Get it? He was trying to butter up our new teacher, like he always does with Moses and our other teachers.”

  “Oh, I get it!” I said, finally understanding. “Because Mr. Swift had said that he and his wife are going to build a sailboat, he wrote about boating, but used somebody else’s story, thinking that this was the best way for him to get a top grade out of our new teacher.”

  “Exactly,” said Hillam.

  “What did you get?” I then asked Hillam.

  “I got an A, too. I wrote about loving to bake cookies and eating them all!” said Hillam, laughing so hard that his big belly shook up and down.

  George was fat and one of the most well-liked guys in our whole grade. His father owned a grocery store in downtown Oceanside and was real tall and skinny. It was George’s mother, who had the prettiest blue eyes in all the world, who was heavy-set like George.

  Everybody was already standing in ranks. George and I were the last ones to get in file. It seemed like George and I were almost always late for everything. Usually George only got Cs and Bs. He was pretty excited about his A, too.

  For three days I got As and George did, too, and finally I even forgot that I was Mexican and not a good student, and all those other derogatory things that had been pounded into my head ever since I’d begun school. For the first time in my life, I was no longer one of the slowest learners in my grade. No, I was simply becoming a regular kid who loved to come to school, work extra hard on my homework at home, and could hardly wait to get to school in the morning so I could go to English class.

  I was flying!

  I was an eagle shooting across the heavens!

&
nbsp; I was that Redtail hawk that lived in the towering Torrey Pines by our home and screeched with gusto every afternoon when I went hunting, causing flocks of dove and quail to take flight. And I now understood for the first time in my life why reading and writing had always seemed so boring and stupid. I’d never known that they were vital to our lives outside of the classroom. You see, Mr. Swift explained to us that the whole world communicated through reading and writing. A scientist learned about science through reading, then later in his career, he expressed his findings to other scientists through writing. A farmer learned about new tractors and the new methods of farming through reading, then he also told the world about any discoveries that he might have uncovered, through writing.

  Years ago, Mr. Swift explained to us, it had all been done around the campfire—the sharing of stories and information—but now in modern times, with the known world having gotten so much larger, it was all done through the written word. The plumber, the electrician, the lawyer, the doctor, the trainer of dogs and horses—everybody learned and communicated through the written word.

  And with a library card, he told us that we could learn the fundamentals of anything in all the world; then, with hands-on experience, we had no earthly limitations. This was all so mind-boggling for me. I’d always thought libraries were for punishment, to get us to keep still and shut up. I’d never thought of all those books in the library as our “gateway,” as Mr. Swift said, to the whole universe of knowledge.

  Now I was writing about Midnight Duke, the most noble horse we’d ever had on the ranch, who’d break down gates or climb over fences to be at the side of a mare who was going to foal, so he could guard her against the coyotes who lived below our house in the swampy area, where the sea came into our inlet of fresh water. But then, on the fourth day, when I came in to show Mr. Swift what I’d written at home for him, he was gone, and there was Captain Moses once again.