I became unsure if I should still enact my plan. I worried that I could be in some danger if I did not find out exactly what was in this envelope.
This fear came with two realizations: first, that if I was ever to be understood by anyone, I would have to know what Mrs. Helene had sent; and second, one way or another it would be up to me to be smart enough to pass the third grade. I brought three envelopes and a catalog to the table where the bills were sorted and set them all down. Then I hurried outside into the backyard, climbed the avocado tree, and looked back onto the shadows of our house. There, balancing, I had a third realization: if I was too dumb to read and write, too dumb to be loved, then I would someday have to face it.
Mom called me in that night, envelope in hand. She sat me down at the dining room table and set down a pad of paper for note taking. “How have you been doing in school?” she began.
Oh boy. “I haven’t been getting all my homework in.”
“Why not?” she asked, her pen raised.
“Too much television?”
“But you’re not supposed to watch television unless you have all of your homework done. That is a rule.”
“You shouldn’t turn it on.”
We looked over at my father, watching. Then she handed me the envelope.
I handed it back. “You read it.”
Inside, a number of forms were stapled together. The first page had something of a title: “Notice of Intent to Conduct an Evaluation.” The letter recommended I go through a screening process to determine whether or not I had a learning disability. Depending on how I did—or didn’t do—I could be eligible for a program from the Office of Exceptional Student Education.
I must have appeared exceptional to Mrs. Helene, because she recommended me for testing in each of these categories:
I can’t say why Mrs. Helene didn’t check the box for “Language screening.” The only reason I can imagine is that, in the context of Miami, a language screening might be reserved for students who had come from other countries and needed to learn English.
The date was set, and I awaited it anxiously. That January, on the annual Stanford Achievement Tests, my scores had fallen. I had 27 percent in language, 22 percent in reading comprehension, and 24 percent in math computations. I received a shining 16 percent in science. My highest mark was the 49 percent I’d earned in the concept of numbers.
Mom could see there was a problem. She began to make a space for me beside her at the dining room table when she was studying for her midterm exams. There, for about three or four weeks, we did our homework together. She was working on sublimation and substitution. I was working on subtraction. She checked my answers and said with disappointment: “How did you get this?” I kept quiet. If I said too much, she’d only interrupt me.
One night, seeing that I had gotten nearly every answer wrong on my worksheet, Mom leaned over her psychology textbook and asked me: “What happens?”
“What happens where?”
“What happens when you try to do a problem?”
I said, “I look down at the paper. Numbers come into my head through my eyes. Then they move around inside until I have another number, or a solution. I concentrate on that number. I get my pencil and go to write it down. But that’s when something happens. The number disappears, somewhere between my hand and my pencil. Then in a hurry to remember what I saw, I write down whatever comes to mind first.”
My mother told this story on every occasion that someone asked about how I was doing in school. With it, she could evade the question. If she could laugh about it, she seemed to be saying, they should laugh about it. Any serious consideration of my literacy was thereby hidden behind a spell of nervous laughter.
Super-Vision
Joe called it the “Learning Disability Test,” sounding each word out with a cartoon voice. I had to take it more seriously. The thing was, as Mom explained, this would be a diagnostic test. I laughed. The word diagnostic made my ears tingle. She said there was no way to study. I could not pass or fail. I could only try to make a good impression. It seemed like a tricky situation. I began to envision myself, looking at myself, hoping to see in a reflection what everyone thought was so dumb about me. I had round eyes, and a polite demeanor. Maybe I smiled too much. I thought about how I answered questions, how I spoke, if I stuttered, or hesitated while speaking. I didn’t. In class, I began listening a little more closely when kids spoke up. When the room began chanting, I tried to imagine what I was hearing.
If I ever hoped to be a fourth grader, I would have to convince someone that I understood this material. So, for Mrs. Helene, I began chanting. First, I just made sounds. Sometimes I could correctly guess the first letter or two of a word, but then I would leave the rest to gibberish. I had no idea how letters combined into words. I imagined that it would all make sense eventually. What was the term? Second nature.
When the day was over, Mom asked if I had any homework.
“I did it in class already,” I said. The next day, I said that none had been assigned. I was not only avoiding homework. I was avoiding the embarrassment that would follow whenever the subject of school came up. I stuck to my answers. Both were new to me, and both were lies. Then, while keeping an eye on other kids, I began to suspect that I could cheat my way through class. Who would know the difference?
I began to ask to look at other kids’ homework before the morning bell. The first few looked down and shook their heads. When I came upon my next-door neighbor, Lee Michael, he agreed to help. He opened his folder and knelt down. There, one place in front of me, I saw a clean sheet of paper with twenty vocabulary words written neatly in two columns. I squinted over his shoulder and, in my own folder, copied what I saw. When Mrs. Helene asked for our homework, I passed mine up. The next day we did the whole routine again. I asked my neighbor if we could meet before school until I got caught up, and to my surprise he said yes. He even offered to come over to the house after school and help me complete the homework. Here, I said no thanks. My parents didn’t like visitors, but more importantly I realized that if Lee Michael were to help me do my assignments, it would defeat the purpose of my not doing them.
One night, I stole away to my room and set the workbook on the end of my bed. I was going to see if I was as smart as other kids were. I gathered all of my mental powers and looked at the vocabulary pages. I found the daily exercises: twenty sentences, each sentence with a blank line in the middle and a corresponding list of words on the next page. I concentrated, but with each word the sentence meant something different. Words were words. Any one could fit into another position. It all seemed pointless. I tried to imagine these words turning those words into sentences, but it didn’t help. I only found broken pieces of sentences with only occasional lines converging.
Frustrated, I turned to the back of the book and found the chapter summaries. All the answers, one through twenty, were listed upside down. I spun the workbook around and copied what I saw. The next morning I turned in my homework without having to bother Lee Michael. He looked confused as I proudly turned my assignment in.
Then, on the night before a test, I developed another method. Referring to the answers, I made a tiny cheat sheet. I grabbed a pair of scissors and cut the words away until I had a two-inch square. I folded that square up into a tiny booklet, and set it in the pocket of my backpack. In class, at the third hour, I reached into my bag for my exercises and, amid all of the movement in the room, safely withdrew my cheat sheet. By the time the vocabulary test was handed out, I had the answers waiting beneath the heel of my left hand. I filled in the answers to the test, taking little pauses and shaking my hand to appear as though I was thinking. The next week, I earned my first official A.
“That wasn’t so hard,” Mrs. Helene said with a smile in her eyes.
On the day of the evaluation, Mom drove me to a gray building by the airport where I was introduced to a severe-looking doctor in a white lab coat. She had short white hair and cold eyes.
There was no lobby. The doctor sat me down in a bulky wooden chair and talked to me across a large metal table. She began the test immediately, giving instructions and directions. If I had a question she’d stop, look at me, and repeat her instructions exactly as she had before, never getting more specific, and never clarifying my question.
I was given a set of cards to arrange according to the shapes on them, and another set of cards to arrange into a story. I was given cards with cartoons on them. I had to give each of them an expression that matched what they were doing. The doctor wrote my answers on a score sheet. These games went on. Each came with new instructions that she could not make clearer. I pointed, I answered questions, and I turned cards. Soon the test was over, and the doctor was collecting the materials.
“Do you have any other questions?”
“Why do you wear a lab coat?”
“Well, Travis”—she blinked—“we have to control the elements of the test. I wear a coat so that you won’t come to think of me as being one kind of a person or another.” I looked at her, I thought she was a jerk, and I left.
The results were not quite what anyone had expected. The doctor said that I was possibly dyslexic, but that I was intellectually equipped to stay in the third grade. I had an IQ of “107, adjusted from a score of 111.” I was of above-average intelligence, and mostly needed to work on “sequencing skills.” She recommended only that I receive more supervision when doing my homework, and if I did not receive this supervision, further counseling might be necessary.
“Super-vision?” I said, rolling my eyes around in my head. “Am I going to get super-vision?”
“That’s X-ray vision,” my brother said, dully.
That night, we sat around the faux wooden box like a family of doves cooing. There would be no seeing through walls, and yet, to my mother’s dismay, there would also be no specific name to call my trouble by.
I kept forging my way through Mrs. Helene’s class, improving my methods every week. No one had to know how I was getting work in. Mrs. Helene didn’t seem to care. She was looking for results only, and results were shallow. She was not concerned with comprehension or understanding, and who was? I began to wonder, if adults were so smart, why didn’t I ever hear them explaining things—even to each other?
Had anyone asked me at this time how it was that I learned, I would have told them: I learned from the kid nearest me.
About a month before the end of the year, Mrs. Helene’s assistant took me aside during the second hour and quietly told me that I might have a tracking problem. To see for herself, she had me try a new approach to my last math quiz. On it, I saw a number of red Xs on four rows of problems.
“Let’s have you try these again.”
“Again?”
“Go ahead. Erase a wrong answer, and try to correct it.”
I erased, tapped my pencil, and wrote down a new answer. She shook her head.
“Okay, we’re going to try something.” The assistant then took a blank piece of paper out of her desk drawer and pinched the middle of the page. Then, with a small pair of scissors, she cut four small lines in the middle, carefully extracting a one-inch square. Through this square, she said, I should try seeing only one problem at a time. I set that paper down and found the numbers waiting all alone as though in a window. Holding down this cover sheet, I erased the wrong numbers, tapped my pencil, and answered the next problem correctly. I spent the rest of the hour with the assistant quietly correcting problems. The assistant gave me a congratulatory smile when I was done, and I went back to my chair feeling as though I had finally learned something.
When I told my mom about what had happened in class, she doubted me. She thought there was nothing really brilliant about cutting a hole in a piece of paper. To her, the approach meant something different.
“Travie,” she said as she looked down at my worksheet, “how much is seventeen minus three?” I’d been working on these problems all day.
“Fourteen,” I said by rote.
“Okay, so what is twenty-two minus sixteen?”
“Six.”
Mom lit up. “You know how to do this! What is nineteen minus nine?”
“Nine. Ten?”
“Twenty-seven minus fifteen?”
I envisioned the problem. “Twelve?”
I didn’t need the paper at all, she claimed. She thought I could do the problems in my head easier than on my worksheet.
I wasn’t convinced. I held the piece of paper between us and spied her through it. This piece of paper could be the answer to any problem, I objected, because any problem could benefit by being made to look like a simpler problem.
Penuél
Any act of literacy involves the impulse to capture a thing by its name. This is no simple power. It requires having a sensitivity to signs and words, and the courage to use them in order to hold oneself in the proper perspective to things. With the right names, accountability can be taken. Without the right names, accountability is impossible. Equally, there are obstacles that, when placed in the way of a child’s education, can set this sensitivity off track.
The inability to read or write is usually understood to come from some lack of experience, poverty or distance in culture, or some inability of the intellect. For some, illiteracy can stem from emotional or psychological decisions—coping mechanisms—which can serve as temporary resolutions for children who don’t know how to express their discomfort with the power of right words. This leads to the development of a sort of mental force field for that child, an intellectual defense system, a scanner that when triggered signals only misrecognition and shuts the child down. Illiteracy can become a recourse for traumatized children. They find that the right names for things are hard to reach, hard to trust. Even the right words seem violated, arbitrary, empty, or untenable. Many children learn to protect themselves from the right names of things. Paradoxical ideas will overwhelm them. Every word becomes a reminder of all that cannot be ruled out.
For others, the terms literacy and illiteracy are inconvenient because they don’t begin to identify the many subtle influences or obstacles that prevent literacy, or block literate development. The terms do not account for pathologies in literacy, or hidden forms of illiteracy, and they do not question the measurements we use or the rules we accept as our standards for literacy. These can be biased. Literacy and illiteracy lack subtlety. Literate people should find better terms, as there are always deeper distinctions to be found.
Many people think illiteracy is a condition that is never improved on without support and therapy, but that’s not true. Some will adopt literacy early, and find no way to look back. Others will find they have good reason to keep their illiteracy intact.
On Mother’s Day, my mom took the Hippocratic Oath, an ancient agreement made by healthcare practitioners. She called it the “unconditional love” clause. I saw my mother chanting in a line of other graduates. I couldn’t understand every word, but when they came to “In every house where I come I will enter only for the good of my patients,” my eyes lifted. Mom graduated with her master’s degree in social work from Barry University. As she did, I took the posture of complete belief in her, and total acceptance of her authority. I have a photograph from the ceremony. She is in the center of the image, diploma in hand, walking in a long black robe. I am in the foreground wearing her cap, leading something of a victory march through the courtyard. On this day, if I had a flag I would have been waving it for my wonderful mother. I had nothing but pride in her and confidence in my family.
As she crossed the stage and accepted her diploma, the audience looked up. I thought she must really know everything. On the drive home she corrected me. She was now a master of handling a person in crisis—that’s how she described it—only that. Still, I thought it considerable. To me it seemed that she worked on an immaterial plane, and was a practitioner of specialized psychological techniques. She did not work with tools. She said she was someone who worked on background pro
cesses, the kinds of things that are going on when nothing is going on.
She used words like conscious and unconscious. Tools were usually defenses that clients used to keep their background processes from being exposed in an untimely way. Words like projection and denial, these were some of the defenses she was now a master of.
Dad said, “Good job.”
“For what? Walking across the stage?” At this time, I couldn’t imagine what she meant. Later, I understood. While my mother had depended on my father to get through school, she felt he didn’t respect her choice of study.
“You looked good up there.” That’s all he said.
She frowned, hiding her thoughts, and smoothed out the fabric of her gown. After two years of study at the dining room table, she was now preparing herself to go out into the working world again. Before this would happen, Dad thought she deserved a little break, like a vacation—but without leaving town, and no kids. Dad decided that he could take a week off of work, and send Joe and me to a remote church camp in the Ocala National Forest that he had gone to when he was a boy. He would then have the whole week to spend with his wife, relaxing.
The moment Dad brought the idea up, I didn’t like it. I enjoyed the outdoors but had never spent a night out of the house alone, and neither had I ever been placed under the supervision of a church group. We never went to church. Why spend a week with a congregation of strangers, and be ministered to by pastors or priests we didn’t know or have any reason to listen to? It didn’t make sense.
Dad assured me that I would enjoy myself when I got there, and besides, he said, “you’ll be surrounded by friends.”
“My friends are here, Dad.”
“You’re eight, Trav. Don’t forget it. When you’re eight, your friends are wherever you are.” He said church camp was the home of the happiest memories of his childhood. In a lilting voice, he told us about how for one week of every year he and his older brother would be given free rein on the lake and in the forest. When I still looked doubtful, he said sharply: “Listen, if it was good enough for your father, it’ll be good enough for you.” Then he turned on the television.
A Comedy & a Tragedy Page 3
