2nd grade teachers

I'm doing a program with the folks from Tribal Leadership and it's had me looking at some of my most fundamental assumptions and beliefs going way back to childhood. About two weeks ago I found myself dreaming back through a sequence of experiences during my elementary and secondary schooling. It was an unusually vivid and extraordinarily strung together dream. It seemed to go on all night but for all I know it may have been but a few minutes.

I don't know why I remember Mrs. Boyle, my first grade teacher, but I do. I remember our "coat room" off to the side of the classroom and I remember getting whacked on the back of my hand by a ruler by Mrs. Boyle, but not much else. It left an impression that people in authority could be dangerous.

In 2nd grade my teacher who's name I don't recall, praised me no end for a drawing I did of a tree on a Halloween mural the class was doing. It's funny I don't remember this teacher's name because she had a big impact on me. I didn't think the tree drawing was all that incredible. It was just a tree. I knew and loved trees and spent a lot of time up in them with my brother and all our playmates so I knew how they were built and how they looked and I just drew what I knew.

Well that teacher went on and on about it and I ended up getting some sort of award and my parents and grandparents starting talking about who I had inherited my "artistic" talent from (some distant great uncle or something). At the time I remember it was just embarrassing for me. What was all this fuss over a tree?

Third grade was another one of those revelations as I was able to master the times tables and division easily so my teacher began to tell me I had the makings of being a scientist or an engineer, whatever that was. I wasn't really all that worried about what I was going to be yet, but it seemed to be important to the adults so I went along with it.

Fourth grade algebra was fun and challenging, and I heard more about what that meant about me. But I just recall loving to work out the answers and discover the underlying system and logic. From that point on numbers and math were easy for me, all the way through calculus and trigonometry, but it wasn't really all that meaningful. It was just something I did.

By the time I had gotten to 9th grade however a dilemma appeared. In an an class I did a sculpture of a small mouth bass jumping out of the water and my art teacher went nuts. Again I was taken by surprise about this. My dad loved fishing and he was teaching my brother and I how to be really good fisherman (I now have 26 fishing poles), and our favorite fish to catch were small mouth bass. So I had caught my share of those amazing little critters and seen them dance across the water, when we hooked them. That was the image I created in that sculpture. I don't think my art teacher had done much fishing, so she was easily impressed.

But without me knowing about it, she entered my sculpture into a regional school art show and I won first prize. Surprise, surprise. My mother was so proud of me, she cried when I came home and told her about it. This was when I actually began to consider that maybe I actually had something people referred to as talent. I didn't really know what that meant, but it was clear to me that when I did things people called artistic, I won lots of praise and got attention from my mom. That was the up side. It was important to me because to me my mom seemed to love my brother more than me and I somehow wanted to prove to her that I was worthy.

There was a downside to this art business as well. My dad was not impressed. When I announced that I wanted to take art as a "major" (1 class a day mind you) in high school, my dad took me outside for a walk and told me he wanted me to go to college and become an engineer. He said he didn't want me getting all wrapped up in something like art which I couldn't use to make a living. But I had been "fast tracked" in junior high, so I had completed some high school courses that I needed to graduate so I had a lighter load and had more electives, so I told him art was an "elective" I was just doing to fill my schedule. That seemed to satisfy him.

By my senior year I was spending half of my day in art and photography classes and regularly winning praise and awards. So I ended up applying to go to Lehigh University for engineering and to the Philadelphia College of Art when I discovered there was something I could do called Industrial Design which combined both art and engineering - and because it resulted in a Bachelor of Science degree that it was attractive enough that my dad would agree to me going there. I didn't really know the difference between a Bachelor of Science and a Bachelor of Fine Arts or a Bachelors of Nut Cracking.They were all degrees to me.But it sounded like it was important and it got me past the "useful" hurdle so it's where I ended up going and what I ended up getting.

What's notable about all those distant recollections is that this is the first time I've ever recalled them in this strung together fashion and began to connect those nascent experiences and the impact they've had on my life choices and the way I see myself and my connections to others.

What was instructional was to realize that I have always been a bit embarrassed by attention. I shied away from the popular people, thought of myself as outside the "in" crowd, and never thought of myself as a people person. That was my my brother's domain and I marveled at how masterful he was at it. And as I compared myself to him, it was clear I would never have that skill or talent. So being an artist fit. In those days it was an outside-the-mainstream kind of calling and obviously where I belonged. Do you think?

Well just as I got that first 30 years of my life story all grocked and into place I woke up. Now I go to bed wondering when the next chapters are going to show up. So far nothing. But when they do I'll let you know.