Warehousing

Playing “hooky” from high school in New York City started with frequent stops at some of the most disepitomable pool halls and billiards parlors in Washington Heights and surrounding areas. I still can’t play those games worth a damn. It was my best friend, Bart, who introduced me to Greenwich Village, where I then began acquiring a true education. It all started the night that the group he was playing in, the Hob Walled Apple-Knockers, needed a kazoo and tambourine player. I was selected.

Pretty soon I was a habitué of Rienzi’s Coffeehouse. Playing guitar in the music room. Listening to defrocked college professors spout poetry, philosophy, and wisdom that was not easily available at the city high school where I had been warehoused. At last I was receiving the education I deserved, not the one the City had ordained for “recalcitrant” students. Admittedly, this was not an education that was useful to my former friends and associates. Their immediate post-high school trajectory was education of a more prosaic sort meant for the sort of white-collar careers available in the 1960s – more ornate than truly rewarding. I felt that I was bound for glory. Well, OK, if not for glory, then at least a more interesting, amusing, and intellectually challenging wander through life.

My former associates were like groundhogs. They poked their noses out of the burrow, decided that the burrow was cozy, and returned to an intellectual slumber until college hopefully jarred them awake. Or not.

This is the point at which you might expect me to condemn the educational system. But I am not.

For a number of years I taught an enrichment program at the local middle school in the town where I work. It was called Media Literacy and Television Production. It was for seventh and eighth graders who were self-selected. You couldn’t get dumped into the class. Twice a week we explored what was current in media, how it was meant to influence us, and, importantly, how it was put together. The how it was put together part was critical. If you understand the way the levers are set, how things are designed to manipulate you, you’re less likely to be manipulated. The fun part was that after learning these things, the students used cameras and video editing techniques to create their own madcap version of them to share with fellow students and the residents of the town.

One fall, my students dissected a political campaign and produced a series of television campaign ads that were hilarious while being spot on in approach and production to the real thing.

This was the sort of thing I wish I had access to when I was in school. I had to leave school to find my version of it. The students in the program I taught did not. I don’t feel that this sort of program is unique in today’s educational format, perhaps just underutilized. While teaching it, I frequently coordinated with the school’s English teachers, and for a few years even collaborated closely with one on subjects we would cover. It was educational, creative, and fun. And that’s what I hope can be incorporated into more schools’ curriculum.

Daily writing prompt

What’s a thing you wish schools actually taught?

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