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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Darrell Darnell, I perform all the maintenance and repairs on my car, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living. In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I’ll tell you about a lesson I learned from my 10th grade English teacher.
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What I Learned Yesterday:
Ah, high school. As I mentioned yesterday, those aren’t really days that I would ever care to repeat. Even though I don’t want to repeat them, I did learn a lot and look back at most of those days as good days. Adolescence is hard. I don’t care how big of a town you live in or how stable your home is. Teenage boys are hormonal, generally have short attention spans, have tons of energy, and generally would rather be any place other than school.
It just so happened that my high school sophomore English/Lit class was the same time of day that the girls had their PE or elective. This meant that my sophomore English/Lit teacher, Mr. Harrison had a room full 20 or smart mouthed, teenage boys who couldn’t care less about Shakespeare, Poe, Dickens, or Steinbeck. I was naturally good at English, but didn’t really care much for literature. Some of it was interesting, like Poe, Dickens, and Twain, but the poetry, and Shakespeare stuff was dull. Please don’t hate me.
Mr. Harrison was different than most teachers. He didn’t fit the mold. That’s probably why he only lasted about 3 years. He drove a 1976 Jeep CJ5 and it had the word “Tenacity” stenciled on the sides. He always backed it into his parking space. In the classroom he was different too. He understood what it was like to be a teenage boy and, while he demanded respect and order in the classroom, he tried to make our time and fun as possible.
Mr. Harrison had an amazing vocabulary. He was fluent in at least three languages, maybe more. There was a MASSIVE dictionary near the front of the classroom and we’d often pick random words out of it and see if he could tell us the definition. He knew so much about language and word origins that even if it was a word he didn’t readily know, he could usually get a pretty accurate guess.
One day he caught one of the kids in the back of the room chewing gum. The kid’s name was JC. Mr. Harrison suddenly blurted out, “JC, are you masticating back there? I can tell you that no one but Mr. Harrison had any idea what the word masticate meant, but I can tell you that we all knew what word it sounded like! Everyone suddenly turned around to look at JC and he’s frozen. He has no idea if he’s masticating or not! Mr. Harrison made him go to the dictionary, look up the word masticate, and tell the class what it means. It means “to chew” in case you haven’t added that word to your vocabulary yet. I’ll never forget that word now. Other times he had students write gum companies to find out more information about the ingredients in their products, and write an essay about the findings.
Remember yesterday when I mentioned that I wanted to be an animator for Warner Brothers? I LOVED after school cartoons. In those days my after school TV time consisted of Ducktales, Chip and Dale Rescue Rangers, Animaniacs, Tale Spin, Darkwing Duck, and Batman the Animated Series. Darkwing Duck became my favorite cartoon character. I used him as inspiration for the cartoons I would draw for the school newspaper, and I would often just sit in class and draw him. One day Mr. Harrision caught me drawing Darkwing Duck. He took the paper and looked at it and said it was pretty good. However, I couldn’t go unpunished because I was doodling when I should have been doing something else. My punishment: draw him a comic strip.
I went home and drew up a comic strip with the character I used for the school newspaper, Skater Billy. In that comic strip I depicted Billy crossing paths with Mr. Pharrison and giving Mr. Pharision a taste of his own medicine. When Billy used a slang term that Mr. Pharrision didn’t understand, Billy told him to look up the words in the dictionary and then told Mr. Pharrison to write an essay about slugs. Looking back at it now, that was a pretty risky move. However, Mr. Harrision took it all in stride. He loved it and proudly displayed it near his desk. He later told me that my comic strip taught him a valuable lesson about himself and the way he treated people. I’ll come back to this story some day. There’s more that I learned with that one.
But today’s lesson came via a different encounter with Mr. Harrison. We had been reading through some of the works of America’s best authors. After cramming for the test, by brain was a muddled mess. I’m terrible with names and I was putting way too much pressure on myself. I came to a very simple question: Who wrote East of Eden? Oh man, the answer was right there, right on the tip of my brain. I thought for quite a while and the answer was simply not presenting itself. So rather than leave the question blank, I wrote, “The same guy that wrote The Grapes of Wrath.” When I got my test back a few days later, I was shocked that I had received credit for my answer.
I asked Mr. Harrision about it and he said while it was not the answer he was looking for, my answer was correct. The man that wrote The Grapes of Wrath did indeed write East of Eden.
Here’s what I learned. Answers come in a variety of ways. Just because we think we know the answer to something does not mean that we know the only path to that answer or that it’s the only possible answer. This is a tremendously powerful perspective to have. When I was managing a store in Texas, there was a problem with a layout that was best solved only when I allowed the employee responsible for that area to choose his own path and find the solution in his own way. When I look at the way my kids learn or express themselves, it’s extremely important for me to allow them to learn in ways that are sometimes not typical.
Don’t get me wrong, not every answer is correct and I think kids, and the rest of us, benefit by being wrong and learning from those errors. But just because someone gives an answer that isn’t the exact one you were looking for does not make that person wrong. I’m Darrell Darnell and this has been stuff I learned yesterday.
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