Looking Back by Joyce Maynard Read Free Book Online Page A

read a book by Louisa May Alcott. I don’t think I read a book all that year. All through high school, in fact, I barely read. Though I’ve started reading now in college, I still find myself drawn in bookstores to the bright covers and shiny, PowerBuilder look. My eyes have been trained to skip nonessentials (adjectives, adverbs) and dart straight to the meaty phrases. (TVPQM.) But—perhaps in defiance of that whirring black rate-builder projector—it takes me three hours to read one hundred pages.
    I watch them every year, the six-year-olds, buying lunch boxes and snap-on bow ties and jeweled barrettes, swinging on their mothers’ arms as they approach the school on registration day or walking ahead a little, stiff in new clothes. Putting their feet on the shoe salesman’s metal foot measurer, eying the patent leather and ending up with sturdy brown tie oxfords, sitting rigid in the barber’s chair, heads balanced on white-sheeted bodies like cherries on cupcakes, as the barber snips away the kindergarten hair for the new grownup cut, striding past the five-year-olds with looks of knowing pity (ah, youth) they enter elementary school, feigning reluctance—with scuffing heels and dying TV cowboy groans shared in the cloakroom, but filled with hope and anticipation of all the mysteries waiting in the cafeteria and the water fountain and the paper closet, and in the pages of the textbooks on the teachers’ desks. With pink erasers and a sheath of sharpened pencils, they file in so really bravely, as if to tame lions, or at least subdue the alphabet. And instead, I long to warn them, watching this green young crop pass by each year, seeing them enter a red-brick, smelly-staircase world of bathroom passes and penmanship drills, gongs and red x’s, and an unexpected snap to the teacher’s slingshot voice (so slack and giving, when she met the mothers). I want to tell them about the back pages in the teacher’s record book, of going to the principal’s office or staying behind an extra year. Quickly they learn how little use they’ll have for lion-taming apparatus. They are, themselves, about to meet the tamer.
    I can barely remember it now, but I know that I once felt that first-day eagerness too. Something happened, though, between that one pony-tail-tossing, skirt-flouncing, hand-waving (“I know the answer—call on me ”) day and the first day of all the other years I spent in public school. It wasn’t just homework and the struggle to get up at seven every morning, it was the kind of homework assignments we were given and the prospect of just what it was that we were rousing ourselves for—the systematic breaking down, workbook page by workbook page, drill after drill, of all the joy we started out with. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that, with very few exceptions, what they did to (not for ) us in elementary school was not unlike what I would sometimes do to my cats: dress them up in doll clothes because they looked cute that way.
    We were forever being organized into activities that, I suspect, looked good on paper and in school board reports. New programs took over and disappeared as approaches to child education changed. One year we would go without marks, on the theory that marks were a “poor motivating factor,” “an unnatural pressure,” and my laboriously researched science and social studies reports would come back with a check mark or a check plus inside the margin. Another year every activity became a competition, with posters tacked up on the walls showing who was ahead that week, our failures and our glories bared to all the class. Our days were filled with electrical gimmicks, film strips and movies and overhead projectors and tapes and supplementary TV shows, and in junior high, when we went audio-visual, a power failure would have been reason enough to close down the school.
    But though the educational jargon changed, the school’s basic attitude remained constant.