Looking Back by Joyce Maynard Read Free Book Online Page B

Anything too different (too bad or too exceptional), anything that meant making another column in the record book, was frowned upon. A lone recorder, in a field of squeaking flutophones, a reader of Dickens, while the class was laboring page by page (out loud, pace set by the slowest oral readers) with the adventures of the Marshall family and their dog Ranger, a ten-page story when the teacher had asked for a two-pager—they all met with suspicion. Getting straight A’s was fine with the school as long as one pursued the steady, earnest, unspectacular course. But to complete a piece of work well, without having followed the prescribed steps—that seemed a threat to the school, proof that we could progress without it. Vanity rears its head everywhere, even in the classroom, but surely extra guards against it should be put up there. I remember an English teacher who wouldn’t grant me an A until second term, an indication, for whoever cared about that sort of thing, that under her tutelage I had improved. Every composition was supposed to have evolved from three progressively refined rough drafts. I moved in just the opposite direction for the school’s benefit: I wrote my “final drafts” the first time around, then deliberately aged them a bit with earnest-looking smudges and erasures.
    Kids who have gone through elementary school at the bottom of their class might argue here that it was the smart ones who got special attention—independent study groups, free time to spend acting in plays and writing novels (we were always starting autobiographies) and researching “Special Reports”—all the things that kept our groups self-perpetuating, with the children lucky enough to start out on top forever in the teachers’ good graces, and those who didn’t start there always drilling on decimals and workbook extra-work pages. But Oyster River was an exemplary democratic school and showed exemplary concern for slow students—the underachievers—and virtuously left the quick and bright to swim for themselves, or tread water endlessly.
    It always seemed to me as a Group One member, that there was little individual chance to shine. It was as if the school had just discovered the division of labor concept, and oh, how we divided it. Book reports, math problems, maps for history and even art projects—we did them all in committee. Once we were supposed to write a short story that way, pooling our resources of Descriptive Adjectives and Figures of Speech to come up with an adventure that read like one of those typing-book sentences (“A quick brown fox …”), where every letter of the alphabet is represented. Our group drawings had the look of movie magazine composites that show the ideal star, with Paul Newman’s eyes, Brando’s lips, Steve McQueen’s hair. Most people loved group work—the kids because working together meant not working very hard, tossing your penny in the till and leaving it for someone else to count, the teachers because committee projects prepared us for community work, (getting along with the group, leadership abilities …) and, more important, I think, to some of them, they required a lot less marking time than individual projects did. The finished product didn’t matter so much—in fact, anything too unusual seemed only to rock our jointly rowed canoe.
    The school day was for me, and for most of us, I think, a mixture of humiliation and boredom. Teachers would use their students for the entertainment of the class. Within the first few days of the new term, someone quickly becomes the class jester, someone is the class genius, the “brain” who, the teacher, with doubtful modesty, reminds us often, probably has a much higher IQ than she. Some student is the troublemaker black sheep (the one who always makes her sigh), the one who will be singled out as the culprit when the whole class seems like a stock exchange of note passing, while all the others stare at him, looking shocked.
    Although