I'll be the First

I'll confess: I'm a teacher pleaser. I worry about what teachers think of me, worry about ways of reaching them that will improve their opinion of me, and I worry far too much about sounding like the sort of student they want me to be.

So when I say that I discovered the teachers' discourse probably in preschool please believe me. I had a very powerful preschool teacher. I guess, to be entirely accurate it was a prekindergarten class at a private school, which my father was teaching English in. You know the private school's snobbish ways. Well, we were taught how to read and write at that early age, but we were also taught how to draw.

We were filling in the lines of a farm scene: barns, silos, cows, the like. I had started drawing one direction, up and down on a particular silo when I had an epiphany: silos aren't flat, they're round. To this day I remember that moment as a day in which a n new world opened up to me. Of course we know the world as children and have confidence that the way we view things is the way they actually are, but at that moment I saw that confidence shift. I started shading in that silo left to right. It was liberating! The world is not held within one dimention or not even within two. But then my teacher wandered over to my seat.

" What are you doing, Chris?"

What should one say to such an obvious question? I thought for a moment and replied, "I'm drawing."

"I see that. What are you drawing?"

"A silo."

"I see." At this point she walked to the next desk, picked up my neighbors completed, now lifeless depiction of the farm scene, and plopped it down covering mine. "How is yours different that Carly's?"

At this point I began to sense that something I had done was amiss, and though I wracked my mind with ever possible dilema I never considered that that discovering a new view of the world that opened my eyes to a host of new realities could ever be anything but glorious.

"Chris, you're a smart kid. Certainly you've realized that Carly's is neat and orderly. You've seen that hers using only one directional strokes."

I was still confused; not so much because of the language, though words like directional and stroke did befuddle me for a few seconds. I just couldn't believe that my discovery, my revolution of thought, the thing that I wanted, now, to shout out to the whole class that they might know of the freedom I had just now discovered, could ever possibly be wrong. But then my teacher did something that had, if possible larger rammifications than even my previous discover had.

"Chris, I want you to do it again, except this time, draw all the picture the same direction."

To me, this was crushing. Of course I couldn't tell the teacher that. And though now, I don't remember her name, and her figure is very hazy in my visual memory as well, I can't forget that deflation. So, now, almost twenty years later, I'm still struggling with the fierce desire to please my educational advisors: I'm still seeking words to say and write--and draw-- to make teachers see me as somehow better. However, I would have to say that today I'm a bit better off than I was when I was four. If a teacher tried to tell me to draw only one direction. I'd embrace her, and say exultantly, "Come and see what I've discovered!"