How We Change by Ross Ellenhorn

Author:Ross Ellenhorn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-03-15T16:00:00+00:00

Lights, Camera, Inaction: Controlling Expectations

THE OUTSIDER

I grew up in the 1960s and ’70s in a Southern California college town. The town had its proverbial “two sides,” marked less by class than by lifestyle. One side of town was populated by professors and students, most of whom were part of the counterculture. On the other side of town lived professionals who commuted into Los Angeles for work. I attended an experimental public grade school on the counterculture side of town, one in which teachers tried all kinds of creative ways to engage and teach kids, abandoned grades, and often taught in a democratic way that favored individual strengths. I attended junior high in the professionals part of town, a school like any suburban public school: hierarchical, teaching to the test, using the Scantron form and the dreaded Blue Book essay, all measured, of course, by grades.

I exceled in my grade school, exhibiting everything my experimental school cherished: creativity, outside-the-box thinking, eagerness to learn through new modes and methods. In fact, as I look back (lovingly, mostly) at this school, I can now perceive a hidden prejudice there. My guess is that the straitlaced students, the ones who wanted to just learn from the book, were probably ignored a bit, respected but not stars. I, on the other hand, was a star. I couldn’t read well, nor could I spell worth a damn, and I found math impossible. I daydreamed a lot, and I couldn’t seem to get my desk (turned, with the teacher’s permission, into a fort) organized. But I handed in the best graphically creative book reports, took the leads in school plays, and even designed and built—with the help of my teacher and his hippie friends—a giant inflatable dragon large enough for people to walk inside. My feeling at that time was that life was literally in my hands. I felt almost magically self-efficacious. A flick of the wrist and everything was at my command. When I graduated to junior high, that feeling ended abruptly.

All the expectations at my new junior high played to my weaknesses. I was disoriented. It was culture shock. I cringe even today, remembering the first time I handed in a book report. I spent hours on a collage portrait of the book The Outsiders, only for the teacher to haul me aside after class and angrily ask, “What’s this?”

It was a humiliating time, made more painful by being identified by school counselors as suffering from a learning disability. Deemed defective in learning at an age in life when learning was the central societal expectation for my cohorts, I felt like a broken piece of equipment on an assembly line of perfectly manufactured ones. Going to school each day was like being a visitor in a strange land, where I had no map and didn’t speak the language. I felt helpless, lost. Shame set in. Since my sense of ostracism stung most when I was criticized for trying to learn or express myself the way

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