Learning to learn

Mr. Meredith was the English teacher everyone loved to hate. Nerdy to the core, a little out of date, and painfully meticulous, he was the one who taught AP English in my freshman year of high school. What a way to start. His weapon of choice? The comma fault. One comma fault got you a “gift D,” as he would say. Of course referring to a D as a gift was the surest way to foster universal disdain in a class full of people hoping to make their way into top-tier schools. But he was acutely aware of that.

A month into the class, nearly everyone was failing, and if there was a way out of that hell, I’m sure we’d all have taken the ride. But there wasn’t, because back in those days, parents didn’t intervene. Then, something interesting started to happen. Right around that time, we all stopped failing. All of us, without exception. We started to get it. We could see language. We could understand sentence structure. We got punctuation.

It took me awhile to appreciate it, but now more than ever, I consider this a remarkable feat. Because I can only imagine how hard it must be to teach punctuation year in and year out to a bunch of teenagers who saw the entire pursuit as nothing more than an irritation and a barrier. Yes, his method was draconian, but in my life there are only two teachers, maybe three, to whom I feel eternally indebted, and he was one of them. And I know I’m not the only one who feels that way. He still isn’t my favorite teacher. But he was one of the most essential.

Now here’s really the thing of it. Mr. Meredith would never survive in this day and age. If parents got wind of it by way of a bunch of self-entitled students that they were failing and this prick of a teacher was the sole obstacle between them and the Ivy Leagues, he’d be sent packing. But it’s not just the kids. In fact, it’s not just the parents. It’s not even just the system. It’s that we’re so used to wanting everything easy, we forget the real value of hard. We’re so used to caring about the result, we forget the value of the process. Feeling good is more valuable than being good.

And this isn’t just about punctuation. It’s about everything. We want the portfolio and not the vision. We want the cash and not the skills. We forget the real point of it all. To learn. To be broader. To be better simply for ourselves and not what it gets us. Mr. Meredith understood something that daily living tells us to forget. It’s not about getting to the next thing. It’s about being equipped to handle the right now – today, tomorrow, and always.

I’ll fess up that I’ve hopped onto all too many a trend without thinking enough about it. I’ve been distracted. I’ve focused on the ends instead of the means. I’ve run in circles, chasing my own tail, because it was easier than looking down the road. Change is hard. Growth is harder. But whatever you do, don’t run from the hurt. Don’t avoid the pain. Don’t chase the reward. Let them come when they are due. If you keep at it, they will. We judge our own images by our best and others by their worst. It might be less fun, but you’ll get more out of it if you do it the other way around.

I’ll also fess up to the fact that there’s been some attrition. I have my comma faults. I have my run-on sentences. Sometimes, for sheer laziness. Others, because I failed to notice. But for all that, more times than not, I still hear him in my head giving me my “gift D” time and time again. And what a gift it is. Understanding something in such a simple and immediate way I can recall it without thought or pause. It’s always just there for me. That’s what learning is about.