We Have Ways of Making you Talk

It might surprise people who know me now, but when I was in second and third grade I refused to speak in public unless I absolutely had to. Teachers would call me “Kristi” and I didn’t correct them; they learned otherwise only after my parents’ first meeting with them each fall. Now, I talked a lot at home, but I would not talk at school, not because I had nothing to say but because I was shy and didn’t want anyone to notice me.

The problem is, if you take silence too far, someone will notice it. One day Miss Coza let me know that the speech teacher would be coming by to take me out of class during math. A creature of routine, I found this terrifying and pondered sneaking out of school at recess to walk home. Having learned my lesson from the first grade short bus debacle, I stayed put and waited for the speech lady to take me away.

The speech therapist was kind but also spoke in such a loud, slow voice ("Why HELL-O Kirsti. How ARE you toDAY?") that I was worried she thought I was either deaf or didn't speak English. She had me read some words out loud from a series of cards, and, satisfied that I could actually utter audible sounds, tried the psychological approach.

“Why don’t you talk in class?” she finally asked me, the loud, slow voice modulated now.

I don’t remember my answer, but I’m sure it was short and vague. At the time, I didn’t know, but I knew I was afraid to speak and that it was frustrating. I didn’t want to be afraid to talk. I wasn’t happy being like that. I just didn’t know any other way to be. And there were rewards for not talking: my conduct grade was consistently excellent, and teachers did not want to pressure a shy girl who might start crying at any moment.

The upshot of it was that the speech therapist decided that it was beyond her powers as a speech therapist to help a child who could actually speak without lisp, impediment, or other diagnosable problem, and sent me back to class.

That was not the end of it, unfortunately. My father so happened to be the school psychologist at Varnum, so although he could not test me, I had to go elsewhere for psychological testing. Apparently all was well with those tests, but I still wouldn’t talk at school. Nowadays, the solution to children’s social problems often seems to be involvement in sports (Violent child? Sign him up for hockey! Social misfit? Try soccer!), but public schools in Lowell didn’t have organized sports, and my mother’s view on sports has always been very easy to summarize: “Sports are stupid.” She had another idea: Elocution lessons.

Elocution is another word for “public speaking,” but focuses more on performance than persuasion. It was taught a great deal in the nineteenth century, most often in connection with acquiring refinement and poise, and the pieces students read were literary: parts of plays, essays, poems and stories. Even in 1976, elocution was hopelessly old-fashioned, but my mother was determined, and she talked Eileen’s mother into sending her as well. The elocution teacher, Mrs. Lawson, a former librarian, lived in a brick apartment building downtown that was filled with plants, cumbersome furniture, and stacks of books. Everything was old but not shabby—we thought it was elegant, and figured Mrs. Lawson must be rich because she had a four-poster canopy bed and beautiful, flowered carpets, the kind my mother said are only for people who don’t have kids or pets.

Armed with our elocution readers, books filled with short pieces for recitation that I’m sure were discards with “Lowell Public Library” stamped on the cover pages, we read for Mrs. Lawson each Monday night, learning how to sit straight and to project our voices (but not too much—no shouting). Mrs. Lawson never gave those “aren’t you cute” looks that many old ladies did; she was all briskness, and her goal was to get us ready for our public recital at a local auditorium, where all of her students would be performing. She also taught piano and flute, so she had a full roster. Eileen and I practiced after school, although Eileen’s performance on recital night was hindered by her drunken father loudly complaining about Ginger having dragged him there. My mother tells me now that although the look on Ginger’s face broke her heart, Mrs. Lawson’s glare at Daniel, which actually shut him up for a few minutes, almost made up for it.

My piece was a story about mice, and when the recital came, I read it straight through, despite my terror, looking directly at the audience and speaking clearly and loudly. It might seem disingenuous to say that elocution lessons cured me of my public shyness, but I got my first B in conduct at school the next term.

My Teacher, the Inanimate Test Packet

Moving away from Lowell was a big deal for my family, though I didn’t fully realize it at the time. This was because most people didn’t move away from Lowell. Andover Street, the road connecting Lowell to Andover, was the fanciest street in town—lined with mansions that we used to compare when driving by, mansions once inhabited by the owners of the textile mills where members of my family had worked. Some had towers and stained glass windows, wrap-around porches and balconies.

We moved to a newer subdivision that had once been acres of farmland; the stone walls still stood, but they didn’t match with the evenly spaced ranch houses all painted in coordinated earth tones, and their placement seemed random. Our house had a deck facing the woods and a large level yard, and in the summer we could not really see any of our neighbors, which was quite a switch from Lowell, where we could see people eating dinner from our living room. It was not really a neighborhood; we all kept to ourselves. Everyone in Andover seemed to speak English and golf, everyone was white, and the Welcome Wagon lady came to our doorstep and left a welcome basket with things like free samples for laundry detergent and attorneys’ business cards. My parents were on friendly terms with the neighbors, but they never became friends with any of them.

The school in Andover was much bigger and more modern than my beloved Varnum, and it was also something called “open concept” which meant that instead of walls it had wall-like partitions that functioned as walls. I took a bus to school for the first time and had to sit with my little brother, who was starting the first grade. The kids in Andover seemed much hipper and older than the ones in Lowell—they had nicer backpacks and sneakers, and they wore real Levis corduroys instead of Sears Toughskins. I felt awkward and babyish in my jumper dress and knee socks.

But the biggest adjustment of all was learning reading and math from a series of test books instead of a sentient being. I was used to reading out loud in small groups in English, and for math, being led by the teacher in a lesson and then doing worksheets. At the elementary school in Andover, they practiced something called “individualized instruction, “ which meant that you worked on one math packet on your own and then went on to the next one. The math packets were like SAT tests which require penciling in the circles with your answer, and I’m not sure whether a teacher or machine read and scored them. Reading was the same way: the school was committed to something called AIRS (Andover Individualized Reading System) which meant that we went to the book selection shelves in the hallway, picked out a book, read it, filled in the appropriate answers on the worksheet, and then picked out the next level of book, and so on. Our packets were kept, in alphabetical order, in a file cabinet; it was our responsibility to retrieve them and then return them when the bell rang. It was school with no teachers; we had a homeroom teacher, and someone who taught us social studies, gym, and art (there were no individualized modules for these subjects) but that was it. AIRS was not taught—it was monitored and supervised.

My first day in this system confused me. I was told to pick out a book, so I picked out a first grade book, even though I was in fourth grade, because I figured it would allow me to work my way up and start with easy questions I was sure to get right. If the goal was to get correct answers, this seemed the way to do it. I remember the homeroom teacher scolding me when she saw me reading The Windy Day (yes, I do remember the exact title of the book), which wasn’t even a chapter book and had only a single line of text on each page: “That’s a baby book. You need to choose a book for fourth graders, unless you have a problem reading. Can you read a fourth grade book?” I could read a fourth grade book, and even a seventh grade book. However, I said nothing to Mrs. Kelly, and the next time I chose an appropriate fourth-grade book.

This is probably why I cringe whenever I hear educational acronyms or buzzwords being used. I understand that it’s not the acronyms themselves that are the problem, but every time I hear the term NEASC or NCATE or hear terms like “critical thinking” or “experiential learning” I think back to that school in Andover, to rows of fourth-graders reading silently and filling in bubbles with their # 2 pencils, and I think, was I really supposed to learn from that? It is probably also why walking around my former high school and seeing lockers and walls and rooms is strangely satisfying. We like to think of all new ideas in education as progress, but those freshly painted walls tell the real story.