Miss Meg

“I Touch the Future…I Teach.”

Christa McAuliffe Teacher/Astronaut

We See What We Think We Know

One of the perks of teaching something new for the first time is that you have to become a student again, learning all you can about a subject.  When I was asked to teach a high school humanities class, I began a crash course in art history (a weakness in my collegiate engineering background). One text that made a lasting impression on me was E.F. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion.   One of Gombrich’s major tenets involves “schemata,” the preconceived vision of the world that dictates day-to-day operations. In Art and Illusion, Gombrich poses this essential question: “Why is it that different ages and different nations have represented the visible world in such different ways?” Interesting question. ”At the heart of Gombrich’s theory is the notion of ‘schemata,’ that is, the idea that the artist ‘begins not with his visual impression but with his idea or concept’ and that the artist adjusts this idea to fit, as well as it can, the object, landscape, or person before him or her. Gombrich calls this theory ‘making and matching.’” http://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/culture-magazines/art-and-illusion-study-psychology-pictorial-representation

We paint what we know.  For example, a famous Japanese painter (as Huck Finn is prone to say, “I disremember his name.”) fell in love with the coastal landscapes of the American Northwest.

In his paintings, which he completed on his return to Japan, he caught the beauty of ocean meeting land except for one detail—the trees were not evergreens but Ginkgos, a Japanese tree.  His schemata required he paint “tree” and the most familiar was, well, what he was familiar with.  A better example:  You just enter your home after an evening at the movies.  You walk in your living room and see what you expect to see—your schemata—your living room.   Split seconds pass and then your brain begins to distinguish between your schemata and reality:  a picture tilted, a chair overturned, muddy tracks on the carpet.  “We’ve been robbed!!”

My point is that our schemata saw the room in the first few seconds as we expected to see it.  I would enter a classroom and expect to see Harry in the first row, first seat.  And that is what I saw until my brain realized it was Mark who usurped Harry in the assigned seat.

Growing up in the Bronx, the only part of the evening news that I paid attention to was the weather forecast by Tex Antoine who, as he predicted the weather, drew Mr. Weatherman on an easel.  When he mentioned the probability of “patchy fog,” I heard “Apache fog,” the fog being used as cover as Geronimo and cohorts crawled up to the fort in preparation for an attack.  I had a penchant for romance in those days….maybe still.   My schemata was shaped by hours spent watching westerns and reading James Fenimore Cooper.  I heard what I knew—or thought I knew.  I was so disappointed when I learned it was “patchy” fog—so unromantic.

Imagine that a friend tells you, “I am taking you to an exciting amusement park.  Ready?  Let’s go.” Your mind draws on your schemata of what an amusement park is supposed to be…roller coasters, neon lights, swirling rides, and cotton candy.  When you reach your friend’s destination, you find yourself standing in a cemetery.  Now your friend may argue that reading the inscriptions on ancient tombstones may be amusing, but the cemetery contradicts your schemata of what an amusement park should be.

Amusement Park?

Confusion sometimes occurs when one person’s schemata does not jive with another person’s schemata.  Combine this with the human tendency to hear what we expect to hear and not what was really said, and the potential for embarrassment is exponentially multiplied.  Take my eleventh grade high school English assignment.   Context is necessary here.  I was fortunate to have three excellent and distinctly different high school English teachers (who were my inspiration to choose teaching as a profession).   Mr. Murphy taught me the sometimes humorous concept of irony, especially as it applied to literature.  Mrs. Farrell honed my organizational and research skills. Miss Megerdichian taught me that behind every true thought there is passion.  Young and vivacious and possessing a smile that made you feel as if the world was a glorious place to live in, Miss Meg was the first teacher in my student career who broke the class into groups and assigned a collaborative learning project….an experience that I later incorporated into my own teaching (although I learned to structure the collaborative projects quite differently from Miss Meg). She believed that we could learn from each other because she also had faith that we had something to offer.

To supplement her teaching income Miss Meg worked in a book store in Union City.  Several of us would take the bus to go visit her on a Saturday or Sunday.  One visit, Miss Meg was alone in the store, and Steve asked her if she was ever lonely working there.  She replied as her arm majestically swept the shelves and the books they held. “How can I be alone with all these beautiful soulers surrounding me?”

One day I brought my writing journal, and asked her to read some of my poems.  She read my work as if what she was reading was the most important document in the universe.  After a while she looked up at me.  “Your poems are very personalized and introspective.”  I knew that meant my poems were crapola, but it didn’t matter. She taught me how to use very very very very faint praise to encourage students, a lesson that helped me as an instructor.  That Monday she lent me some books of poetry and essays from her personal library.  “Based on what I read of your poetry, I thought you might enjoy these poets, and in your essays you might work at studying the writing styles of these authors.  Examine the figures of speech they use.” Miss Meg told me I should keep reading and writing, and that while I read I should constantly make connections to the world I knew of which was very little.  Her courageous break with conventional teaching methods, her inherent and palpable kindness, and her passion for learning inspired us.  She called us her “beautiful soulers,” which, in our adolescent penchant for cynicism and self-deprecation, shortened to her “BS’ers.”  She made us think expansively and encouraged us to believe we truly had something deep and important to offer the future.  She informed the class that a collaborative entreprise was our next assignment.

 I had plenty of motivation to perform well on this project.  First, like every other male in the class, I had a crush on Ms. Meg. I learned that Miss Megerdichian’s ancestry was Armenian.  I wanted to go to Armenia.   I wondered if Armenians would love non-Armenians.  Second, Melody Ann Appleby was assigned to my group.  Melody Ann Appleby was a young lady with lips perpetually pursed, with long blonde hair that draped her cheerleader shoulders and blue eyes that pierced every young lad’s soul and twisted his heart into a spasm of unrelenting yearning.

Asking Melody Ann Appleby to a school dance or social gala was out of the question–she was so totally out of my league in that category, but, if I dazzled her with my academic skills, there was an outside chance (okay, a long shot) that she would accept an invitation to go to a basketball game or movie or bowling at the Broad Avenue Alley….or at least recognize my existence, even if it was by rejecting my invitation to the bowling alley.

Ms. Meg verbally assigned our group the topic of euthanasia.  (As a teacher I learned that topics are boring and not very forensic, but questions are interesting and explorable—“Lincoln’s Assassination” is blah, but “What future would our nation have experienced if Lincoln had served out his second term” is ripe for investigation.  Most of my assignments as a teacher were framed as questions for my students.) Our group conversation went something like this:

Moe: “Anyone know anything about euthanasia?”
Silence.

Joe:  “When’s it due?”

Floe: “Miss Meg said the research was due next Monday, and then we collectively write the paper.”

Moe: “Who wants to do the research?”

Floe:  “Miss Meg says we should share the work.”

Joe:  “I got basketball practice.”  Joe shot Melody Ann Appleby a wink.  “Playoffs in two weeks.”

Moe: “I work at the A&P after school.  Got no time.”

I stepped up.  “I’ll gather the research.”  I nodded emphatically in the direction of Melody Ann Appleby.

Melody Ann Appleby sat silent, her posture reflecting the goddess-like composure of a Greek statue, her eyes (and maybe thoughts) focused on the fire drill instructions posted on the bulletin board.

I spent every night for the next week in the public library researching our topic until closing time.   And these were the days before Xerox and Cutting and Pasting…..using real books, no less.  I had to read the article and take notes, summarizing what I read (a high level thinking activity). And pages, no—reams, of notes I took.  It was quite a load what with all my other calculus and social studies and physics homework, but my goal was to impress Miss Meg with my stellar research skills and to augment the possibility of Melody Ann Appleby learning my name.

When the day came for all the groups to reconvene and share the research (in our group I was doing the sharing), I was ready.  I plopped a box that had previously held twelve heads of iceberg lettuce from the local Shopwise on our group’s table, proud of the depth and breadth of the acres of research I had gathered on our topic.  I couldn’t sit still.  I was anxious for Miss Meg to see what I had done, to be the recipient of one of her approving smiles and for Melody Ann Appleby to be dazzled by my academic thoroughness.

Each of my collaborators reached into the box and fetched a piece of research.  My eyes were only focused on Melody Ann Appleby who reluctantly retrieved a thick packet of my notes and, fatalistically, fighting the burden of boredom, began to read.  I waited.  After a minute or so I saw her nose twitch slightly and scrunch up.  Maybe it was the smell of decayed lettuce that I had failed to totally eradicate from the box. Melody Ann Appleby looked perplexed.

Suddenly I noticed Miss Meg at my side.  “May I look at your research?”
I nodded admiringly.

Miss Meg asked, “Who collected all this?”
Four hands pointed at me.  I smiled my “Aw shucks” smile.

Miss Meg looked at the first page of one of my packets.  I waited.

Suddenly, and totally unexpectedly, Miss Meg snickered. A real snicker.

Seconds, eons really, passed. I looked up and with some concern noticed Miss Meg was trying to stifle a guffaw.  This was puzzling.  I could not recall anything funny in the research I had painstakingly gathered over the last seven nights.

Miss Meg stifled another laugh.  I looked down and looked up again.  This was not the response I anticipated.

Miss Meg put her lovely hand on my shoulder and looked down at me the way a pet owner looks at her small puppy dog about to be put to sleep.

“Ralph,” Miss Meg’s brown eyes glistened.  “Your topic was ‘euthanasia,’ not ‘Youth in Asia.’”

What the hell was “euthanasia?”  My schemata incorporated “youth” and “Asia,” but “euthanasia?”
Miss Meg gently inserted the needle that would inject the invisible liquid that would inflame my humiliation and dash all hopes of my keeping Melody Ann Appleby out of the gutter in the Broad Avenue Bowling Alley.  “Ralph, euthanasia means ‘mercy killing.’”

My face red with embarrassment, the blood coursing through my veins bringing disgrace and degradation to every cell of my body, I thought, “Then why the hell didn’t you say ‘mercy killing?!’”

Tip to new teachers:  Always issue written instructions as well as verbal instructions.  Make certain you present the verbal instructions before you distribute the written instructions.  Otherwise the students will be reading the assignment instead of listening to you.

Miss Meg tried her best to soften the blow. “Ralph, you certainly did a great deal of work here.”

I certainly did.  Want to know what was the legal driving age for young people in Cambodia?  I had it in my research.  Curious about dental diseases specific to kids in Thailand?  I had it in my research.  Interested in the dietary habits of adolescents in Japan?  I had it in my research.  Always wonder what the incidence of acne was among teenagers in China?  I had it in my research.

Miss Meg’s “praise” did not prevent my noticing the giggling that circulated the classroom.  I was more than ready for having mercy killing…euthanasia…administered to me.

Since the earliest primitive man drew on his schemata of where he expected his next meal would be, say a filet of wooly mammoth, there has been the occasional need to change our schemata based on new information.  Now, with no grand studies to support my assertion, I believe that that dynamic in American culture has changed.

Growing up we shared the news from three television stations, and this news was basically the same.

 At the water cooler we discussed the same shows everyone saw, say the Johnny Carson show when Ed Ames fires that tomahawk and hits the wooden target at a place (the crotch) where Johnny says, “You couldn’t hurt him any more than there.”

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 We could argue that we liked Ike or didn’t like Ike, but we were arguing from basically the same database of shared information.  No longer.

I think that in our modern culture, people tend to watch “news” or listen to pundits who preach to their schemata—and there are plenty of politicians and talk show hosts who willingly frame a message to appeal to certain schemata.   People tune in to what they want to hear. The problem with this is that it curtails dialogue between opposing views.  Truth and reality become casualties. We don’t seek the truth.  In fact many of us don’t research at all.  We simply seek opinions and media that verify our schemata, no matter how wrong what we think we know may be. The “truth” is whatever we want to believe it to be.

Sometimes it is necessary to challenge one’s schemata, to prepare for other possibilities.   Early in my teaching career I realized that my schemata of what teaching was…teacher talk, students listen, teacher at the center of the classroom, students sitting in neat little rows—needed rethinking because I did not like the results of that preconception.

The problem with questioning what one thinks he or she knows is that it requires effort.  It is so much easier to sail along with the tide.  And sail along we do, modern voters only watching the newscasts and talk shows that fit their schemata of the way things are, ignoring any potential contradictions.

Before we can resume real dialogue in our culture, we must be willing to suspend our schemata of the “way things are,” and listen to other possibilities.   Otherwise, we only read research that affirms our beliefs which are, after all, beliefs.  But, as I tried to teach my students, there are opinions and there are education opinions, and the latter require research, facts, from neutral resources.   I can have the opinion tax dollars should be allocated to remove the elephants roaming the New York City subways, but I doubt I would get support for that opinion.  Just bellowing a view does not make it valid.

Even though the Great Euthanasia Debacle of 1963  was the culminating embarrassment of a high school career that was replete with humiliating incidents, I am eternally grateful to my English teacher, Ms. Meg who taught me one of the most important lessons in life—to constantly challenge what I thought I knew, to believe that a convention or status quo may have a reason (though not necessarily a moral one) for existing but to have value must continue to be challenged.  Ms. Meg also taught me that all true passion is thoughtful, and all thought, to be held with conviction, possesses passion. To this day I thank her for her teaching, her inspiration, and her kindness.  She is my Mrs. Calabash (from Jimmy Durante fame.)

Good Night Miss Meg, wherever you are.