A Tale of Two Teachers
Mrs. Gorski and Mr. P
If you are coming to Examining Competence right now, I suggest you go back to read from the beginning. Not required, but might help. The articles follow my own timeline, using people I know as examples of how competence works.
In the last episode I hinted that Junior High maybe wasn’t all that much fun. I’m sure middle school has at some time been fun for someone. I was not that someone and it sure wasn’t my particular Junior High in the early 1980’s.
In Elementary School I had the beginnings of social invisibility, which was still rudimentary. The monsters that are adolescent children had a scent for shy prey. My earliest "#MeToo” stories are from then. Probably most women’s are.
Junior High was interesting in that I found some skills. I also found that my young interest in athletics (archery, bike racing, sprinting, acrobatics, tennis, even skiing) hit a wall. I gained weight (which is like a neon sign drawing adolescent bullies), curves (an obstacle to archery, my favorite sport), and my clumsiness ratcheted up as I got gawky. By 9th grade it took me multiple tries to get my mile under ten minutes to meet the P.E. requirement. Running is my mortal enemy to this day. That’s a lot of change kids encounter, so it’s no wonder kids that age aren’t the best at being human.
For all that I was bad at real athletics, I was excellent at the key skill of my time: video games. Like a duck to water. Early console games, arcade games, computer games, loved them.
I’ve also always had a thing for weaponry. In Junior High I started working with a yo-yo. You can bring a yo-yo almost anywhere, and no one realizes it’s a heavy weight that can be thrown with a lot of force and comes right back to you. It’s also a strong string you can use without hurting yourself. People forget the origin of things. I would sit for hours with a heavy wood yo-yo from Brookstone and smack myself with it (awkward) until I was quite good. Not at tricks, I could only ever do a handful, nothing to write home about, but I could place it accurately and reliably at high speed like a pro. And it went with me almost everywhere for many years.
I also managed to get a couple of edged weapons past my Mom’s ban on my having edged weapons. Having to keep weapons concealed from my Mom made it second-nature to conceal weapons in everyday life. (This has been a lifelong hobby.)
In Junior High I also met, but did not at the time run in the same circles with, my literal BFF Heidi. So there were some bright spots (or at least foreshadowing) in an otherwise dismal time. The school was good academically, and I liked to learn and took pride in academic things and in making teachers happy, so it was a chance to put my head down and focus on knowledge-acquisition.
I was always on my own except for some blessed lunches with my neighbor friend Kristin my first year. When she wasn’t available and after she went to High School I ate lunch in an English teacher’s room. By then I was deep into literature. I joined the book club my Dad belonged to. A nice activity to do with him. Why a pack of professors tolerated a 13-year-old I don’t know, but it was fun to me to talk Siddhartha with people not my age.
At school I gravitated toward the safety of Mr. P’s quiet room instead of the lunchroom, and I read some Dostoevsky to impress him. Mr. P was a bicycle-riding 1980’s-style hippie English Lit guy. I never actually had him for a class, just took advantage of the open classroom for lunch. His room was a haven. No one tormented me there, and occasionally Mr. P would talk books with me, and even recommend a few. Another bit of hindsight, he recommended “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” to me. I got a few pages in and knew it wasn’t for me, but adult me realizes that wasn’t fantastic judgment for a teacher. No harm no foul, and I’m a complete believer in letting kids read anything, but maybe out of all the books available in the world not the best suggestion.
The other teacher referenced in the title was also an English teacher. Mrs. Gorski. Mrs. Gorski was terrifying. Old, harsh, critical, demanding, uncompromising. Terrifying. I had her class in seventh grade. I did NOT go out of my way to spend time in her room. “Not being noticed by Mrs. Gorski” was on every student’s to-do list, even mine.
These essays tend to start out with a lot of context. “Where’s the Competence?!” you might be asking. Getting to that, I promise.
One year, my Junior High put on a performance of Nicholas Nickleby (interesting choice). I have always wanted to perform, but at the time was incredibly, painfully shy. I read the book in advance to prepare for the audition. Mr. P was directing. He was impressed I’d read the book, suggested that I should be an assistant director, but he didn’t follow through.
I didn’t have the guts or the voice to ask him to follow through on the AD role when he didn’t give me any part in the play. I think that was an early set of lessons I didn’t recognize until later.
Despite our American Mythology, hard work will not necessarily pay off. Being “little-c” competent will actually not result in...much of anything. I would wager that no one who was in that play to this day has ever actually read Nicholas Nickleby. Competence of any kind has to be its own reward (it was a good book), and its own punishment, because hard work by definition takes hard work. But also:
”Big-C” Competence isn’t just wanting something and working real hard at something else. I was quiet, shy, anxious, and didn’t get cast even by a teacher who knew I existed. Instead of working on skills that would make me succeed at an audition or be a good actor, I did something comfortable and wished the world would be different to make my hard work enough to get me a part.
I felt bad about that for years. To be clear, I think anyone who tries out for a play in Junior High damn well ought to get to walk on stage, or at least be asked to do backstage work. Some of my feeling of betrayal wasn’t wrong. But looking back now, I do see that I did the thing I was very comfortable doing (reading a dense book) rather than anything I was uncomfortable doing (speaking in public, practicing reading parts of the play, getting feedback or advice on acting). Then I chose to be unhappy that staying comfortable didn’t make me an actor or get me a part.
I did get a good taste for Dickens from all of that. Dickens recognized the fruitlessness of competence, and the effectiveness of Competence (read “Dombey and Son,” my favorite Dickens book to understand what I mean). You could probably learn everything I’m addressing in these essays if you read enough Dickens. You’d just have to pick it out of thousands of pages. I’ll do that for you.
Another formative event in Junior High was a required speech in English class. Being deeply shy made public speaking feel like death. I remember standing up to give a speech I hadn’t prepared for at all well (you see the running theme now). My identity as an academically industrious and gifted person lost out to not practicing a public speech because I was terrified and didn’t want to think about it. So when it was my turn to get up in front of that class I froze, had trouble breathing, was beet red, and I was probably whispering. But this is where Mrs. Gorski came in. Somehow I did not fail the assignment, and my memory is that that’s when she took me under her wing and voluntold me to join her merry little band of do-gooders. She apparently had a merry band of do-gooders.
Maybe in me Mrs.Gorski saw fresh fodder for her community volunteer efforts. For many years she recruited cadres of students to work at the local soup kitchen and she organized a local University’s theater ushering program. Volunteers got to see the plays for free. It’s obvious now that she had many layers of deviousness: getting students out to see theater productions, volunteering, supporting local theater…she was an English Teacher for the ages.
Volunteering suited me. Being with a group, and having the approval of a scary old teacher suited me as well. I always wanted to be on the stage, but ushering was still helping. I fit there, and did that volunteering for years. I suspect Mrs. Gorski had a sense for the people who needed to help and be helped. I remember other people in that group being much more popular than I was, and they were always nice to me. Maybe they needed help in other ways. I don’t think all of them were exactly academic all-stars. We might have been the Breakfast Club, but minus the deep conversations and misanthropy.
Failing to get into Nicholas Nickleby was disappointing, but the result was feeling wronged for a long time and learning lessons only in very distant hindsight. Mr. P was a laid-back person, but he didn’t really notice anything going on with me. Mrs. Gorski was amazingly insightful about her students, but appeared to be a Gorgon. Really, anyone who had her as a teacher would surely describe her as strict, no-nonsense, and determined to make us learn to diagram sentences or die trying. But behind the crusty exterior was a gifted and highly Competent teacher who conveyed her subject well and saw her students as raw people she intended to form into better and happier people.
She saw a floundering student, and decided to do something about that. She saw that my problem was a failure of confidence, and gave me work I was good at that made me feel useful. That’s stuck with me my whole life. The solution to failure, lack of confidence, and feeling useless is to help other people and just get up and do something useful. Competent people will give you something to do. Competent people don’t leave available hands idle.
Mr. P didn’t see a dynamo of energy available to do anything asked of her in the shy terrified girl who read an entire damn Dickens book in a couple of weeks to demonstrate her dedication to his play. Mrs. Gorski saw a floppy pile of nothing whispering a painful public speech in her 7th Grade English class and decided to make something out of it. That’s Competence.
The confidence Mrs. Gorski showed by giving me responsibilities, and the pain of failing at that required speech both spurred something. I don’t like being terrified. I don’t like being bad at things. And if this intimidating old woman saw value in me, I was much too scared of her to disagree. (She passed away years ago, and I still wouldn’t have the temerity to disagree with her.) The biggest result was that I decided to get good at public speaking. More on that in future episodes.
Next week: high school!