A Struggle to Learn Essay

From the time when I was a little boy, growing up in carve County, Kentucky, I yield had problems with my reading and write. Things never seemed to click for me, a trait that the teachers attributed to a mild case of dyslexia mixed with a kempt dose of attention deficit disorder. I k newfound, however, that no disorder was the designer of my distaste of reading and report. Rather, there was nonhing really beguileing adjoin me that would grab my interest in the secernateroom.The teachers I encountered never took any interest in what their schoolchilds wanted to read or write they developed assignments ground on what the curriculum, a course of study developed by slightly politicians at the Board of Education, told them to do. This work was so far removed from what we, as students were experiencing in our own lives, and the assignments were so boring that they could cause put an lidless to sleep. However, my life-time changed the day I met my Junior English teacher, Mr. Clark Dun tidy sum.Clark Duncan was an interesting man, particularly when you contrasted him with the surroundings in Graves County. nearly of the men in Graves lived their days in work clothes, with at least one oblige of camouflage attached to their disclosefits at any given time. Almost both jean pocket showed the wear from a Skoal can because no dead on target Graves man would work or socialize without a pearl in his mouth. The most common calls that the police received were from residents who were concerned because the neighbours cows had gotten loose and were standing in the middle of the lane keeping them from getting to work at the tire plant. In short, my township and the surrounding county, were about as country as a town can be.Everyone knew that when Mr. Duncan walked in, he must be from another place altogether. As he stepped over the threshold into my English class, his highly polished, patent lash wing tips were the low gear thing I noticed. This man was J confederacy in a sea of Carhartt. He wore a tan, cotton wooing which looked like aroundthing out of the Great Gatsby, and he glided across the floor with a smoothness that a person does not achieve when wearing a pair of Justin boots. His hair was parted and smoothed, almost like glass was shimmering on the surface, but, amazingly, he looked effortless and at ease within the confines of a classroom filled with the daughters and sons of plant operators.While I may give birth been enamored of this new teacher, the quiet insults started almost immediately. I heard mortal say, What a fruit, from the back of the room, loud enough for the class to hear, but retributory quiet enough for the teacher to be unaware of the declaration against his manhood. It didnt help that Mr. Duncan was wearing a large tote bag to take for his books which amounted to a large handbag. Some students sniggered that they would be talking to their parents and getting out of the class immediately before Duncans gayness rubbed off on them. However cruel the other students were being, it all stopped when Duncan opened his mouth.Your county has some of the worst literacy rates in the state. According to your test scores, most of you can barely even read or write. I will be honest with you I think that the current curriculum breeds stupidity and is wholly appropriate for people who aspire to complete mediocrity. I may besides last one category, but I am, from this point forth, deciding not to follow the curriculum. You can leave your books under your desk, because you will not be needing them. In this class, we will dwell on our ability to think and communicate, not our ability to memorize the balcony speech from Romeo and Juliet. You have the option of leaving this class if you aspire to mediocrity and do not wish to be challenged.You could have heard a pin drop when Duncan finished his speech. Not a single person left the room, but I do not know if it is necessarily because they h ad a wish to be challenged by this new teacher. Rather, I think everyone was in shock. This man, who everyone had immediately decided must have been a sissy pushover, had just attacked the very foundations of our local educational system. in that location was no doubt that he was jog that we had been living in a haze of poorly-planned assignments and simple memorization tests, but no teacher had dared to suspicion these methods before. We all knew that Duncan must have been something different.In the weeks that followed, Duncan challenged every student school term in that room. We had assignments to write essays analyzing the lyrics to Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, who Duncan described as trippy. Most had never even heard of these bands, and the fact that many of their lyrics did not go forth to make sense freaked us all out. However, Duncan taught us to look on a lower floor the surface to find how we, ourselves, could find meaning in the work by examining our past experiences. We read Vonnegut and the Beat Poets and analyzed why we were all stuck in this box of sameness that our ancestors had lived for generations before us. We wrote journals about our fears and aspirations and, through sharing these, acquire that many of the other students who seemed to different from us, were really sharing the same experiences. This was the first time in my life that I started to see reading and writing not just as an assignment to muddle through, but likewise a way to connect with the rich humanity which surrounded me.Mr. Duncan was correct when he stated that he could only last a year at our school. After the school board caught wind of all of the things he had been teaching in his class, he was unceremoniously fired right when the summer began. The next year, we went back to memorizing speeches from Shakespeare, but Duncan forever left a aim on me as a student. I went from being a student who hated to read and write to a student who saw writing as a means to gai n further knowledge of my feller citizens of the world as well as further knowledge of myself. I am a better communicator in every aspect of my life because of Clark Duncan, the so-called fruit who took on the Kentucky educational system, singlehandedly.