Artifacts of My Selves: Reflections on Learning (Still Here #3/Spying on My Homework #4)

Comrades! It's now two weeks since school began and I know I owe you an update on this new chapter. But the weeks have been unbelievably overwhelming, mostly from matters of pure Time. Did I say summer was intense? Foolish, foolish girl! The structure of My Life Now: Monday-Thursday, in the classroom 7:30 am-4:30 pm or later teaching/planning/beingcoached; Fridays uni classes all day; Tuesdays uni classes 6-9 pm. Find the unclaimed hours and fill them with textbook reading, essay writing, class novel reading, reflection writing, homework grading, observation writing, and loads of other things I'm sure I'm forgetting (Has anybody seen my to-do list?)...so my capacity for self-expression is stretched rather thin these days.

I don't sleep more than four hours a night, and my quota for crafting complete sentences usually maxes out by Wednesday. I have brief, tearful panic attacks every few days, usually when I'm writing and revising my perpetual to-do lists (including the daily "MUST-DO TONIGHT") or trying to figure out if I have time to eat dinner or call my mama. Luckily I have Chrysa sending me text messages that say "Sagapo Lulumu. Don't forget to eat." and wise, beautiful Jodi reminding me: "Always call your mother."

The good news is, the wonderful news is, none of these stresses has anything to do with actual teaching! All signs so far suggest that this strange career I've chosen will be home. Sometime very soon when I have a little more time in my hands I'll sit down again and begin to tell you why.

For now, I thought I'd share a piece adapted from one of my assignments this week (a confidential "personal learning reflection" for my Ed. Psych. class). I think it will help sketch a glimpse of the histories of the person stepping into these high school classrooms now. Gulping now too because this essay touches on some gritty wounds and secret things, hoping that the trust I feel within this community of readers can pull me through to publish, remembering the trust I'm building Right Now with my students in each classroom community, wanting to share our voices. Here's mine for today.

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Many years ago, while home from college and sorting through the countless boxes of forgotten objects and priceless remnants that fill my closets there, I became absorbed in a faded slip of paper I found towards the bottom of a box of childhood art my mother had saved. I had discovered an official report from one of my earliest teachers on my progress in preschool. The “Margeaux” in the report is a little thing, not more than three or four years old. What’s fascinating is how very much she reminded me of myself then, at the age of eighteen or nineteen, and how alike she would seem to me again now, at twenty-eight, for though I no longer have the report in front of me I remember very well its mood, which so deeply struck me by its familiarity.

Three-year-old Margeaux is curious and creative; an independent, self-directed learner; cooperative and intrinsically motivated but shy, sensitive, and withdrawn from other children (my teacher’s only concern); happiest making art or listening to stories; already reading. Transpose “always reading” for “already reading” and you have a remarkably accurate picture of myself today, twenty-five years later.

This parallel challenges the notion of intellectual and emotional development shaped primarily from environmental influences (“nurture”), a notion to which I have typically, intuitively been inclined. Yet the assessment also describes a personality and learning style very clearly aligned with my life experiences. Reflection on the larger narrative of my subjective development seems to confirm the strong influence of our experiences on whatever is present in our “nature” (whether chemical, genetic, or neurological), suggesting a hybrid truth resulting from a complicated interplay of influences.

The report was from a Montessori preschool I had attended in San Francisco. My parents were young when I came unexpectedly into their lives, my mother completing her bachelor’s degree, and my father his master’s, while both held down odd jobs and cared for one, and later two, children. Because they were both quite busy, I attended an assortment of daycares and preschools before beginning kindergarten. Nonetheless, my parents were nurturing, creative, and intellectually committed, and read to me constantly. It seems likely that all of these factors, along with some kind of innate cognitive ability, combined to the result that I had begun to read by the age of three. As a voracious reader and an English-teacher-in-training, the threads between these aspects of my child development and my present self are quite clear.

Along with my innate fascination with reading and a robust imagination (including a dangerous tendency towards “magical thinking” that persists despite my intellectual growth) came a deep interest and natural strength in writing. Not long after I learned to read and had begun to write, I composed and illustrated my first story. I include the text and image of this story here, because I believe it paints a fascinating portrait of my early development.


Figure 1: My first story, written around 4 years old on a piece of cardboard.



Figure 2: The story continues on the other side of the board.



Figure 3: Complete text of the story, transcribed exactly as written.

"There once was a cat who met a dog and first she was afraid because it was big. and then she met a pig. and the pig siad eech eech and then she met a horse and the horse went eeha eeha and then she met a goose and a sheep and the she siad what are you doing heere and the goose siad what are you doing heere to so they ran of in the…"
[text continues but gets tinier and tinier and can’t be deciphered]

The subject matter betrays that innate interest in animals common to so many children, but the story suggests an inquisitive and linguistically advanced creativity as well as a natural command of narrative structure (including the use of a classic “once there was” opening, temporal markers such as then, and relative mastery of the simple past). A surprising number of non-phonetic spellings are correct (e.g. because, horse, goose, and what). Even the misspellings demonstrate a significant knowledge of irregular spelling norms that point to language acquired more likely through reading than through speaking (e.g. I consistently spelled said like “siad,” but would guess that most developing writers would have misspelled it as “sed” or a variant thereof). Overall, this artifact serves as a deeply layered expression of my early development, and a remarkable blueprint for the selves I have become. My love of writing extended throughout my childhood, and served later as a crucial means of self-expression during the deeply turbulent years of my adolescence. Now, as a poet, I thrive in spaces of ambivalent and creative language.

Throughout my childhood I excelled consistently in all academic areas but was particularly skilled in writing, an activity which has always seemed to come naturally to me. I remained a shy, withdrawn, and highly sensitive child but always did very well in school. I sometimes wonder whether my academic success may have somehow been a cause of the bullying and other intense social challenges I faced during grade school, where children’s sometimes deep cruelties remain a relative mystery to me. The social alienation became so intense at one point that I ran away from school one day after my mother dropped me off, wandering the streets of the Upper Haight district of San Francisco alone at the age of eight, until after a few hours a policeman dispatched by my anxious mother found me and brought me home. I still recall that when the other children back at school asked me what had happened that day, I shrugged and told them simply that “I just wanted to go for a walk.”

In spite of, or perhaps because of, this fierce independence, academic achievement seems to have come quite easily to me. I began kindergarten but was moved ahead to the first grade because—as a reader among kids learning their alphabet for the first time—I was deeply bored. Later we moved to Istanbul where I was enrolled in a normal Turkish-speaking elementary school for the third grade, language being another, contingent, strength. Returning to the States the local grade school initially forced me to repeat third grade again, concerned that I had not met the national standards in my foreign school. After a few weeks, however, I was moved ahead again into fourth grade. As the years progressed I grew used to adapting to constantly changing contexts and to mostly being left alone to take care of myself. My little sister’s undiagnosed, degenerative, neurological disorder demanded constant parental care, and as long as I continued to do well in school no one seemed to worry about me.

The year I began high school, at the age of 13, was steeped in tragedy. My mother developed a brain tumor that temporarily paralyzed one side of her body; by the time she had begun to rehabilitate, we lost my sister, whose immune system was already weak, to pneumonia. Following her loss came the loss of my father, who moved back to his native Turkey something like six weeks after my sister died, suggesting that he didn’t think there was anyone left here to take care of. I was barely 14. Despite this emotional turmoil, I maintained my nearly perfect A-average for two more years, learning to smile as a means of deferring attention, a communicative subterfuge. I never spoke of my sadness, but wrote poems fraught with hurt and loneliness, quietly publishing them in my schools’ literary magazines but hiding them from my parents. By the time I was 15, however, the grief and anger I had so carefully hidden from sight surged within the already fertile instability of adolescence.

My emotional fragility, combined with a budding intellectual independence, permanently destroyed my perfect record. I was placed in Honors Physics but couldn’t seem to pay attention or even show up, half the time, to the 7 a.m. class (my worried teacher called my mother, who joined the perpetual chorus that I was not “meeting my potential”). I stayed out all night drinking the night before my SATs but managed a remarkably high score anyway. I wrote a research paper I was extremely proud of, debating the ethics of mandatory HIV-testing for doctors, but my teacher refused to read it and I received an F for Junior English that quarter anyway because I had refused to turn in any of the mandatory steps prior to the final paper (those notecards, outlines, and drafts that are the bane of teenagers and artists). I was restless, wild, and self-destructive. Somehow I managed distractedly to apply to and start college, where I spent my freshman year ignoring Gen. Ed. in favor of graduate-level coursework in philosophy, but finally dropped out in the middle of my third quarter after a half-hearted suicide attempt and psychiatric hospitalization on my sister’s birthday.

I mention these behavioral and emotional aspects in part to suggest the difficulty of locating distinct teleological maps of our subjective development. Though a linear narrative could easily be written connecting the loss and trauma I suffered with my eventual psychological crises, it is just as possible that even as a baby the threat of these breaks lay dormant somewhere in my chemistry. Perhaps there is simply something different about my brain and always has been, as evidenced by the fact that a simple medicine seems to dramatically improve my ability to function, to survive, and to succeed. On the other hand, I often suspect that many of my struggles were connected to the fact that my intellectual and physical development led people to treat me at a level at which I was not yet emotionally capable of dealing. Forced to attend therapy for the first time at the age of eight, following my parents’ divorce, and continuing unwillingly off and on throughout high school and college, I despised psychologists and psychiatrists because they seemed to want to draw too tidy a picture of me, either entirely from my life story (in the former) or from my brain chemistry (in the latter), both in the end unimaginative and unreal pictures, pictures that seemed to have nothing to do with me.

A parallel can easily be drawn between these complicated questions of emotional and behavioral development and the intellectual patterns I have also begun to trace. Would I love making art so much if I had not been given tons of materials and encouragement from my parents, if my father had not regularly taken me to the Museum of Modern Art in one of those infant backpacks or drawn collaborative cubist drawings with me in his notebooks, if my mother had not insisted on my having the Anti-Coloring Book, or handmade breathtakingly elaborate and imaginative cakes for me each year on my early birthdays? If I had grown up in a banal, happily married household in Middle America, with 1.5 siblings and a dog, would I have still been sad? If my parents had never read to me, would I still like to write?

My emotional dis/order has proved not to be ineffable; there are happy endings to my story so far. Having spent a year recovering and growing at home, I returned to college to graduate three years later with highest honors, finally completing a master’s at the University of Chicago before deciding that if I was going to devote myself to writing I wanted to be writing creatively, with freedom and without footnotes; and that I wanted to teach not in the rarefied air of academia but in the living realm of urban high schools, teaching students whose innocence (like mine) is belied by their lives, whose hopes (like mine) are fragile but fierce. Where transformation is possible, because we are always learning, growing, and becoming.

Yet when I return to the artifact with which I began this essay, and to the stories I have only begun to untangle, I seem to have only grown more and more into my self.
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