It’s back to school time (for most) and a lot of focus is on what to do about students who are not at grade level in English and math. Many years ago, I was one of them.
I attended Divine Infant Jesus grade school in west suburban Westchester and graduated in 1974.
It was a turbulent time. The Vietnam War was ending. The Civil Rights Movement was entering a different phase. Watergate was raging. And Catholic education, while sometimes good, was sometimes bad.
My mom was a widow and worked as a secretary. Sending me, the youngest of six, to Catholic high school was out of the question, even though all but one of my older siblings, during better times, had attended Fenwick or St. Joe’s or Immaculate Heart of Mary.
My next oldest brother and I were sent to Proviso West High School in Hillside. At that time, believe it or not, Proviso was something of a hotbed of academic experimentation.
The school gave all entering freshmen an IQ test. That’s right. In the days before sophisticated standardized testing, the administration — but not the student — saw our IQ scores, and we were placed accordingly.
Proviso offered speed reading classes during lunch period to interested students. We would look into a viewfinder that would “speed” through a text followed by a comprehension test at the end. It worked. My extremely slow reading became merely slow.
The most mind-blowing experiment involved a piece of paper I received on the first day of freshman English. It had a list of every grammatical error known to humanity along with an abbreviation. A spelling error was SP. Passive voice was PV. There were 12 different types of comma splice errors. Each was identified with an example and denoted as CS5 or CS9.
Our teachers explained each error and then assigned us our first written theme on the hoary subject — what I did on my summer vacation. That evening, I dashed off my composition in no time, filling up six or seven handwritten pages in my spiral notebook.
I handed in my opus the next day with the confidence of Ralphie writing about that Red Rider BB gun in A Christmas Story.
The results were crushing: 112 grammatical errors in one essay. Each error was noted in the margin with a symbol: RO for a run-on sentence, VT for improper verb tense. Many, many, many SP errors. That translated into a C for content and an F for grammar.
I was invited to stay after school and correct each of the 112 errors. I had to circle each error and write it out correctly on a separate piece of paper. It took a long time. Hours.
Not one to learn from mistakes, the next week I turned in another essay: 126 grammatical errors. The week after, 138 in one essay. I peaked at something over 150, each mistake carefully noted by the teacher with a symbol in the margin. I stayed after school and corrected each error.
Somewhere around the middle of the fall semester, I had an epiphany. I could avoid the frustration of seeing my friends go home without me if I proofread my essay and corrected my mistakes before handing it in.
I began to turn a corner. I remember the first essay that had less than 100 errors. By winter, I was averaging 40-50. And by the end of the year, in a magic moment, I received an essay back that had no grammatical errors. Not one.
Like a wild horse that had been broken, I could now compose an essay in somewhat standard English. It probably helped that during freshman English we had read the forceful but simple writing of Ernest Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms and Willa Cather in My Antonia.
In that one year, my freshmen English teachers took me from a functional illiterate to a passable writer. And to them — Mr. and Mrs. Boesky, Mrs. Radkewitz — I am forever grateful.
Now math, that was a different story.