This may sound like a cop-out, but in the lower grades I didn’t have a favorite subject. For one thing, we spent the entire day with just one teacher, which blurred the lines between subjects somewhat. For another thing, what excited me the most was not a particular field of study, but the opportunity to be curious, to be creative, or to read—and because at least one of those opportunities would arise in every subject, I often enjoyed different parts of the day the most. For the same reasons, or perhaps also for lack of memory, I don’t seem to recall a least favorite subject either, nor could I tell you where my best and worst grades were.
In the upper grades, each subject began to take on its own distinct feel, which was further emphasized by the fact that we now had different teachers. In all honesty it was the teacher and the atmosphere of the classroom that had the greatest impact on whether I enjoyed a subject or not. The same held true for whether I was good at a subject; at that point in my life, I needed the teacher more than the textbook. For instance, it took me years to appreciate how much I had learned in my god-awful art history AP class, despite hating that class and earning mediocre grades. That teacher had been terrible at making the class enjoyable, yet somehow he had excelled at actually teaching the elements and principles of art. By high school, I liked most of my classes, and I was aware of the great benefit my education was effecting in me.
I had an intrinsic artistic genius, and a very well-developed logical mind for scientific and methodical learning. My favorite kind of work was creative self-expression. Usually that was most likely in the language arts (later, “English”) classes, although it often came up in social studies (“history”) and the electives, too. I scored ahead of the curve on pretty much everything. I was at my apex when I got to write, as writing was like a direct plug-in to my lively imagination.
Throughout my K-12 education, I had four major problems. The first was boring subject matter and a remedial environment. This made some tasks interminably boring, and caused me to get poor marks in fourth grade when I stopped doing my homework. Reading was a big issue; in any grade, whenever we read aloud in class, the pace was way too slow—and yet reading ahead was not allowed. (I usually did it anyway.)
My second major problem was P.E. Who can say which Circle of Hell came up with the idea of promising kids the chance to play and then making them suffer for an hour instead? Nominally, physical education was divided over the course of a year into several units, each of which focused on a particular sport or athletic concept. When it comes to sports, I’ve always preferred the intimacy and privacy of a long bike ride over the hectic hustle and bustle of a basketball court. Unfortunately, my preferences were usually opposed to whatever we were actually studying.
Nominally, we studied units…but in practice every day of the year was the same damn routine: Even during the fun units, like street hockey or tennis, we barely ever got to do the actual activity! Instead, the P.E. period consisted of dressing up in our uniforms—a novelty that wore off way too many years before I completed my “physical education”—then trotting out to the blacktop in order to wait and wait through roll-call, suffering through some military-style group stretches, running a warm-up lap, and only getting to enjoy the actual sport for ten or fifteen minutes before regrouping for cool-down and the dress back to our regular clothes. And that was just four days a week. The remaining day was “Mile Day.” Now, there are many forms of exercise I enjoy, or am willing to keep an open mind about. But running laps around a racing track or stadium is not one of them. ‘Nuff said.
My third major problem was math. I was a whiz at math until algebra kicked in at eighth grade. I want to blame part of it on my algebra teacher: Every period we’d talk about basketball for anywhere from five minutes to, on rare occasions, the entire period. At the time it was nice to get out of doing math work. Then the end of the year came around and we were only eight chapters through the book. I missed out on half my algebra education. After that, math was always my hardest subject to learn, and the one in which I earned my lowest grades. I always felt like I was playing catch-up. Geometry didn’t make any sense to me the year I took it. The next year, in Algebra II, it made perfect sense instantly…but Algebra II did not. Repeat ad nauseam.
I love the beauty of calculus…the way it reveals the truth of the world in its most naked form. Math became immensely interesting in eleventh grade, and I never looked back. And goodness knows that, as an engineer, I get to do plenty of math! But I just don’t have the right grasp of it in my head. It is as though I think about it the wrong way, and have to translate it from across a wide gulf.
The last and least of my major problems was grammar. Just before tenth grade I took the entrance test for the Honors level of the English class. It was a grammar test, and I failed miserably! But I talked asked the teacher to be let in provisionally, and he acceded. That was probably the most important decision I ever made about my education. As a kid I was a voracious reader, and I could write very well for my age, but my understanding of English structure had no formal training whatsoever. I could do it, but I didn’t really understand what I was doing. Tenth grade changed all of that. I developed a formal understanding of grammar—a very difficult ordeal!—and was able to combine my intuitive knowledge from all that reading with my new structural expertise to form probably the best grammatical intellect you’re likely to come across—at least in English.
The upper grades give me the chance to say that I most enjoyed science, reading, and writing. And I did enjoy those, but it’s not as simple as that. A proper education does not practice exclusion at this point.
Finally, at the college level my favorite subjects have always been the higher classes. That’s where the real education is; the entry-level courses are mostly weeders with little to offer that I hadn’t already learned in high school. My favorite class was called “Environmental Changes in the Glacial Ages,” which was a 400-level class well outside my engineering major devoted to exactly what the title says. Best class I ever took! The worst class was something out of the English department taught by a TA so pompous that I used my annual free drop to end the class. Sadly, that seems to be the trend. In K-12, the best learning is in the social sciences and the arts. But at the college level, the real wisdom is mostly locked up in the hard sciences, engineering, and medicine—the quantifiable fields of study that are not ruled by the unproven opinions of well-regarded “experts.”
I guess that means we should all become artists first and scientists second.
