An essay today - its a little long but I hope you enjoy it anyway.


Reading Biology

Mr. Henderson was my 10th grade biology teacher. He was one of those teachers that make you not want to send your future child to public school. Any system that would produce such a pedagogue as him, in his weird sans-a-belt pants, was utterly doomed. Like his choice in trousers would indicate, he loved the easy ride, and his occupation, the life of a public school teacher fully licensed and tenured, meant he could be unobstructed in his idleness. The best that can be said about him was that he took great care to trim his moustache, and was, I think, a nice guy. However nice a guy he was, doesn’t excuse the fact that when he was awarded tenure, a presumably difficult accomplishment, he promptly forgot how to teach. That is if he ever knew in the first place.

The fact that he couldn’t teach wasn’t an impediment to him making a career of it. He came from that great school of education developed, I believe, sometime in the 1970’s, the one where teachers literally read out of their textbooks how to conduct day-to-day classes. He had one of those slightly larger than average teacher’s editions of the standard biology text, emblazoned in large white capital letters BIOLOGY imposed upon a lush forest of greenery. I am thoroughly convinced, that if anything happened to his teacher’s edition, he wouldn’t be able to teach a single day’s class just by winging it even after twenty years of being in a classroom teaching “science”. For all I know, he probably didn’t know anything about biology, since he just read what was in the book out loud, before getting in his Buick at 3PM and calling it a day.

What made his class truly unbearable wasn’t the fact that I was craving intellectual stimulation, but that I wanted something just vaguely interesting out of learning. My entire life in school was dedicated to preventing boredom, a futile exercise, since the very definition of public education is to make dreadful all that is inspirational. His class was simply awful, and to make matters a whole lot worse, I had this basic biology class for a double fourth period with my socially retarded and sadistic peers - an hour and a half torture session over the lunch hour.

All of the smart kids were either in honors, or their parents were able to get them into a section taught by a real teacher before the year began. My parents were of the status quo variety, Calvinists I believe, who thought that my lot of ending up in Mr. Henderson’s class was somehow akin to Job’s sufferings. Like Job, I took it because I didn’t want to make any trouble and because, if anything, public school prepared me for a lifetime of recognizing classes that had “Easy A” bedazzled across the top of the syllabus.

I had no friends in this particular class. I was an honors kid normally, who because of an early reluctance to do my math homework, ended up being thrown into “academic” biology and mathematics, but honors everything else. So for two class periods a day, I left the cushy geekdom of honors and was cast down into purgatory. In honors, the teachers still cared about their students. But in the sociological experiment that is “academic” biology, this was sadly not the case.

Don’t kid yourself - there was absolutely nothing “academic” about basic biology. We didn’t even have homework. We barely had any work at all. Instead of taking our textbooks home with us to study or to prepare before class, Mr. Henderson had us read the text in class. Presumably, this was the only way he could guarantee that we did our reading assignment and wouldn’t muck up the books. The bonus for him was that it gave us something to do in class. For every second we spent reading aloud from the book, the less Mr. Henderson had to teach.

We sat in three rows of ten desks each. I was in the middle of the second row, because my last name began with an “I” and Mr. Henderson was so blatantly incompetent that he wouldn’t be bothered to memorize any of our names. So we were put in alphabetical order. Each day, he read the roll while looking at the seating chart – proving that even by the end of the year, he didn’t know any of our names. Before he called on you, he always looked at your name on the seating chart, just to make sure he got it right. The plaid panted “Biologist” himself sat in the front of the room, at a lectern, where his trusted teachers edition textbook sat on the pedestal like a sacred text in a cathedral, and on this pedestal remained. I think that it came with the lectern when it was first installed in the room, twenty years before; right after old Henderson got tenure and grew his fantastic moustache to celebrate.

We never did a single experiment or dissection. We never did anything except read out of the textbook. On off days, we would take a quiz based on our reading – the reading that some poor slob had just finished reading aloud in class. Most kids reflecting on their high school lab science requirement remember the smell of formaldehyde, or decay, or chemicals in the classroom. The only odd smells I remember were from my peers, mostly teenage boys who smelled funny from not showering after morning gym class, or from the endless farting – the latter due to the fact that this was a the class right after lunch and most people tend to get a little gassy after eating chicken patties smothered in ketchup.

I mastered this class within about five minutes after arriving. I received A after A on reading quizzes, not because I was brilliant, but because I had at least sixth grade reading comprehension ability. The quizzes were all on the section of text that we had just finished reading in class. The fact that many of my peers got C’s or lower proved a popular theory at the time, that they were all probably raised within close proximity to a nuclear power plant.

But there was a darker side to all of this frivolity. Even with the ease in which I breezed through our “academic” work, I lived in complete terror that someday, it would be my turn to read aloud from the textbook, and all of my peers would discover that I had a stutter. This, the fact that I talked funny, made such an assignment terrifying. If we had the chance to take our books home with us, you know, to study like normal people, then I would do fine. But because we were graded on being able to sound out words in class aloud for the benefit of all, I watched as my fate moved closer and closer, day by day, one plastic desk at a time.

You see, being a marginally clever little lad, I had managed to make it my entire life without any of my peers discovering anything particular about my speech. I doubt if any teacher even knew of my condition. I surely didn’t tell anyone. No, the fact that I was a stutterer was something that only my family and I knew, and even they refused to admit that it was a legitimate problem, insisting that I just got “hung up on words”. Although this is an accurate definition of the condition, their stupid downplaying of what was a legitimate speech impediment, failed to grasp the complete scope of the true psychological awfulness of talking funny in front of people. Reading aloud was terrifying and was something that I avoided at all costs. Because I was in honors reading, where we never had to read aloud because it was presumed that we could read just fine, and honors everything else, where the teachers had better things for us to do than read out of the textbook during class, nobody ever noticed that there was something wrong with me.

So when Mr. Henderson explained at the beginning of the school year what his definition of “class participation” was, he invariably meant that we were to read aloud from the textbook, and that he would somehow evaluate said reading, using a criteria that he made up on the spot. Reading aloud was the very definition of fear to me. I could stand a written test, I could master multiple choice or true verses false paradigms, and I could even give class participations, speeches, book reports, whatever, provided I could pick out the words myself. But to read aloud from an inflexible text and be graded daily upon the accuracy and fluency of your reading was the one thing I knew I could not do without falling all over a work like “symbiosis” and never, in fact, getting past the first syllable. Hell, I couldn’t even say, “syllable” without stuttering the word to death by myself, let alone, sitting in a class full of unfamiliar and judgmental teenage wolves.

What causes stuttering? Well according to experts, nobody really knows anything really. It could be genetic, as some recent evidence suggests, or it could be both the combination of a physical and a psychological disorder. Symptoms are usually individualized with some commonality shared across the cases. According to the Stuttering Foundation Publication No. 0011 “If Your Child Stutters: A Guide for Parents”, a delightful manual to stutter through, most children will outgrow their stutter. For those of us that didn’t outgrow it, certain situations will aggravate the disorder, such as stress and uncomfortably.

So if you are a 15 year-old stuttering boy who has managed to cleverly disguise your strange habit of repeating about a hundred words a hundred times without actually saying them, being forced to read aloud from a biology textbook is the very definition of stress and uncomfortably. Not only is reading aloud stressful, but there is nothing so uncomfortable as being a teenager. So from a clinical standpoint, I was totally screwed.

And this was a fact that I was painfully aware, as I shrunk into my chair and awaited the eventual fate, watching as each day the horror of reading aloud moved one sinister desk closer to me. It made me sweat. It kept me up at night. It made me want to cut class, and I was the kind of dork who never did that.

The question of how I was able to hide my “closet” stutter is a very valid one. My stutter is unpredictable – it literally comes and goes depending upon my emotional state. What I mean by this is that, at times, I can speak with fluency and grace, and I can say just about any words without falling into a r-r-r-rut. However, when I am anxious, stressed, or reading something I am insecure about aloud, then I am much more likely to get hung up on words that I would not normally repeat, say if I was talking to myself in a car or singing in the shower.

I was able to hide the condition because I was a serial substitutor throughout the entirety of my academic career. People have often asked why I decided to become a writer, and the answer is pretty simple – I am able to express my vocabulary fully through writing, whereas, if I was speaking, I would only be able to use a fraction of these words in everyday use. For words that I had a particular difficulty, say for the word “difficulty” itself, I would substitute “hard”. For the word “sincerity” I would say something like “earnestness” or “honesty”, both of which I can say with ease. My life had, up until biology class, been lived in a world of synonyms.

And now this bastard Mr. Henderson, with his funky mustachio, was going to publicly “out” the fact that I was a weirdo in front of the most moronic group of “academics” in my High School. My peers weren’t college prep, they weren’t even junior college prep, but they could all presumably do something that I, the class geek, could not do. They could read aloud.

So I waited my turn at the verbal stockyard. And then, on a mid September Morning, that turn came.

“Would you,” Henderson said through the filter of his clam chowder caked upper lip, “would you mind reading today’s section?”

I began tearing at a hangnail on my thumb. I had no choice but to read or else I would fail basic biology, which I think was technically impossible. I had to find an out.

“Yes,” I said. “I would mind.”

It was a long shot, but Mr. Henderson afforded me an unseen option by asking me to read, rather than just telling me to do so.

“Oh,” said the moustache. “Fine, Ms. Jenkins, would you mind reading?”

Ms. Jenkins rolled her eyes, said a “whatever” under her breath, put her gum on the desktop, and read. My classmates thought me peculiar, but not more peculiar than before and I escaped the wrath of a greater public humiliation by not confirming the fact that I was a weirdo, one who talked funny, in front of the class.

This crisis was avoided in the most apathetic way possible. I made for the door at the end of the period, feeling that although I may have failed class participation for this day, I could likely make up for this deficiency in another way, say, by getting straight A’s on every assignment. As I walked out the door, the Moustache turned to me, looked down at his seating chart to get make sure I was the same person who sat in the middle of the second row, and he said, “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

Whatever sense of relief was immediately dissipated from me, like smoke from an open beaker.

“Okay,” I mumbled to my five star notebook. I was, after all, a teenager and we mumbled as a species.

“I’m sorry I put you on the spot today,” he said. This, I couldn’t believe. If any of the other kids in the class would have pulled something like this, refusing to read aloud based on a rhetorical error on the part of the instructor, he would have cast them out into the hallway. But with me - the kid we both knew shouldn’t be in his class - he apologized.

“It’s okay,” I said soothing the uncomfortable pause between moustache and man after a conflict. “I just don’t like to read aloud in class.”

“Oh,” he said. “That’s okay. You don’t have to. We’ll find another assignment.”

We never found another assignment. I never had to read in class. I ended up acing all my assignments and got an A for the year. Mr. Henderson and I never said anything more about the fact that I didn’t like to read in class. No teacher for the remainder of my high school experience ever discovered that there was anything wrong with the way I talked. I continued to substitute words, and although my speech at times was peculiar, sometimes archaic, but it was attributed to eccentricity. And my stutter remains, though, without as much frequency, since I am no longer as an adult, asked to read aloud. Serious reading is an individual activity, and serious writing is a solitary trade. Both suit well the stuttering boy.