Pin oak
A back to school edition
A pin oak is the kind of oak leaf that has tips that come to a sharp point, like pins.*
I learned this in high school in my biology class, taught by Mr. Z.
This is the back to school edition, a few anecdotes.
Three weeks ago the big kid moved to college. We packed big blue zip-up plastic Ikea bags and schlepped them to the airport. We flew to Ohio, rented a car, then spent a day buying things for the dorm room. Then drop off, then another morning of more drop off. It was amazing to be back in a quiet, green place where the primary purpose of the place was to be a college, where most of the people in the place had something to do with the college.
The place looked like the landscape of my childhood, long illusionistic lawns meant to resemble the English enclosures and fortresses of higher learning only a very few were privy to. Needless to say, I wanted to stay.
Last week the younger kid started high school. It’s a new school. Before this, she’d been in the same school since kindergarten. The school she now takes the subway to is deep into Brooklyn and about 16 times bigger than the one she came from.
I started teaching again at the same two colleges where I have been teaching since 2010. I was astonished as ever that all these young people showed up at 9am on a Friday before a holiday weekend to talk about video art. They were engaged and present and enthusiastic as if nothing at all were happening in the world. But they know what is happening in the world. In the past, I’ve been dismissive of this apparent disengagement but as of last fall I began thinking that this room at 9am where we come together could be a small, albeit highly privileged sanctuary where art-making and the history of this weird art form might still matter. There are a lot of problems with this dream of mine but it helps in the day to day.
When Mr. Z taught us biology in high school in Oxford Ohio he did it with such energy and enthusiasm that even the most unscientific ones of us were happy. We built models of houses with solar panels to heat the boiler, concocted something over the bunsen burner, and as mentioned above, went through our tiny town to gather leaves and make a book identifying them. Buckeye, maple, locust, oak.
Mr. Z also taught us about evolution.
Mr. DeRight was our high school physics teacher. I was not good at physics, my slopes and lines inaccurate and the math part a muddle.
In the front of the low-ceilinged classroom, Mr. DeRight sat at a high lab table atop a stool. His physics book, prominent at the front of the lab table, sat atop a Bible. A scattered rumor in the halls intimated that, as every year, because Mr. Z taught us evolution, Mr. DeRight demanded equal time to present his truth of how life began.
The next day instead of whatever the lesson was, Mr. DeRight opened up the Book under the physics book, read aloud from it, and lectured to us about Creationism.
***
After my first year of high school, I started going to the coffee shop uptown to do my homework. 50 cents plus tax got you all the watery coffee you could ingest. In my junior year I often did my homework in a college dorm room where my boyfriend had just moved from his childhood home all the way across town.
His dorm was a block away from my house. I’d go there after work and all the guys on the hallway would be crammed into one room listening to Mike Oldfield or Dead Kennedys or Black Flag. I’d be sitting on the floor scrawling a thoughtless paper about William Blake or Emerson.
***
Assemblies where kids would play “Dueling Banjos” on banjos and cheerleaders would jump around. Always the Pledge of Allegiance. Sometimes I’d stay sitting for that, heart pounding at my minor rebellion.
Always in awe of the flag squad. Always called a “theater fag” on the way to theater.
The satisfying slam of slamming the locker closed.
A year of Latin: puer est in agricola is the only thing I still remember (the boy is in the field) which seems fitting given the school’s location.
The most joyful and engaged French teacher which seems impossible but was true.
The dedicated history teacher. When I was visiting home in the mid 2000s just before my parents moved out of town, I was rummaging in the basement and found an old high school paper I’d written. My teacher’s sensitive comments and giant A on the top showed a level of care and attention I can still not fathom. When I came upstairs from the basement, she was there in our dining room, having come over for a potluck dinner along with a lot of other family friends.
A student one grade older discovered a loophole in school rules through which one could time-travel and get out of a year of high school. If you added one independent study and took summer gym a couple years in a row, you could graduate in three years instead of four. I jumped at the chance.
The independent study: during lunch periods, I would go to the school library and read The Communist Manifesto. I wrote a paper about it.
Summer gym was more of a struggle, the five mile bike ride up and down rolling hills out to the state park nearly too much for me. I gasped for breath as my classmates sped on ahead. As far as I recall that’s all it took. A year after, a couple more kids performed similar escape tricks. Then the school closed the loophole.
Several years after I graduated, my mom got a new job as the high school psychologist. She too showed a level of care and determination that traveled across generations of kids and now their kids and mine.
When I got to college after a gap year, I was woefully underprepared, despite my having aced all high school classes (except math) and won all kinds of awards. But nothing could compare with the kind of training others had been exposed to. In college I learned many things and avoided learning many others. Looking at my transcripts it’s shocking to see how few courses comprise a college education and how formative the experience still feels.
Despite my penchant for control and a rigidity unmatched by even the stubbornnest mule, I’ve learned to love not-knowing as much as knowing, and revel in the wobble along this bumpy route.
The best teachers offer stories to carry on. I’m grateful for those I’ve been given.
*Apparently the name Pin Oak also may have come from a range of other stories, including how the tree’s wood was used, the shapes of the branches, and its knots.
If you so desire, you can read more about the tree here and here.
BUNKER will screen at the Trondheim Architecture Film Festival, Norway, October 18-19. Stay tuned for more screening & exhibition announcements soon!
