Standard vs Unstandard

A friend of mine retweeted something from McSweeney'sthat read, "At Dream Killers Ltd., we help our clients kill the impractical dreams of their loved ones and shepherd their naïve dreamers towards stable career paths such as accounting, chimney sweeping, or electronic repair."

Actually, she quote tweeted it and added "Or as I like to call it, a STEM career path."

With respect to McSweeney's, we'd be better off telling our kids not to call it a dream and call it a goal instead. This is more than semantics. Of course, dreams are easy to kill.  They are fragile, ethereal, and disappear when we wake up.  Daydreaming is what. you do when you aren't paying attention. Staring out the window, lost in thought, head in the clouds, unproductive.

On the other hand, a goal is defined. I want to compete in a triathlon. I want to visit all continents. Even if there's no defined path, there's a game plan. Same as there is for someone who wants to be a doctor.

I would never tell my kid she's dreaming because she wants to be an artist.  On the contrary, if someone asks what she wants to do, I hope she'll answer "My goal is to ___," and challenge the notion that creative endeavors are dreams instead of practical, achievable goals.  Just imagine teachers' heads exploding when you reframed your passion like that.

At the risk of sounding like a rabid Libertarian, this really is the problem with state-sponsored schools. They need standardized teachers to produce standardized results, through standardized tests to create standardized students. And if you don't fit the standard, you get weeded out or persuaded to consider a more standard career choice by well-meaning guidance counselors who most likely would never consider artistic professions to be anything but a dream. How could they? After all, they went through the same standardized system. Not only can they not picture it, but they can offer no guidance in achieving that goal. When it comes to unstandrd things, they are useless.

Artists, musicians, actors, writers, photographers, are all real jobs that require education, and yet these tend to get downplayed in favor of standardized jobs with standard results. As an aside, when I was in college, I once met someone who worked in advertising while waiting for the bus. I told him I wanted to get into advertising. He asked what I was majoring in, and when I answered "fiction," he told me "I don't see how that would be applicable."  Strange, considering I've been happily working in advertising as a writer for the past eighteen years. It just goes to show you that even working professionals in so-called creative jobs are standardized. You can also witness this in the uniformity of thought when it comes to creating ideas, holding political points of view etc.

I can count on one finger the number of teachers who were unstandard. Marilyn Bates, taught me the most important aspects of creative writing. For poetry it was "end with an image." Deceptively simple, that. For dialogue it was "write like people talk."  Again, if it were that easy, I'd read more stories or watch more shows with good dialogue. I liked her high school creative writing class so much, I audited it a second year after finishing all my requirements.

She did not suffer fools gladly or otherwise. She had no problem snarking, swearing or yelling to get her point across. She was wizened, cynical, bitter and hilarious. Her humor came from a place of hard-won truth, and if you didn't like it, she be all too happy to tell you to fuck off.

The popular kids hated her because she'd belittle them, and make them feel stupid for hot having any other attributes except coming from money. The freaks, outcasts and artistic kids gravitated towards her. Even then, she was careful to separate the poseurs from the authentic kids. I saw her call out one guy for merely dressing the part, telling him "You might be able to fool the girls whose pants you're trying to get in to with your bullshit, but you don't fool me."

We'd go to poetry readings at night on the South Side. She introduced me to parts of Pittsburgh I didn't know existed. The artistic parts where people gathered in old warehouses or in small book stores to bare their souls in words or on canvas. We'd mock the bad ones, and be inspired by the good ones.  

The other teachers looked at her as unstandard, because she was. She was treated as such, like a refugee who spoke no English or a half-wit. She was tolerated as a token creative. I'm sure she had dear friends, but she never fraternized at school with students or many teachers. She was professional throughout. That's why they had to accept her. She exhibited just enough standardized qualities.

In addition to teaching us how to write to instrumental music (she had a thing about "Riders on the storm") we also did a yearly field trip to the Carnegie Museum.  

The year I audited the class, we arrived at the Carnegie at ten and in her shrill voice she yelled to the students who were itching to be on their way. "Before I let you go into the wild: You're here to write. I will be expecting to see something you've written tomorrow. So don't fuck around. Don't make me give you an F tomorrow.  Meet back here at two. You aren't here, we leave without you. Have fun."

I started to go off, but she tugged at my sleeve. We waited for the other kids to go. The she whispered conspiratorially. "Fuck this."  

Instead of going through last year's exercise for a second year in a row, my unstandardized teacher invited me to sneak off for coffee and a leisurely Middle Eastern lunch. Throughout it, she gave me relationship advice, I hadn't asked for, flat-out telling me I was wasting my time with so-and-so who was selfish and just playing games and kept me in the picture because she enjoyed the attention. A survivor of two bad marriages, she was correct in all her observations. I wish I'd taken her advice as it would have spared me some adolescent heartbreak.

As two o'clock approached, she lit up a cigarette, snorting like a pig at the trail of smoke left her nose, as if to get more of it, while admonishing herself for still smoking.  She talked about some writing she was working on, but was. vague about it.  Thinking about this now, I can't remember anything she wrote, but I do remember her reading her writing aloud with conviction. Luckily, I can't remember anything I wrote back then, either. I'm sure it sucked.  

Miss Bates had  a double mastectomy. She was blind in one eye. Diabetes had taken all her toes.  She shuffled along in strange looking black shoes that somehow looked fashionable on her.  Superficial convention meant about as much to her as manners and authority. She was a punk who somehow lived to be 73 when the standardized world did all it could to knock her down at every turn.

She was not a dreamer. That's why she got so many things done despite the odds. And I don't believe she ever looked at me and my aspirations as being anything other than a goal. It was the right path for me to be on, even if neither one of us could know the direction it would take or how it would ultimately take shape. I have no idea if she thought I had any talent, and for that I am grateful. If she'd thought so, it might have gone to my head. If she didn't, it would have crushed me.

I hope somewhere there's another unstandardized teacher out there. We could use a lot more unstandard people, and a hell of a lot fewer coders, lawyers and guidance counselors who have no idea how to guide.