"Extra" reading: Books I discovered in school either through teachers or their encouragement or the freedom they gave me

Thursday 6/19/25

About a month and a half ago, I saw this post made by a teacher about this gifted child in her class who finished his assignments before anyone else. Teachers were talking about what they did in these situations.

This particular teacher said that the student really liked history, and what he did in this "down time" was to put together PowerPoint presentations that he'd later share with the class on things beyond the scope of the classroom teachings. Things that wouldn't be gotten to, as it were.

Obviously, the child wanted to do this, or else he wouldn't have. What do you think the response was? Negative. Of course. The kid had earned a rest. He should just put his head down. Etc.

There is nothing that the lazy and stupid like more than others being lazy and stupid. It's the most pronounced form of peer pressure in our society, because if you are not lazy and stupid, you will be ostracized. Putting forth effort and learning are now denigrated. And there is so much projection. A lot of that projection comes in the form of what is masquerades as good or advice or concern, but make no mistake, this is just selfish, bad, simple, insecure people finding another way to be those things.

I was that kid who was always done and who stood apart. During my years in school, I had a number of teachers who helped in making this a good thing. Or so I thought, because I kept learning, and the more you know, the more fucked you are in this world at present. But you're not thinking that way then. People aren't telling you that, but rather the opposite.

Third grade was when I began to take writing seriously. To work at it. To try and get better. To make sure I didn't repeat myself. To always be coming up with something new. We would write stories that year. You knew that tomorrow would be one of those days. As a result, I'd be thinking about the story I wanted to write. Hard.

We'd get to class, I'd write the story, figure out other parts of it in the process, and I'd be done before everyone else. Then the teacher would have me go to this nook in the back of the room where there were chairs and a little library. In this library where all of these collections of Peanuts cartoons. I'd read them voraciously. I knew they weren't ordinary cartoons. They had a depth to them, a melancholic wisdom. They were wry. Could be incisive and existential. Linus was like Montaigne.

I was not and would never be an elitist fuck. One of these MFA robots. I saw the value in these strips. That here, in the so-called funny pages, you could find art. Aren't didn't need to be exclusionary. I have always thought of art as maximally inclusive. I wasn't killing time in the back of that classroom--I was learning and growing.

In fourth grade, and now at a new school, I'd be the first one done again. My teacher encouraged me to explore the mini-library at the back of her classroom. It was here that I discovered The Three Investigators mystery series. I still read these books today. I'm always reading one. They taught me a lot about relationship dynamics in fiction, in how you want the reader to feel as if they're there and these people--the characters--are out there. I'd stay up late at night reading these books. They were set in a fictional California town called Rocky Beach in what you sort of figured was this perpetual 1964, but they were also weren't hemmed in by notions of region or time. They were boundless, timeless. But they still had that substrate so that you had traction in that world.

In fifth grade, I was also encouraged to ransack the library in a different classroom. It was now that I started reading Jack London and Charles Dickens, as well as what felt like shelf after shelf of books on baseball history. I read a Sandy Koufax biography, and that sent me searching at the library in town for more and more baseball books. I read Ted Williams' The Science of Hitting and My Turn at Bat. I knew who put up the big numbers in 1930 and what they were. I was shocked by parts of White Fang. Dickens wasn't "old-timey," but rather fresh as just-laundered linen.

I'd say that the next time a teacher helped steward me along--not that I needed much help, but I'd welcome input or opportunity--was in tenth grade. I was a big hockey star now who'd stay after school every chance I got to sit with this teacher and discuss Shakespeare. She didn't understand how I just knew all the lines and where they were from. And she was always encouraging me in my writing. To keep developing my ability. She'd give it to me straight. "This doesn't work, can't do this." Whatever it was. I just wanted to keep getting better.

I was at a different high school the next year. A teacher had everyone do a paper on a different book. He picked the book for each person based on what he thought would be appropriate and a good fit. For me he picked Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, and I thought this was great. Funny and sharp and creative. Bold. You had a vodka-drinking, gun-toting cat named Behemoth, Pontius Pilate, Satan. The guy was right--this was going to appeal to me. I'd talk with this teacher about literature. At lunch or whatever. I didn't have any friends. I never ate so much as a mouthful of food at that school in two years. Same teacher recommended Tristram Shandy to me, so there I was, reading that in eleventh grade, laughing, and understanding that there wasn't anything off-limits if what you wrote worked. Toby and Trim were Laurel and Hardy. And I'll put your finger on the very spot wasn't that far afield from Ball Four, which I'd read earlier in high school.

None of these things, these books, were more important than any of the others for me. When I got to college, though, this kind of thing mostly ended. I was dealing with miserable, awkward, joyless, ignorant people with my professors--with one exception. It was remarkable to me how different they were than the good teachers I had had. And just how dumb they were. But arrogant. Close-minded. Embittered. Humorless. I was wasting my time sitting in their classrooms, and eventually I stopped doing so any more than I had to. I was the person reading the books they knew nothing about. I knew that they offered me nothing, and I had to keep finding my own way. It's worse now. Imagine sitting in a class and some tool is assigning Joshua Cohen to you or George Saunders or Junot Diaz? Or their equally talentless ghoul of a colleague?

When I arrived at college, I was reading Ambrose Bierce's short stories, a biography of John Clare, F. Scott Fitzgerald's letters. If I mentioned any of that to most of the professors I had, they wouldn't have known what I was talking about.

If you want to write and you're serious about it, I'd encourage you to stay the hell away from academia.

Find what's worth reading. Don't rely on other people. Get out and search and look and discover. But be open to people who are passionate, who have your best interests at heart, who are the type of person who want to help a kid--or an adult--learn and grow and branch out. Not fritter away their time and their lives. I had some cool teachers in that regard. Some of them just knew to say, "Okay, Colin, here's a shelf of books, I trust you'll figure out what to do." But that's still a form of freedom. Of helping someone. It's not just telling them to take a nap at their desk.