Forgive me. This will be a long one.
My father very much wanted me to go to college. No, strike that: He desperately wanted me to go to college. He spent much of his adult life doing a job he hated and one which offered no chance of ever yielding more than a very modest living. This, he blamed in large part on his education stopping the day he graduated high school. No son of his — and he only had one — was going to be deprived of greater opportunity.
As we neared the day when I would have to start applying in order for college to happen, another reason popped up as to why I had to go to one. There was this war in Vietnam going on and my father literally had nightmares of me being drafted and sent there. He heard about these things called "student deferments" and while he wasn't sure what they did and if they'd keep me out, if there was even a chance…
So I was going to go to college, end of discussion. In truth, there never was any discussion. As it would turn out, I did attend U.C.L.A., found it to be an utter waste of time and quit before I secured any kind of degree — a decision I have never regretted for an instant. I'm sure college is great for many people…probably even most people. But it wasn't right for me and in some other essay here, I'll explain why. This one is about me getting into college in the first place, not out.
If I'd known then what I know now…well, I probably would still have enrolled in college. Because my father just wanted it so much.
I don't know how it works these days but in the sixties, the route into U.C.L.A. went like this. I was attending University High School in West Los Angeles and there were certain "college-qualifying" classes I had to take and I had to get at least a C in each of them. Then one or both of two things had to happen. I had to take the Scholastic Aptitude Test and achieve a certain score on it and/or I had to graduate from Uni with a certain grade point average.
I took the S.A.T. and scored above the designated number so that was that. Getting at least a C on all those college-qualifying courses in high school seemed quite doable…with one possible problem. I had to take and pass two different "lab sciences" — two semesters of each. The choices were Physics, Physiology and Chemistry. In order to sign up for Physics, you had to have notched a certain grade level in Geometry and Algebra but I'd fallen a millionth of a point below that requirement so I was stuck with Physiology and Chemistry. In eleventh grade, I took Physiology and it was no great challenge. In fact, it was actually one of the more interesting and useful things I studied in school. Chemistry, which I took in my final year of high school, was the opposite.
At Uni, there were two Chemistry teachers — Mr. Dennison and Mr. Clayton. Mr. Dennison was a friendly, benevolent fellow and, I was told, a damn good teacher. I wish I could have experienced that first-hand but I got stuck with Mr. Clayton, who was the worst human being on the planet. Years later after he died, the story made the rounds that somewhere in the bowels of Hell, Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin found themselves rooming with Mr. Clayton and they both said, "Hey, who let him in here?" I have no doubt this is absolutly true.
At Uni, we had to "run for classes," scurrying from office to office to sign up for what we were going to take and which period. Many a young life was lost as students trampled one another to get into Mr. Dennison's Chemistry class as opposed to Mr. Clayton's. I was not among the better scurriers or tramplers.
Mr. Clayton was a serious, older man. Visually, he reminded me a little of the character actor, John McGiver. In case you don't remember John McGiver, here's a photo of him…
John McGiver
The first day, Mr. McGiver Mr. Clayton announced that he would be teaching the class on a "College Level." By his standards, that meant there had to be little to no chance of any of us passing it. To emphasize this point, he gave every student a failing grade on the first test and most of us a failing grade on the second. For the third, he urged us to read and study Chapter Five in our textbooks. We all committed every word of that chapter to memory…and then the test was all about Chapter Six.
Asked why he had done this, he replied, "Because a good student would have read ahead." And so we all flunked the third test. That was how it went all semester as we all played a game that was rigged against us. I'm sure he thought he was doing us some sort of "tough love" favor but I was sure he wasn't.
I might not have minded this Ruthless Drill Sergeant approach to teaching if I thought I was learning anything but I swear to you: I learned nothing from Mr. Clayton. Not a thing…except on a temporary basis, some memorized (but not understood) facts that I could regurgitate onto a test paper and then forget. We spent much of the first semester learning how to balance Redox Equations. What is a Redox Equation and why on Earth would anyone ever need to balance one? Beats the hell outta me. I never learned what one was though I learned enough about balancing them to squeak through a test or two.
I got out of high school and Mr. Clayton's class in 1969. Since then, I have encountered numerous instances where things I learned in Physiology have proven useful. No one has ever asked me to balance a Redox Equation and I still don't know what the hell they are…or even if anyone still balances them. After all, I spent much of my time in Algebra learning how to use a slide rule. That comes in so handy these days.
I didn't learn anything and I don't think very many of my classmates learned a thing. Perhaps a few who came into the class with an interest and aptitude for Chemistry did. I won't say he wasn't good for them. But at least 95% of us weren't in that class because we cared about it or could ever conceivably use the information he attempted to convey. We took the class because we had to take it and we had to pass it. I got through via sheer short-term memorization. Others did it an easier way: They cheated. When tests were given, all around me, I could see other students peeking at crib sheets or, when Mr. Clayton wasn't looking, showing each other what they were writing on the test papers. Also, we were in Fifth Period and Mr. Clayton used the same test forms for his Second Period class. The students in that class hated him and were willing to share what had been on the tests. More than once, someone in Second Period swiped an extra copy of the test and let Fifth Period students see it before it was their time. At lunch on a test day, I'd see little groups of Fifth Period students huddled, going over the form and trying to find the answers in their textbooks. I wish I could tell you that I never participated in that but, yeah, I did. A little.
I saw cheating in many of my classes at school. Mr. Clayton's were the only classes where almost everyone cheated.
Throughout my senior year at Uni Hi, I pretty much neglected all my other classes but Chemistry. The way Mr. Clayton ran things, you pretty much had to. One night, I had a dream…or at least, I think it was a dream. All I remember is Mr. Clayton handing back our mid-terms to us, all marked not "F" but some new, lower grade he'd invented to lower our self-esteem yet another notch…and he'd stapled to each an employment application form for McDonald's. As he passed them out, he explained, "I thought I'd make it easier for you since none of you will ever get into college or amount to anything in this world."
I did not dream about the one female student who was so filled with hatred for that man that she was seriously considering luring him into some sort of affair or sexual flirtation. She was not going to seduce him to get him to give her a passing grade. Her plan was to have someone photograph the two of them together and then she'd report him for statutory rape and then, for the good of all, get him the hell out of the teaching profession. She never did this, much to the disappointment of many.
I had my own, less drastic scheme which I actually did try. I took my copy of Mr. Clayton's mid-term — the one we'd all flunked — and applied about a quart of Liquid Paper to it, eradicating my answers. Then I Xeroxed it at the school library, giving me a blank copy of the test. Some friends and I went to the other Chemistry teacher, Mr. Dennison, and double-dared him into taking it. He got about halfway through before he quit, announcing he was not going to endure the embarrassment of flunking Mr. Clayton's test.
I don't recall why I thought at the time that this would bring down or otherwise impede Mr. Clayton's destructive teaching methods…but it did get all over school that Mr. Clayton's test was too hard even for Mr. Dennison. I felt I scored some sort of small, meaningless victory with that.
Still, I was trapped in what seemed less like a Chemistry class than like some horrid Bataan Death March with test tubes. May I tell you the one thing I did "learn" (sort of) in that class? I understood very little of what Mr. Clayton said in his lectures. In them, he spoke some language that sounded vaguely like one I myself spoke, but I could grasp very little of what he said. And asking for clarifications did no good. It was like asking to be scolded for not studying harder so I could keep up with him.
So my mind often wandered and I often stared at a big chart he had on the wall showing the Periodic Table of Elements. It gave me an idea and in my mind during class, and later on paper at home, I wrote a murder mystery story. In it, someone murdered a Chemistry Professor named Mr. Playton. Note how clever I was to change one letter. When the body is found in the lab, it's surrounded by vials of various chemicals the victim apparently snatched off the shelves in his final moments: Neon, Aluminium, Chlorine, Argon and Potassium. Based on the formula they represented — NeAlClArK — the detective deduces at the end that the murderer has to be Neal Clark.
A year or two later, I sold the story to a small magazine. It earned me $200 and kudos from a friend who was an avid student of murder mysteries. He congratulated me on being the one thousandth writer to think of that gimmick and use it in a story.
Anyway, at the end of the semester, just about everyone in the class was failing, a point Mr. Clayton drove home by reading aloud — with a bit too much glee, I thought — everyone's final grade. Most of them were cheating every which way and they were still failing. I needed a C for my college credit but I had a D. So did most of us. Mr. Clayton let the gloom sink in for a few minutes…let everyone envision their college admittances flying out the window…
…then he announced that he was going to raise everyone one grade level. An F became a D, a D became a C and the one or two kids in the class who had managed Cs got Bs. Sighs of relief could be heard as far as Kuala Lumpur. Rumors had reached us that he'd done this before for his Beginning Chemistry classes — apparently, he always did it — but it was nice to hear. He did inform us though, and we had no evidence to the contrary, that he never did it for the advanced class.
So when it came time to sign up for my final semester at Uni, I was determined to get into Mr. Dennison's advanced class instead of Mr. Clayton's. I did my darnedest: I cut in line. I elbowed others aside. I cheated and lied and fought and bled and when sign-ups were over, I was not in Mr. Clayton's class.
Unfortunately, I was not in Mr. Dennison's, either. Both had filled to capacity without me. When I told the registrar lady that I needed the Advanced Chemistry class to graduate, she signed me up for another course called Modern Science. I told her Modern Science was not a college-qualifying class and it would not do. She said, "Well, you'll just have to talk to your counselor and get him to transfer you from Modern Science into Advanced Chemistry. I can't do that here."
I went to my counselor — a nice gent named Mr. Wilson — and he shuffled papers, pulled strings and got me moved into an Advanced Chemistry class. Unfortunately, it was the one taught by the future roommate of Hitler and Stalin. There was just too long a waiting list for Mr. Dennison. I believe it included the names of every single student who'd attended Uni in the last ten years.
Mr. Clayton in the advanced class was even worse than Mr. Clayton in the beginning class. Again, I managed Cs and Ds on his tests through sheer memorization of textbook paragraphs that I did not for a minute comprehend. Alas, there were more Ds than Cs and I was worried I wouldn't pass the class, which was my last obstacle to getting into U.C.L.A.
Mr. Wilson told me not there was no cause for concern. He said, "Clayton's rough but he never stopped a student from getting into college in his life." I said I wasn't sure I wouldn't be the first. I also told him I hadn't heard yet from U.C.L.A. "Fear not," he told me. "You'll be getting a letter from them any day telling you you've been accepted." Sure enough, any day later, a letter arrived.
I wasn't home when it was delivered but my father was. He took it from the mailbox and ordinarily, he'd have left it on my bed for me to open when I got home.
Then he saw the return address: University of California at Los Angeles, Admissions Office. It was a letter he'd been waiting for since…well, since around the time I was born. And though I'd told him it was coming and what it would say, he just couldn't wait to see it on paper.
I got all sorts of mail and my father had never opened any of it before. He never opened another one after that one. But he couldn't resist opening that one and, as he later described it to me, "My heart stopped. I thought my life was over."
The letter — a form letter, of course — briefly stated that my application and cumulative record had been received and examined and that I was not accepted to U.C.L.A. Very truly yours.
I arrived home about an hour later, unaware I was walking into the worst evening of my life, at least insofar as my relationship with my father was concerned.
I was…well, I must have been sixteen. To that moment, my father had yelled at me about five times. Seven, tops…and never for very long. As often as not, after he yelled at me, he'd apologize for yelling at me.
I'd go over to the homes of friends my age and I'd hear yelling. Lots of yelling. I am not exaggerating when I tell you I would hear them being yelled at, in one afternoon, more than my father yelled at me in my entire life. We almost never argued because he was such a decent, kindly man and also because I was just one of those kids who never did anything wrong.
That night, he yelled at me. All night. He yelled at me so much, screaming about how I'd ruined my life, that I thought he was going to have a heart attack. He'd had one and there were moments that evening I thought I was witnessing its sequel. I'd ruined my life and I'd lied to him with that crap about high-enough S.A.T. scores and guaranteed acceptance.
I yelled back that the letter was a mistake. It had to be a mistake. He yelled back that U.C.L.A. didn't make mistakes.
I reminded him that he worked for the Internal Revenue Service and he was always telling me how the I.R.S. had made mistakes…huge mistakes. If the I.R.S. could make mistakes, why couldn't U.C.L.A.? That wasn't enough. The arguing went on all evening and I remember my mother crying and telling us both, over and over, to calm down. It was just a horrible, horrible night and I'm actually trembling a bit and making more typos than usual as I type this now, a half-century after it occurred.
The next morning, I got up early and left the house before my father departed for work. He usually dropped me off at Uni on his way to his job but that morning, I wasn't about to ride with him. I took the bus to school and waited in the faculty parking lot for Mr. Wilson to arrive. When he pulled in, he saw me standing in his parking space, stuck his head out and said, "I get the feeling you need to talk to me."
I told him, "Yes! And if you won't give me an appointment right away, you might as well run me over."
Soon, we were in his office and he was studying The Letter. "This is obviously a mistake," he said. He picked up the phone, called someone he knew at the U.C.L.A. Admissions Office and straightened the whole thing out in under three minutes. The problem, it turned out, stemmed from when that registrar lady had stuck me in Modern Science and I'd had to transfer to Advanced Chemistry. When the school sent my records over to the university, the transfer had not been noted. U.C.L.A. thought I was taking Modern Science and even if I passed it with an A, that course did not qualify me for their university.
"You'll get another letter in a few days saying you've been accepted," Mr. Wilson said. I told him, "I can't wait a few days to go home. Is there any way you could phone my parents and tell them this?"
He picked up the phone and called my mother. He said, "Mrs. Evanier? This is George Wilson at University High School. I'm your son's guidance counselor. Mrs. Evanier, I have Mark here in my office and we've just straightened out a little mistake. Mark showed me this letter he'd received and I phoned U.C.L.A. and spoke to the Admissions Office there. They made an error. Well, it may be that we here at Uni made the error but whoever made it, the fact is that your son has been accepted into U.C.L.A. There's no question of it and he'll be receiving a letter shortly that confirms that. I'm sorry about the misunderstanding."
Through the earpiece on his phone, I could hear my mother crying and saying, "Thank you, thank you…"
When I left his office, I went to a pay phone and called her. She said, "I just called your father at the office and he was so happy…and so upset that he hadn't believed you. In fact, he's so upset that he can't stay at the office. He said he's on his way home." That afternoon when I got home, my father apologized to me…and apologized and apologized, over and over. In later years, he would occasionally bring it up again just to apologize again.
A few days later, a letter arrived — one he saw first but allowed me to open. It said I was accepted to U.C.L.A. for the fall semester, assuming I successfully graduated University High School and passed all my classes. So it pretty much came down to Mr. Clayton and Advanced Chemistry.
Much to my amazement, I passed that class. I got Fs and Ds and only the occasional C or two on Mr. Clayton's tests and I was sure it would all average out to a D, which was in this case a failing grade. But I got a C. I would start at U.C.L.A. in the Fall.
My last day of classes there, I went around and said goodbye and thanks to a number of teachers, skipping (of course) over Mr. Clayton. I was on my way to my last stop — Mr. Wilson, the counselor who'd helped me so much — when I ran into Mr. Clayton in the hall. He was all smiles and congratulations and he extended his hand. I shook it but something within me bubbled to the surface…something I'd been waiting a year to unleash…
I said, "I can't thank you for all I learned in your class because I didn't learn a damn thing except that I hate Chemistry and will never go near it again. This has been a horrible experience and I know you think you whipped us all into shape and made us better students. But what you did was to convince us that the game was rigged and we just had to do whatever we could to get through your class. A lot of students cheated to pass your tests. I didn't cheat but I did memorize stuff, spit it out onto the tests…and then my brain jettisoned it all because it was of utterly no use to me. I'm not sure what that is but it sure as hell isn't learning."
That's what I said to him.
Well, actually, that's what I wish I'd said to him. I actually started to thank him for all I'd learned because back then, I hadn't worked in television and didn't know how to be rude. And I guess because I was also worried that he'd call down the forces of Mephistopheles and consign me for all eternity to a fire pit where I'd be flogged by demons as I balanced Redox Equations.
He interrupted my insincere mumbles of gratitude and said, "Well, you can thank George Wilson. He really believes you have a bright future and he came to me to make sure I wouldn't flunk you." So the fix was in. Thank heavens for the fix.
I thanked Mr. Clayton with a smidgen more candor and then I went down and thanked Mr. Wilson…a lot. He said, "Mr. Clayton isn't a bad teacher." I said, "You wouldn't say that if you knew how little, after a whole year of his class and memorizing textbooks, I know about Chemistry." We had a long, interesting discussion about what a waste of everyone's time it was for me to take that course, especially since I'd known well before it that I had no future in anything relating to Chemistry.
Several months later when I was attending U.C.L.A. and starting to wonder if maybe college was a mistake, Mr. Wilson called and asked if I would do him a favor. Of course, I would do him a favor. He wanted me to appear downtown at a meeting of some council at the Los Angeles Board of Education and tell them the same things I'd said to him that day. A week later, I appeared and here — reconstructed from notes I found last year when I cleaned out my mother's house — is almost exactly what I said as my opening statement…
I come before you at the request of Mr. George Wilson here, an excellent counselor who helped me a lot when I attended and graduated from University High School. Mr. Wilson asked that I tell you my own experience with the breadth requirements in the L.A. City School System's curriculum. Let me tell you first that although I am attending U.C.L.A., I have already begun working rather steadily as a freelance professional writer. Let me also tell you that this is a career I decided on around the time I was six. I have never deviated from it. I never wanted to be a fireman or a movie star or the President of the United States. I've always wanted to do what I'm doing now.
The breadth requirements, as you know, forced me to take courses outside my major or interests. The main result of them is that I had to neglect my major and serious interests in favor of subjects I am unable to learn and couldn't possibly have a need for even if I could learn them.
I am dreadful at foreign languages. I took two years of Spanish in Junior High School and two more in High School and the only two complete sentences I can speak in that language are, "Y Fijate, que bien estan las luces" and "Pero el cordero asado esta delicioso." These may come in handy should I ever find myself eating lamb with Mexicans in a room with lovely lighting but otherwise, it was kind of a waste. I passed those classes but I assure you I did not get anything out of them besides those two sentences.
My last year at University High, I had to take Chemistry. Now admittedly, this was because I wanted to go to U.C.L.A. and U.C.L.A. required it but the L.A. City School System also required science classes that might as well have been in Spanish. These were Chemistry classes in which, I swear to you, I learned absolutely nothing. I know how to mix a glass of Nestlé's Quik but that is the extent of my Chemistry.
I got through those classes by memorizing, as opposed to learning, facts with which I could answer questions on tests. And then once those tests were over, my brain — well aware it would never need that information — dumped it all. It's like if you had to learn a column of numbers to parrot back to someone for a test. Since the numbers don't relate to your life in any way but the test, you forget them once the test is over.
What could I have done with all the time I wasted memorizing Spanish I could not absorb and Chemistry I could not use? I could have done real work in classes that were relevant to my chosen career, such as English. I never had the time to read my textbooks for my English classes and I had to bluff my way through those tests. I had to bluff through History too, which was a shame because that might have been useful. But I was too busy memorizing Chemistry data that I do not remember and never understood. I believe I learned less in high school because I had to take Chemistry, not more.
I appreciate that you want to offer a wide range of subjects to students. A student who did have an aptitude for or interest in Chemistry might have profited from that class that was meaningless to me. It also might have been a better class if it had been taught for students who belonged in it. Exposure to Chemistry might even have been valuable to a student who wasn't sure what he or she wanted to do with their lives. Maybe Chemistry would have grabbed them as it failed to grab me. Given the teacher I had, I doubt it but it's possible.
I hated Chemistry. I hated the subject. I hated the teacher. I hated how much of my time it took up, taking me away from more valuable learning. I hated how it might have even prevented me from gaining admission to U.C.L.A. where, by the way, there is no requirement in my major that I ever go anywhere near a Chemistry Lab. If I had been required to spend the same time learning how to work a yo-yo, I'd have just as much knowledge in my head today, plus I'd be able to work a yo-yo. Something about this arrangement does not seem right to me.
This is the viewpoint that Mr. Wilson asked me to express to you. I will be glad to answer any questions you have as long as they are in English and do not involve Chemistry.
I answered questions for about a half-hour. The Board Members seemed interested and they laughed when I told them, omitting the names, of how Mr. Dennison couldn't pass Mr. Clayton's mid-term. In the end, they all admitted I had a good point and said they'd discuss it further. As far as I know, nothing changed except that I felt better…and felt I'd put whatever lingering anger I had at Mr. Clayton behind me. In fact, I kind of look back on the day I testified to that council as the day I finally got out of high school. It would have been so much easier without Mr. Clayton.
