The Dreaded "Red F" and the Beginnings of a Scholar
A guest post by Robert Leonard
Today I’m delighted to share an essay by my friend
, who writes and co-produces the podcast , among many other ventures. You can find several of Bob’s columns in the NY Times archive and at TIME magazine. Bob’s Substack is titled after his most recent book, a collection of stories, poems, and sketches of life in rural Iowa. He is also the author of Yellow Cab, a book based on his side hustle as a cab driver in Albuquerque, New Mexico, while he was still a professor of anthropology. Bob was one of the earliest members of the , which inspired our smaller venture , where he has also been a guest writer.I met Bob more than a decade ago, around the time that he resigned his faculty position at the University of New Mexico and moved back to Iowa to be closer to family. In fact, you might say that he was a recovering academic long before I was. We both grew up poor and fought our way into academe against the odds before growing disaffected with our institutions and the profession more broadly. I had the privilege of producing Bob's unforgettable oral history for the first season of Mid-Americana.
Bob’s essay reminds me of our shared roots. I grew up in a home without television, which meant that I turned to books and the outdoors for entertainment. But I also struggled during my early years in school. Perhaps my lowest point was 4th grade, when I forged my father’s signature on a report card because it showed me failing four subjects. My punishment was walking to school for a week, lugging my French Horn two miles down the mountain and another mile through town. My mother walked the first two miles with me, until we reached the bridge across the Kootenai River. Then she left me to walk the final mile to school alone. I can still remember the ache in my shoulders from the weight of my horn as I shifted it from hand to hand on the long hike home, and the way the case beat against my shins where the bell flared out.
I’m not sure why I struggled so much in school as a boy, but I think Bob’s essay points to a possible answer. Learning never comes alive in the hearts of students until they begin exploring ideas for themselves. It wasn’t shame or coercion that changed Bob’s attitude toward school, it was the joy of discovery. I love this story about how a punishment turned into a reward, and I hope you will, too.
Bob and I are both independent writers, and we appreciate your support. If you have the means, consider investing in projects like mine and Deep Midwest, where you’ll get two quality posts a week, every week. You’ll see the world differently through our writing. And if we’re meeting our own high standards, you’ll learn about your own life by reading about ours. We thank all of our readers who are already full members and look forward to welcoming more of you into our writerly communities.
The Dreaded "Red F" and the Beginnings of a Scholar
Earlier this month, at the invitation of our leader Julie Gammack, a majority of the members of the Iowa Writers Collaborative gathered in Jefferson at the Wild Rose Casino to get to know each other better and to collectively contemplate our future. We had a great time and are just going to get bigger and better. Watch out, world!
Since we all didn’t know each other personally, and to help us introduce ourselves, there was an easel with a large paper tablet on it, where we were to take turns to write down information about ourselves with a Sharpie. I believe there were three columns where we were to write our names, the name of our Substack column, and something personal about us. We were then to briefly tell the rest of the group more about ourselves and what we are trying to do with our columns before we sat back down.
I might not be remembering all of this correctly because as I watched all of the other writers in attendance effortlessly fill in the columns on the sheet of paper as they talked, I knew I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t write the words. No way, and I wasn’t even going to try. First, I have a kind of attention deficit disorder, and to focus on writing the words requested while everyone was looking at me--I knew it wasn’t going to happen. The time I would have to spend writing would seem interminable. Plus, whatever I managed to write would be unintelligible.
So, I went into full storytelling mode, figuring that would fill in the tell us something “personal” about you part, mentioning I have ADD and a brief mention of the long, sad story behind my poor handwriting. Maybe 30 seconds into my brief presentation, and coming to my rescue, Suzanna de Baca got up, said, “let’s collaborate,” grabbed the Sharpie, and started writing for me. Art Cullen hooted something like, “doesn’t seem like it hurt you any, Bob!” and Julie Gammack said, “sounds like a column to me.”
So, Julie, here is that column.
My first F was in handwriting in first grade. Not only was it an F, it was the dreaded RED F, and Mrs. Butler, my teacher, was so mad about my penmanship that she drove her pen through the paper, ripping it. This is indelibly etched into my mind.
I don’t know what they do in first grade now, but back then, when the earth was young, we had to write our letters precisely on paper that displayed two solid lines (if I remember correctly, they were blue) with a dotted line splitting them for reference. No matter how hard I tried to make my block letters fit precisely between the two solid blue lines, I failed. My attempts to make my letters geometric, symmetrical, and smoothly inked created angular globs. Lines that were supposed to be straight wavered as if drawn in a gust of wind, their orientations unpredictable and seemingly without relation to each other. And I could never stay between the lines. It’s like they didn’t exist. No amount of concentration helped, and no amount of practice made my writing consistently intelligible. It was almost as if someone was continually bumping me as I tried to write.
Judging by the scowls Mrs. Butler regularly gave me, It appeared that I was damned to lead an ineffective, illegible, and miserable existence for the rest of my life.
The red F came on a Friday, and I knew I eventually had to tell my parents about it that weekend, and I agonized about telling them of my humiliation. Of course, I procrastinated until Sunday night. I remember the moment I told them. It was in the fall of 1960, and I was six years old. Every Sunday night, my Mom and Dad and my two little sisters, Steph and Nan, gathered in the living room and watched the “Wonderful World of Disney on our black and white TV.
When Tinkerbell came on the screen, sprinkling magic dust or whatever she sprinkles over the Disney castle, and a voice sang, “when you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are…” the dam burst; I teared up and told my parents the bad news as the song drew to a close and before the commercial break. They could tell how upset I was. Instead of being angry about the grade, they comforted me and said that I should just try harder.
Wow, that was easy, I thought. I should have told them Friday night after school and not ruined the weekend. I had forgotten that Mrs. Butler had been Dad’s first-grade teacher too.
I remember hopefully looking toward rescue with the seeming flexibility that would come in the future when we would learn cursive, only to be disappointed that cursive would only serve to magnify my errors.
We began learning cursive in third grade. My first grade in handwriting was, of course, an F.
The solution? Practice. Or so they said.
The same day my F for the grading period was entered, my teacher, Miss Schneckloth, told me that I wouldn’t be allowed to go outside for recess until I earned a C. I had to practice my handwriting instead. My heart sank. Mom and Dad would later insist that I practice for an hour each night after school and for an hour each day of the weekend.
Any thoughts I had about the original composition were discouraged as being too slow for penmanship practice. Instead, I was told to copy entries out of the dictionary by day and out of the encyclopedia at night.
The mere contemplation of the time I was sentenced to practice brought anguish. Grading periods were eight weeks long, and to consider a future of no recesses for eight weeks, accompanied by one hour of writing at home each night for the same length of time, seemed both interminable and inhumane. And then there was one hour on Saturday and one hour on Sunday.
My sentence began before the ink of the F had dried. The noon bell rang, and my classmates ran outside and onto the playground into one of the last bright sunny days of an Iowa autumn. While my friends were out for recess, Miss Schneckloth handed me a dictionary and told me to copy any page I chose for practice. She insisted that it was important that I finish copying at least one page before recess was over, and my classmates returned to our room. I was not to leave my assigned wooden seat, and I knew that she would somehow know, even from the dark den of the teacher’s lounge down the hall (a fabled place no student had ever seen), if I strayed even one step from my desk to defy her.
Sniffling, I started copying out of the dictionary. Miss Schneckloth retreated brusquely from the classroom, floral print dress splitting her wake, heels clipping the linoleum floor, the echo of her footfalls quickly fading into the distance down the darkened hall. Through the open window, I heard the laughter of my classmates playing, broken only by the song of a meadowlark and the shadow of a cumulus cloud moving east and away.
As I copied, my stubby little fingers pushed the pencil along, and when I heard the meadowlark sing, I wept; tears splashed on my paper, smudging my writing, making it even more illegible.
But I kept copying words out of the dictionary. Entries, symbols, and definitions—everything I saw I copied indiscriminately and without thought.
Slowly I calmed and started paying attention to the words as they passed from the dictionary page through my hand, horribly mutating onto the rough-grained paper. I remember it like it was yesterday. A few words were familiar, but most were not, and all hinted at times and places well beyond the room that centered my existence at that moment. Outside sounds faded as my reality broadened into the one offered on the pages before me. My ADD mainly causes distraction after distraction, but sometimes it allows me to hyper-focus, like then.
The dictionary had fallen open to the P’s, and I quickly became enthralled. Pagan. A word Reverend Myskins used at our Lutheran church nearly every Sunday. Didn’t sound so bad to me. Paladin. Ah! The source of the name of the TV cowboy! Paleolithic. Cavemen! Panache. I didn’t know anyone who had that. Pulchritude. Mary Kay Snyder had that in abundance! Pyre. What happens when you play with matches in the closet at night.
Every word, whether I understood it or not, offered a slice of hope that someday I might be in a situation where I could use the word, far from the empty room where I was chained to a desk, far from the ruler and ire of Miss Schneckloth. I decided to take this opportunity to prepare, and write faster, if not with more clarity.
That night I rode the yellow school bus home, sitting backward on the wheel well of the bus next to Mr. Bob Fulton, our bus driver and school custodian. Mr. Fulton’s spine had been bent nearly double by some condition or incident, and he seemed to appreciate it when I helped him with the elaborate lever of the red stop sign that needed to swing out from the side of the bus whenever we pulled over to stop.
We spoke of the words I had learned in the dictionary that day and of the Green Bay Packers of Lombardi. I nearly asked Mr. Fulton the cause of his spinal condition, just in case it was something I could look up in the dictionary. Perhaps I could also understand it and learn of a cure—if not in my ragged paperback dictionary, perhaps in the big dictionary in the school library. Politeness overcame curiosity, however, and I didn’t ask. Now I suspect that Mr. Fulton wouldn’t have minded me asking. Briefly, I wondered, if I ever learned enough, could I find a cure?
A pack of barking dogs chased the bus to a stop at our house, and while my sisters ran to play with friends, I set up a TV tray to practice my penmanship. My sisters and I lived with Mom and Dad in a small flat-roofed house covered with thick asphalt tarpaper. Our home had what we called a living room, a kitchen, and one bedroom. Water was retrieved from the pump about 30 feet in the back of the house, and the outhouse sat another 20 feet to the west. A couch in the living room folded out into a bed for my two sisters, and my dad’s red chair converted into a bed for me. Mom and Dad had the bedroom and the record player, which played our three records. Or maybe the three I remember. One album by Patsy Cline, one by Dean Martin, and another by Nino Temple and April Stevens, who sang "Deep Purple" late into the night.
Above the red chair was a small bookshelf, which held our family’s most prized possession—an edition of the World Book Encyclopedia. We had the green and white version—how it differed from the red and blue version at school, I didn’t know, but ours was more familiar and comfortable. Each volume offered a different challenge, from the imposing, thick C, to the thin I. It almost seemed that with a bit of work, one could know everything important about the world that began with the letter I. After conquering the slender letter I, perhaps Z, U, and even B might be overcome. It seemed as if all of the important information in the world was contained in three linear feet of encyclopedia consisting of words, maps, drawings, and photographs. The World Book seemed aptly named.
There were two rules about using the World Book in our house. 1. One could not eat or drink while using it, and 2. One must ALWAYS wash one’s hands before pulling a volume from the shelf. Swallowing my last bit of after-school Oreo and milk, I washed my hands and contemplated which volume to copy from on this first afternoon of damnation.
Mr. Fulton came to mind. I pulled down S, appreciating the volume's heft as I randomly parted its pages. As expected, a splash of color and text greeted my eyes, accompanied by a gentle yet crisp pop as the binding creaked open. The smell of ink could be tasted at the very tip of my tongue and palate as the slick, glossy pages slid past each other, whispering sssssoooot. I looked up spine. I copied. From spine, I went to skeleton. I copied. From skeleton, I trekked to skull, from skull to evolution, from evolution to anatomy. From anatomy to human evolution, from human evolution to anthropology, to archaeology, to technology, to kinship, to Brazil, to nuts, to trees, to plants, to animals, to fish to fowl, reading as I went. Copying. Learning. Moving from one fascinating subject to another as the world fell open to me between my thumbs. Colorful art and photos of rocks, minerals, Istanbul, corn, mussels, and the great American astronaut Alan Shepard and the rest of the amazing peoples of the world. When my hour was up, I quit copying and started reading. Aardwolf, Agribusiness, Aegean Sea, Antarctica, Avocados—the list skittered to infinity.
I copied and read that night, and for the following 57 nights my routine varied little. Now in the habit, I read at every opportunity, the world of fact filling in the gaps of the world of fiction I had adored since becoming friends with Dick, Jane, Sally, and Spot in the first grade. They, after all, taught us the very first word most of us of my generation ever learned to read—LOOK.
The more I read fiction, the more facts it asked of me, and I always returned to the World Book for answers. I tried other encyclopedias—Britannica, and Compton’s, among others, but they weren’t comfortable, colorful, or mine. They were thick, dense, and colorless, although I’m sure they also have countless admirers. As I grew older, I occasionally needed to seek out these other volumes when the World Book was a bit thin for my efforts. Yet, for years I felt like a traitor to the warm, welcoming encyclopedia my parents somehow managed to pay for.
This was the beginning of my life as a scholar. While my handwriting never got any better, one of the very best gifts I have ever received was—you guessed it—a red F.
Thanks, Robert. Great expansion of Preface, p. 4 & 5.
Get his book at your own risk, folks--it's an all-nighter.
I think there's great value to be found, particularly for teachers, perhaps particularly from teachers, to learning from adults about their early education experiences, the bad ones and those, good or bad, that led them ultimately to a life informed by education.