Young Dumbboy Browne

Which lives mattered a thousand years ago?

By Otto Sinding (1842-1909) - Painting by Otto Sinding, Public Domain, Link

Sweyn Forkbeard, up to his tricks, circa 1002

It is already Sunday afternoon.

I have been working on musical projects, and yet I have nothing ready to post up here.

I recently went to the old mp3 hosting site where I originally uploaded the very first pieces of music that I did with the first laptop I ever owned.

The laptop: "my old beat up laptop," had been mailed to me in St. Augustine, Florida by a guy named Martin Wright, of West Virginia.

The first recording, I made using the built in microphone in the thing, with it sitting on my lap, as I played the guitar and harmonica.

Not an ideal setup, as I had to be careful not to let the laptop fall off my knees, on top of trying to play the two instruments, and sing.

But, I have retrieved all those old mp3 recordings, and they are not as bad as I thought they would be; at least they show "effort."

It was an appropriate starting point for someone like me, who likes to start at the very bottom and climb all the way to the top, type of thing.

Starting Somewhere In The Middle

When I was in sixth grade, there appeared, about halfway through the year, a large box that was propped up on kind of a pedestal, that was divided into 60 compartments.

Each compartment held one of a set of carefully graded units for the teaching of reading and comprehension.

There was a long passage to be read, followed by the typical multiple choice questions about the subject matter, with an essay assignment; to be completed on a separate sheet of paper and to be between 500 and 1,000 words.

Reingold Elementary, Now Solar Powered?

But, the cool thing (I thought) was that this Placement Test was designed to determine which unit, out of the 60, any student would be able to begin at and, in effect, skip over a lot of material.

If you were really a dim bulb, like Billy Brown, well, you might have to start on unit 5, like he had to, then work your way up towards number 60.

Billy was the first instance of an allegorical character to come along in my life, because he was literally the "brown"est skinned kid in our class of about 30. In the tradition of Nathaniel Hawthorne, he could aptly have been named Young Dumbboy Browne.

To get a passing grade (of D) Billy would have had to at least reach something like unit 25, whereupon he would have drug himself up to a sixth grade level of reading and comprehension

He probably didn't, because he was that dumb.

He was the kind of kid who would huff model glue in his spare time, while others might be assembling the actual model with it.

Billy always wore a crew cut and, only now do I think back and wonder if it was because of the fact that he was a mulatto that he didn't want his hair to grow out and give him away with its tell-tale kinkiness. It was already bad enough to have to be the brownest kid in a class of upper middle class whites.

Debbie Richard was equally brown, but she was a beautiful Latina looking girl, who fell somewhere in the middle of the pack as far as how smart she was. Her brown hair fell in curls to her shoulders; no source of shame to her, there...

By grade six, the kids who hadn't learned to read and write were beggining to stick out like sore thumbs (or like a feces floating in a pool amidst rolls of toilet paper, as one black kid described his feelings on the subject to me once).

Billy Brown had distinguished himself, through scores like 9 or 13, achieved infamously by him on typical tests.

My connection to him came about because often Miss Hayford, our teacher, would wind up throwing both mine and Billy's scores out, in order to massage the bell curve into a more manageable shape, preparing to "scale" the grades.

Miss Hayford was a large woman with unruly blond hair that fell halfway down her back. She usually wore "moo moo" dresses; but was a very nice teacher. I suppose she let her size do the yelling and threatening for her, so she could be as soft-spoken as she likes.

Some of the boys nicknamed her "Haystack Calhoun," after a professional wrestler who was on the scene at the time, but this was just because of her size, combined with the phonetic similarity of the two names, and a modicum of creativity from the boys.

Haystack Calhoun (left) at work

Sometimes Miss Hayford would throw out Peter Capute's or Patricia Donlon's on the high end of the spectrum; but it was always Billy Brown's that got tossed off the low end -as an anomaly; something not to be factored in as being a representation of the class as a whole. Maybe that one kid hadn't slept the night before; and maybe that other kid has an unnatural ability in the subject that the rest of the kids shouldn't be held up to, type of thing...

Scaling was unheard of in the private schools; the theory being that a kid needs to become aware that he is only absorbing 48 percent of the material; because The World is certainly going to notice. Better to have your feelings hurt than to be sent off to college, where a rude awakening awaits you if you are Billy Brown.

If the class average on a test was 58%, then that would become the criteria for a grade of C, denoting an average student.

The 17 percentage points would be added to everyone's score, so that the kid that got a 58 would then become a C student, sanctioned by association with 75% having been (arbitrarily?) chosen as what the average student should be able to perform on a test relative to having retained that amount of knowledge, out of the pool of knowledge that had been available, to have answered 3 quarters of the questions correctly, that is average.

This was most likely to make the school system appear to be doing at least a passable job of passing the kids along.

So, the fraud was perpetrated that we were an average class of average kids who would then be shuffled along to the next grade, with the hopes that, by the time they graduate high school, they will have at least learned to read and write, but to move them along to the next grade to make room for the younger tikes coming along, none the less.

But, I suppose, just keep giving the kid reading and writing, over and over, even up to and including in the 12th grade if you have to. That would be a worthy goal for the teachers in the world's public schools of the Billy Browns of the world.

Reiterate things that are eventually going to give the Billy Browns an education in the things that they had not yet mastered in the first few grades.
That way, they might be able to know how many eggs they will have left after they use 4 of them, and be able to do it in their heads.

Keeping a kid in the school system all the way up to past his 17th birthday is going to become quite a challenge now that the veil has been pulled off of a totally online education system, by the virus.
Who is going to want to go back to a bricks and mortar school system, now that it has been demonstrated that you can really learn just as much from Google as you can from any school system

Plus, you can insulate the pupil, from any hidden agenda or bias that might be harbored in the school's staff, like teachers trying to turn your kid into a socialist, for example.

The used to be that schools were equal parts day care centers, and classroom, because parents in a nuclear family worked.
This was pretty much the dynamic in the early 1970's. The nuclear family was still pretty strong back then, if having just one Billy Brown out of 30 kids is any indication.
The Story of the Box of 50 Compartments, continued...

Back to Reingold Elementary School, which I attended from grades 4 through 6.

My father had carefully vetted Reingold, which was where kids from my neighborhood that didn't go to private schools went.

That wasn't very many of them.
The Ryan's kids went there, and that was probably because their dad was a politician, as well as a real estate mogul (by the standards of our city) and it would have been hypocritical for him to get on the stump and talk about how excellent our school system is, yet send his kids elsewhere.

It was a brand new school, and it was only a mile and a half from our house.

I remember that the principal, Mr. Erickson, had assured him that he ran a tight ship, with an iron hand, and that he had zero tolerance of misbehaving kids, and that it was a good school, I guess. It was decided that it felt safe to send me to the public school, for just 3 years.

I was 9 years old, and that is still a little young for kids to be attacking each other with knives or guns. That stuff doesn't really begin until at least high school....

Plus, given the school's location, it drew upon mostly upper middle class white neighborhoods. The parents of these kids ran tight ships with iron hands and instilled good values and work ethics in their kids before they even left the house.

But the two mile radius around the school, where they culled their students from, was big enough to encompass some of the more economically depressed parts of our city.

And, so, enter Billy Brown, wearing an ordinary sweatshirt, old sneakers, and apparently the owner of no more than 5 tee shirts.

If his homework hadn't gotten done, it might have been because his parents had been fighting, or there had been some other drama, like blue and red flashing lights and paramedics and cops radios squawking in the living room, to have distracted him from it.

Billy was the darkest skinned kid in our class of 30, with the exception of Debbie Richard, who was a beautiful brown Latina girl with brown eyes.

Still, in my 9 year old mind, I didn't correlate Billy's skin color with his very poor performance in school. I figured he was just one of those kids that had already started drinking and smoking pot, or huffing gasoline.

And it never occurred to me until now, that the crew cut that he always wore (while the rest of the boys had varying degrees of long hair the fallout from the recently concluded decade of the 1960's) was perhaps a way for him to hide the fact that he was a mulatto and would be given away as such, were he to let his hair grow out.

Billy Failed By Teachers

But, It's hard to memorize things like "12 minus 5 is 7"  and then memorize "12 minus 8 is 4" separately, as if they aren't related, and then have to memorized every other combination involving 12.

I think Mr. Brown became overwhelmed, and had already given up on "education" at the ripe age of 9.

He probably should have been taught with a more kin-esthetic approach. The teacher should have brought in a dozen eggs, and given demonstrations like:

"OK Billy, I've got 12 eggs here, and I'm going to take 4 of them out; how many are left in the carton?" type of thing.

At least that is what worked for me, being able to visualize numbers.

I got the highest grades in the class, or maybe 2nd behind a kid named Peter Capute, whose father was a detective.

A detective with the Fitchburg Police and so it is assumed he was a smart guy; and so was his kid.

Detective Capute would actually have to visit me a couple years later in that capacity, after my best neighborhood friend and I had left robbery notes in the trash cans at the local bank.
We had some kind of business in there because we were 12 year olds who were already working in some capacity and had bank accounts. This was back when the bank would give you a little book with your transactions stamped on it; but most notably, there would be a column labeled "interest" and you would actually see nice amounts of money appearing there to be added to your balance as time went by. The bank where we were at was paying something like 5.2% interest, compounded monthly, but I digress.
We were in there putting our less than ten bucks into our accounts and started messing around at the table and passing notes which we thought were funny: "all the money, or you and pimple face get it!!" or "they'll be finding pieces of you in the air conditioners filter if you make a sound" -just regular ol' humor to amuse ourselves with.
But, apparently when the bank custodian empties the trash, he also reads it.
The employees were worried that someone had been right on the brink of pulling an armed heist of the place, but had perhaps lost their nerve (over the prospect of blood and gore) and had just tossed their notes and gone home. But, maybe to try it again; the next day...type of thing.

But that would mean I would be meeting Detective Capute who had compared the handwriting on the notes against everyone's who had done business with the bank that day, and had dropped by my house and my friend Dave's to verify that it had just been us joking around (I think he made reference to some law that he could have arrested us under, but said that he wasn't going to because we were just 12 years old, and starting out as a felon is no way to begin life, or something like that...

"One false move and fat ass in the red dress gets splattered!!" 

Peter Capute would have been attending the public school because his dad was a public servant and his going there was sort of a vote of confidence for the entire "system" itself.

For that reason, the Ryan's, whose dad was a real estate mogul, but also a politician, went there, even though their family could afford to send them to private schools. It would be hypocritical to get up on a stump and extol the merits of "our school system," but send your own kids off to a country day school at $1,200 a year, per kid -a lot of money in 1973...and hypocritical.

And, then, you would have the disciplinary problem kids, like myself, whose family could afford to send him to private schools, but who was seen as being incorrigible in the eyes of nuns, whose expectations were that their kids would sit up straight, with their feet squarely on the floor, eyes front and center, and uttering not a word to anyone the whole time that class was in session.

I have blogged about the time I was so deeply focused upon melting a handful of crayons into a waxen blob that I hadn't noticed that the bell had rung and the rest of my contemporaries were out at recess.

But, that was just one day in my life as a parochial school kid.

There was the time that I found some charred bits of wood on the ground next to the cinder block maintenance garage at one edge of the recess yard, and found that they could be used to draw and write on the wall of that garage and then spent the rest of the recess doing so -cars, people, flowers, clouds, birds, the sun, a tree, a squirrel- they were all there in black charcoal as I sat in the principal's office, my knuckles still stinging from the brass ruler, hearing the principal (Sister Mary Agnes, was it?) vaguely threatening my mom with a bill being sent to our house to cover the cost of pressure washing the garage (I think they had just decided to let the rain eventually rinse it off because it really didn't look that bad, depending upon which school official was looking at it).

Then, there was the armpit fart concert...

It had been the first really nice day of the year -probably in mid April- and Sister Theresa had rotated open all of the windows to allow warm fresh air in, redolent with the fragrances of fecund mud, cat tails and evaporated snow, all to the sound robins chirping.

This had inspired me to jump up on my desk and regale my classmates with an impromptu under arm fart piece, based on a Strauss waltz , but intended to be like the Rite of Spring.

The encore to that was another trip to the principal's office.

But those were just a couple days that I remember right off. It really seemed to me that I got in trouble every single day at that school, involving a trip to the principal's office.

So, there were kids like myself at Reingold -ones who didn't get along with nuns.

But, Billy seemed to have resigned himself to the fact that he was dumb; it had become kind of his calling card. He would take a seat at the back of the classroom on the first day of school, type of thing; as far from the action of learning as he could be.

One impression of him that kind of stuck with me was when, during one of our after-lunch record playing sessions, someone put on "Bad Moon on the Rise," by Creedence Clearwater Rivival, which evoked an immediate response from Billy, which involved him smiling a dopey smile and bobbing his head along with the repetitive and simple beat of it.

To me it was the "See Spot run" of songs.

No wonder Creedence sells so many records; they are limited only by how many Billy Browns are out there...

But the simple song played in straight quarter note rhythm: "Dum dum dum dum (dumb dumb dumb dumb)" and Billy Brown, wearing the grin, bobbed his head in dopey approval -the "bad moon on the rise" being something he was in tune with, while maybe "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road," was over his head.

Oddly, this association that I made between the more dim witted individuals, and the music they like later became a stumbling block to me, as I attempted to write what I hoped would be "more sophisticated" music. It kind of drew me away from the fundamentals before I had mastered them enough.

I eventually realized that there is a little bit of Billy Brown in everyone and that even the most majestic of pieces of music contain some basic elements as their "backbone."

Beethoven utilized straight quarter note rhythm; he just didn't make an entire 4 minute song out of nothing but it.

But, back to the graded educational packages, Billy would have started somewhere around Unit 5, which was basically a review of 2nd grade reading skills, while my aptitude test results had placed me at unit 52.

So, I could start with unit 53, and earn an A, just by ascending to unit 60, and then take the rest of the year off, I guessed. This was a full 4 units ahead of Tammy Kendall, who came in second at 48.

But what happened was I began what was to become the nagging life-long habit of resting upon my laurels.

Comfortably atop the class; I began to goof off, and it wasn't until I learned that Tammy was about to begin unit 58, and would most likely be the first in the class to finish all the modules, that I got back to work.

A couple of weeks had passed and it was our teacher, Miss Hayford who had pointed out to me that I hadn't done anything except sit there complaisantly "at the top" of the class, and that I had fallen into second place, behind Tammy Kendall, and was about to be overtaken by Julie Condon and Peter Capute.

I did the same thing after I first tried to play lead on an electric guitar.

Finding that I had some innate ability, and could play what I thought was some cool sounding notes; I put the thing down; figuring that the ability would always be there "in my bag of tricks" and it wouldn't be until years later I would learn that practice actually makes a person better; no matter how much ability they start with.