💃 TREE 327: Failure

This week author, teacher and master learner Alison Acheson is writing about continuing to learn throughout life. She’s choosing the music too. I’m doing the illustrations and notes at the end. —Jeff

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One.

It wasn’t until I took part in a Bachelor of Education program, age 44, that I began to realize I should probably avoid School.

The program was fifty weeks long. I’d already taught post-secondary for years as a contract teacher (the “contract” piece being why I left). I was in an “arts in education” cohort for elementary teaching. It seemed right.

But with three weeks to go, my sponsor teacher told me to think about the rest of my life, passed me a box of tissues, then tossed me. Bullying trickles down: kids learn to bully to get through—such teachers model this as a life-skill.

For days after, I lay in my hammock, absorbing weak sunshine and a biography of Charles Schultz.

And then I was done with that, I decided.

It occurred to me that I had no real sense of classroom timing, because I’d spent only six years in public school. Other years I’d taken correspondence, as we called it in the 70s, and dropped out halfway through grade nine to go to hairdressing school, where people laughed and took care of each other.

It occurred to me that perhaps it’s not the worst thing that I don’t understand the rhythm of thirty people born in the same calendar year, crushed into a relatively small room.

I ceased thinking of it as Failure. It became a story: That Time I Did a B.Ed.

Two.

That feeling when you’re so tired you don’t even know if you can trust a banana.

Three.

Iva Nova – ’cause sometimes the lyrics might as well be in Russian.

I stumbled over this group of women from Saint-Petersburg in my neighbourhood “Russian Hall” on the rough East Side, Vancouver, Canada, at the Accordion Noir Fest. Amazing what can be down your street.

Who needs a guitar? She has an accordion!

If you rushed through today’s post, please scroll up and read it again slowly. There’s a lot to take in. Do you want to get skilled up as a writer? check out Alison’s Unschool for Writers. Alison has published picturebooks, middle-grade and YA novels, short stories and memoir for adults. She taught in the MFA program at the University of British Columbia 14 for years.

Grow slowly
Jeff