O Captain, My Captain

Lately I’ve noticed a pattern: the later I write, the worse my posts read the next day. By midnight, my brain is full of static. I stop looking at my writing with a critical eye, and it shows.

So today, I went back through every single post I’ve written so far. Thankfully, the list is still short, and I edited hard. In the process, I started thinking about patterns, not just in writing, but in how I learned to write in the first place.

Which takes me back to my sophomore year of high school.

English is my second language, and I’ve been learning it since I was six. But I struggled with it, especially reading. Still, until high school, I was a straight-A student who loved school and studying and wasn’t self-aware enough to know when I was overreaching. So my second semester of sophomore year, I picked an advanced English class for my schedule. But after a week, the teacher told me it was too advanced for me, and didn’t just move me to regular English, she suggested a remedial English class.

It was humiliating and heartbreaking. I wanted so much from high school, and that was my start to it. The same thing happened to me with my science class, except that teacher threw me out in front of the whole class. It turns out that overreaching and getting pushed back for it was the best thing that could have happened to me.

That’s where I met Lowell Amrine – “Mr. Amrine” to mere mortals – just Amrine to a few. He was a rebel, a hippie, and he loved literature the way lungs love air. He treated us like we were capable of more than the syllabus allowed. He also ran the newly minted MAC Computer Lab, where I caught the bug for a different kind of science, computer science.

He smuggled AP-level material into our class and moved us forward to the point where our library wasn’t stocked well enough for research on our papers. He didn’t know, but we would sometimes ditch school to sneak into the three-story Cal State library, which exposed us to resources that only made our passion for English lit that much stronger.

I had him through senior year, and while everything he taught me stuck, one of the lessons I took to heart was this: writing doesn’t have to fit into a rigid formula. It’s whatever the writer makes of it.

I still write the way I speak and have the poor grammar to prove it. But I see that I definitely lose something when I’m writing at midnight with a head full of noise. Yup, still overreaching, but better at recognizing it now.

I don’t know if Amrine would approve of my writing in this blog. Of course, it’s my first attempt at getting anything like this out in the world, so he might say something like, “Give yourself two points for showing up.” I don’t even know where he is today, but I do know that he changed my life and the lives of so many others. Maybe the time of day doesn’t matter. Maybe what matters is showing up to the page with the same belief in myself that he once had in me.

I only remember the names of three of my high school teachers, and the one who kicked me out of her English class is not on the list.