A Struggle to Learn From the time when I was a little boy, growing up in Graves County, Kentucky, I have had problems with my reading and writing. Things never seemed to click for me, a trait that the teachers attributed to a mild case of dyslexia mixed with a healthy dose of attention deficit disorder. I knew, however, that no disorder was the cause of my distaste of reading and writing. Rather, there was nothing really interesting surrounding me that would grab my interest in the classroom. The teachers I encountered never took any interest in what their students wanted to read or write; they developed assignments based on what the curriculum, a course of study developed by some politicians at the Board of Education, told them to …show more content…

Not a single person left the room, but I do not know if it is necessarily because they had a wish to be challenged by this new teacher. Rather, I think everyone was in shock. This man, who everyone had immediately decided must have been a sissy pushover, had just attacked the very foundations of our local educational system. There was no doubt that he was correct that we had been living in a haze of poorly-planned assignments and simple memorization tests, but no teacher had dared to question these methods before. We all knew that Duncan must have been something different. In the weeks that followed, Duncan challenged every student sitting in that room. We had assignments to write essays analyzing the lyrics to Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, who Duncan described as “trippy.” Most had never even heard of these bands, and the fact that many of their lyrics did not appear to make sense freaked us all out. However, Duncan taught us to look below the surface to find how we, ourselves, could find meaning in the work by examining our past experiences. We read Vonnegut and the Beat Poets and analyzed why we were all stuck in this box of sameness that our ancestors had lived for generations before us. We wrote journals about our fears and aspirations and, through sharing these, learned that many of the other students