Well, it’s done. I took and passed the CBEST. And wouldn’t you know it, I didn’t do that great on the writing section. I had a feeling this would happen, so I took the other two sections first.
When I tell people I struggled taking college English courses, they have a hard time accepting that. After all, I’ve written eight books. Shouldn’t I know everything about the thousands of other books I’m supposed to read? Shouldn’t I be able to write a 1000 word essay if I can write a 50,000 word novel?
Well, yeah, I probably should. But I don’t.
Doin’ time in the English Department
In one of the first English Lit courses I took, the professor asked me what my major was.
“Creative Writing,” I said.
“Ah. It makes sense,” he replied. “Because you write essays like a poet.”
He took out an essay and pointed out everything that wasn’t right about it. Note that I didn’t say “everything that was wrong about it.” My errors were in not having the proper structure that the upper division English majors were expected to use. My essay talked about the language in which the author wrote, and what I surmised were his real-life inspirations. But it didn’t answer the question that the professor asked, which was a standard English department method.
Exams in the English department were often just three or four questions, and then you pick one and spend the entirety of the class filling out what are called “bluebooks”—cheap, saddle-stapled chapbooks of lined paper. These are then usually graded by a teacher’s assistant under the guidance of the instructor. It’s the lifeblood of the program, and I had virtually no skill at it.
The section in which I tangent talking about why I tangent
This is also long before my neurodivergent diagnosis, so I didn’t have the language to express my utter confusion as to how I didn’t answer the question put before me. To me, I could see all the connections. This is a problem I’ve had my whole life in social situations with people claiming I change the subject of conversations constantly—in my truth, I never change the subject; the other person is just unable to see the connections I do.
However, this was also the emotional basis of my poetry up until 2012, and why I’ve rarely written poetry since. For a long time, I put my lack of poetic creation on the death of my friend, Alex, who died in 2012 of a freak heart attack1, after which I began writing the novel Black Hole. But that was a few months after I got my first diagnosis, and up until that point, my poetry was an attempt to bridge the distance between my own personal island and the mainland of society. I was never trying to go out on the edge, like many of my peers; I was trying to find a way to fit. Metaphorically, I felt like a puzzle piece that had come in the wrong box.
Once I understood why I didn’t fit, and that the difference was not imagined but real, and real like that of many other humans in the people zoo, a lot of the air went out of the bouncy castle of my poetic creativity. I’m not alone at all, just probably not next to anyone with my combination of whoopsie-brain-doodles. By one mathematic calculation I’ll skip past2, there are 43,000 Americans just like me. Well, hell, I thought I was special. That’s three times the size of my hometown. Assholes.
English Department, Part 2
But back to the English department—because of the understaffing of San Francisco State University under the Pete Wilson3 regime, it was impossible to get my required composition class until my senior year, so as a sophomore I had to figure out quickly how to write an essay, as much of my load were literature courses.
Most of the English majors were the former AP English kids from school, who knew all the plotlines and characters of Shakespeare, had read Milton and Chaucer, and generally outwrote me, putting me at the bottom of a curve. Compared to the average schmuck on the street, I was Norman Mailer, but in a run-of-the-mill English department, I was Weez-era Pauly Shore.
The only book I read for pleasure in high school was The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. That series was formative for me, but it kind of stopped there. After that, freshman year in college, I got really involved in the spoken word scene which got me into reading books, which pushed me to go to San Francisco and become a famous poet4. But I wasn’t going to let my reader-come-lately lifestyle hold me back. I developed a plan.
I stuck to more recent authors and eras of literature. To this day, there are a lot of the “greats” whom I can’t get through more than 10 pages of their works: Jane Austen, Joseph Conrad, Herman Melville, to name just a few. Aside from Baudelaire, Poe, Twain, and Rimbaud, I can’t really understand anything written before the 20th century. My brain just won’t comprehend certain styles. So I focused on the “greats” of the 1920s and beyond.
When we read The Great Gatsby, I also read Tender Is the Night and This Side of Paradise. When we read The Sun Also Rises, I also read The Nick Adams Stories. When we read Faulkner, I also read Flannery O’Connor. And I read John Fante and Ring Lardner. I wasn’t going to be able to catch up to everything they had read in their wunderkind years, but I was going to know this era better than they did. And it worked.
You can’t quote yourself
The only bump I had after that was in a paper I wrote on Allen Ginsberg, I was marked down for not referencing a quote from Neeli Cherkovski.
“Not only is this quote factually erroneous, you don’t reference where it came from—you just say ‘according to Neeli Cherkovski,’” the steaming-mad instructor spouted.
He was miffed because I suggested that the Beats did rewrite their material before publication.
“That’s what Neeli5 told me when I asked him,” I said, innocently enough.
“You literally asked Neeli Cherkovski about this?” he asked, accusingly.
“Yeah,” I said. “He lives in Bernal Heights. I just called him when I was writing this and asked him.”
“YOU CAN’T USE PERSONAL CONVERSATIONS IN AN ACADEMIC PAPER!”
“Okay, duly noted. One more question?”
“Yes?”
“If I publish our conversation as an interview, may I quote from it then?”
“NO. Bring in a rewrite on Monday.”
So why did I take the CBEST?
I’m getting there! I need work. Desperately. And this allows me to substitute teach in California.
People say “you would make the best English teacher!” to me. I wouldn’t. I would make a class of poets who like books, but I wouldn’t prepare them for the next level. Which isn’t horrible, but isn’t the best idea.
But substitute teaching is a whole other animal. Most of the job is not to be scared of the students. After that, the work is all downhill.
Do we still have VCRs on carts to roll into classes? Or are we all streaming educational films now? Guys, get ready to watch Jason Statham’s The Beekeeper—welcome to biology class!
He was 19, and drug free. It went down about three days before his birthday.
This involved math I didn’t research that well, and computed once without peer review. So I don’t want to go into it. It’s a computed guess, really. But I have the combination of three diagnoses, and apparently others do as well.
Pete slashed the CSU budgets year after year and used the money to build prisons. Not enough shit is talked about this man. In supposedly liberal California, we had him, Reagan, and Nixon in a stream of conservative governors who destroyed the infrastructure of the state.
I did not become a famous poet. But that was the idea. I gave up on that in 2016 and moved to LA to become a famous comic. That didn’t work either.
Neeli is one of those very accomplished writers who still hangs out at literary events and is very approachable. He was very nice to me as a young aspiring writer.
You're famous to me!
It started like that for me, the certainty that I was a weird fit for this profession and now I’m a fucking Assistant Principal. Life is strange. Congrats on the CBEST hurdle finishing, and may you find the magic on this new side of the classroom that you were not given on the other.