Sitting Up Front

My mom used to make sure Isaac and I sat in the front because of our vision. That is such a tiny intervention. It does not sound like one of the decisive things that shapes a person. It sounds like the kind of boring accommodation a parent mentions once to a teacher at the beginning of the year. But sitting at the front meant I was always near the person in the room who knew the most, controlled the lesson, saw who was paying attention, heard the little questions, and could hand you something harder if you finished too early. I was not one anonymous kid somewhere in the middle of thirty desks. I was right there. Mrs. McQuarkle, Mrs. King, then the teachers after them, all the way through Mrs. Restivo in high school—[verify exact teacher sequence]—saw me at high resolution. And because I liked learning, I gave them plenty to see.

There is a feedback loop here that I don't think anybody designed. I sat close enough to ask questions. I asked questions because I was curious. Teachers gave me attention because I was curious. Attention made school feel rewarding. I worked harder. Working harder made teachers trust me more. Then they would show me some extra thing or let me stay with a technical problem longer or just talk to me like I could understand it, and that made me want more. By the time I was old enough to have an identity around being smart, the evidence for it had been accumulating for years. It was not only grades. It was adults looking at me like I was worth explaining something to.

And our class kept getting lucky in this extremely specific way: we would hit fifth grade, seventh grade, ninth grade, and some technical program or new curriculum or new equipment would be opening exactly then, and we were the guinea pigs. [verify exact programs/grades] I did not understand at the time that there was anything contingent about this. It was just what school was. You did normal school things and then apparently you also got exposed to engineering or computers or fabrication or whatever the district was experimenting with. In retrospect that is insane path dependence. A district buys equipment one year later, a teacher gets hired three years earlier, a pilot program selects a different grade, and maybe some of the affordances that became obvious to me never become obvious at all.

I want to remember the individual teachers instead of compressing them into "I had good teachers." Mrs. McQuarkle. Mrs. King. [add the rest]. The ways their classrooms physically looked. Which ones were strict. Which ones made me feel clever. Which ones scared me. Which ones gave me latitude. There were probably dozens of tiny acts of confidence transfer that I no longer remember because they worked. A teacher saying "you can do this" does not feel historically important when you immediately do it. It just updates the model: apparently I can do this too.

That model became extremely strong. Most of childhood and school rewarded effort in a pretty clean way. If I studied harder, I got a better grade. If I practiced the thing, I usually became good at the thing. If I wanted to understand something, there was usually a book or a teacher or later a website that would let me understand it. If a project failed, I could normally keep touching it until it didn't. This is an incredible prior to give a child because it creates agency. It is also a slightly dangerous prior to give a person because adult life contains systems where effort is not the bottleneck, where other people have vetoes, where timing matters, where your body has limits, where the institution does not care that your local objective function is morally sincere, where you can do everything you know how to do and still lose.

I did not know any of that. Mostly I knew that trying worked.

There is also something about literally sitting up front that I think got encoded socially. I got comfortable being seen by authority figures. I was not naturally some fearless extrovert; there are later chapters where I am hiding and crying from embarrassment. But teachers were usually safe. Adults with expertise were usually interesting. I wanted their attention. I liked being the kid who had the answer. I liked being given responsibility. I liked when a teacher noticed I had understood the deeper thing instead of only doing the assignment. That probably helped produce both some of my best traits and some spectacular later miscalibrations about how institutions evaluate people.

[embed: class photos] [embed: report cards / teacher notes] [embed: pictures from technical pilot programs]

When I remember school now, I do not primarily remember the worksheets. I remember relationships to specific adults and the little expansions of the world they offered me. One teacher showed me a piece of equipment. Another let me take a question too seriously. Another taught me that a hard problem could be beautiful. Another eventually became someone I cared enough about that I cried over a picture with her in it. They were not interchangeable labor units delivering curriculum. They were part of the machinery that built me.

And while all of this was happening, Isaac was usually somewhere nearby. People were not only noticing me. They were noticing two of us.