When I was a very young child, my mother worked in the education system as part of the administration staff at a local preschool. I was swept up in the education system from the moment I started preschool at the age of three. Since then, I could never get away from it. My daily schedule was dominated by the eight hours a day, five days a week spent locked up in those kiddie prisons. Nights and weekends were largely occupied by homework and studying to keep my precious grades steady.
And even when I wasn’t actively in school or doing homework, my parents’ interaction with education remained a constant presence in my life. I watched my mother go back to college and start an elementary school teaching career when I was in high school. I watched my father get a job at a university a few blocks away from the college I attended. I listened to them both talk endlessly about work, about their expectations when they were first hired and their experiences on the other side of the school system’s invisible bars.
And while I had many bittersweet bouts of sickness, there were miraculous deliverances of fresh snow on the New York City streets, and students were granted yearly reprieves that marked the end of each chapter of their education, they all came with a catch. They all came with the knowledge that it was only temporary, and I would be dragged back to school in due time.
In short, education and the school system have been the centerpiece of my life up until now. Almost two long decades in which every aspect of my being, from background details I can barely remember to the day-to-day routines at the forefront of my current life, revolves around education and the school system. And now it’s all about to grind to a sudden halt. In a month, I’ll have attended the last formal class I’ll ever take. In six weeks, I’m going to walk the stage at Barclays Center and be handed the last diploma I’ll ever earn. I’ve spent so long tethered to my education and the school system, but now those binds are about to snap. I… don’t know how to feel about that yet. I do know that I’ve been shaped as a woman, as an autistic person, and as a writer by the time I’ve served in the education system.
The point where my journey as a writer began depends on who you ask. It’s no surprise that a mother who’s deeply entrenched in the public school system will prepare her children for school as early as possible, and my mother was typical in this regard. I was raised to be a voracious reader– Mom says that I first learned how to read when I was two years old, but it’s more likely that I was just under four. I broke up the monotonous world of sterile classrooms, of plastic smiles on tired faces, of bland School FoodTM whose origins were a mystery even to the people serving it, through stories.
One minute I would be in a stuffy, loud, classroom in mid-June that’s overly humid because the air conditioner doesn’t work. I’d be staring at the walls, where all the clocks are some variety of incorrect but I can’t keep track of how because each one is different, and my oversensitive hands can’t handle wearing watches so I have no idea what time it is. I’d be tuning out the voices of my teachers, who I had nothing against and honestly I liked most of them, but sometimes I really could not stand to hear one more word about the two digit multiplication that I’d already mastered but not every student has, and in the absence of an individualized education the class has to cater to the students who aren’t quite there yet.
But then I would crack open a book, and suddenly I would be in the tranquil forests of Narnia. I would see crisp, dry snow on the ground and find myself halfway between imagining how it would feel beneath my sandals, and actually feeling it despite consciously knowing it is not there. I would stand on the other side of an invisible wall, ready to smack Edmund across the face for taking it so personally that Lucy was right about the wardrobe and he was wrong, as if that was such a big deal compared to the fact that there’s a magical world in your closet. All the while I would be able to do nothing, say nothing, influence nothing, only watching the drama unfold as these strangers lived their fascinating lives. Every book was an adventure, a journey to a paper world where I’d see new places, meet new people, and maybe, just maybe, start to understand how other people think. Each book was, to my elementary school mind, proof that magic is real.
Literature began as my primary form of edutainment, but it quickly became much more than that. My mother, and the books she raised me on, taught me to be curious about the world around me. They taught me that learning can be fun– not just in the sterile way that classrooms feebly attempt to turn lessons into games and paint over math worksheets with bright colors, but truly enjoyable in a way inherent to the process of experiencing a new thing for the first time and taking it apart to understand how it works. They taught me to question the status quo, to not take “the way things are'' for granted. They taught me that good people come in a vast array of forms, that just because I don’t understand why someone does the things they do doesn’t mean they are malicious or stupid. And all of this would be sanctioned by the education system which, in its subservience to having its checkboxes checked, its metrics maxed, and its test scores raised, loves nothing more than insatiable Belles with their noses in a book. Literature and education were intrinsically tied together, and reading was the one issue on which the school system’s goals and my goals aligned. I wanted to read, and the school system wanted an eager learner who would be motivated to keep their reading scores up. This childhood, as a voracious reader nudged forward by the schools that sought money from overachieving students, would become the foundation on which I grew to become an English major later in life.
The school system’s influence on my personal life was just as strong as its influence on my professional development, and this was largely my parents’ doing. From my first days toddling into Kindergarten, my parents have always put a strong emphasis on my grades. In my wild young imagination, I once believed that they were subservient to the numbers, almost as if seeing a 100 on a sheet of paper might appease the Old Ones and they would be spared in the apocalypse. As I grew older, so did my brother and my parents, and the standards around my grades shifted and changed to better suit us all. Middle school was an awful slog because the school system was finally starting to take the Internet seriously, and it came up with a hellish software my middle school used that granted parents constant, real-time surveillance of students’ grades. College has been relatively tame, because the line between “good grades” and “bad grades” was drawn by LIU long before I set foot in the university, and neither my parents nor I had the energy to fight over moving it. No matter the form my parents’ standards took, the sentiment behind those standards never went away, and it centered around the seasonal report cards.
Report card day was always a day of dread in my family. My brother and I would stand before Mom and Dad, the emperors of the household, and present our report cards to be judged. Every blemish, every slightly lower number, every less-than-glowing comment written by the teachers, needed to be defended to our parents’ satisfaction lest there be dire consequences. We could be grounded for weeks or months, trapped in our tiny apartment with no access to the toys and games we’d use to entertain ourselves, if a report card wasn’t absolutely stellar.
On one of these many harrowing report card days my mother said to me, “Your education is your job. Since you and Nathaniel do not have money, your grades are the currency with which you buy the things that you value in life.” To a generous interpreter, my mother was trying to say that doing well in school would further the development of my brother and I as people and professionals. Getting good grades will get us into good colleges and grant us connections that will get us what we want in the future. And I’m sure that’s the sentiment my mother wanted us to get from the analogy.
To a cynic, comparing a child’s grades to the money that adults use to buy the things they need means that children are required to prove their worthiness to exist and live happily just as much as adults are. Just like adults who fail to prove their worth through sufficient income or commercial revenue find themselves abandoned on the street, children who fail to prove their worth through sufficient grades will find themselves emotionally battered. They will be constantly at arms with their parents, their teachers, and every other adult in their life, a brutal lopsided war that is impossible for such children to win.
Whichever the interpretation, the underlying message was clear, and an unhealthy relationship between our status in school and our emotional-well being was permanently seared into our hearts. Nathaniel and I needed to have good grades. It wasn’t an option, it wasn’t a negotiation. It simply had to happen. Our souls quickly became tethered to the institution, even when we were physically absent. Our path to peace and happiness, our very worth as children of the Ceballos family, was permanently tied to our performance in school.
Naturally, an institution as closely linked to my soul as school also had a strong influence on my identity. My mother says I was diagnosed with PDD-NOS all the way back in 2001, before the Pervasive Developmental Disorders got condensed into Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Seeing that I was barely a toddler at the time, I have no memory of my initial diagnosis, nor would I have been capable of understanding it even if I did. What I do remember is being pulled aside for Occupational Therapy and Speech Therapy sessions with a few other kids in my class. I remember finding it difficult to connect emotionally with most other students, but noting that it happened to be significantly easier to do so with the other OT/ST kids. I remember receiving extra time on state tests, sequestered in a completely different room from the rest of my class. I remember receiving a paraprofessional to help me with organizational skills. I remember learning about my diagnosis not from my parents or from a doctor, but by reading a copy of my Individualized Education Plan that had been left out on a desk one night when I was in middle school. The diagnosis, simply labeled “Autism”, was written in the corner on the third page, in a space reserved for mental and physical conditions relevant to my IEP.
Instantly my identity as an autistic person became centered around school. I needed to treat my developmental disability and improve my ability to perform daily functions (or to learn how to mask my autism around neurotypical people, if you are as cynical as I was in middle school), so I was taken away from my normal classes to take OT/ST sessions at school. My brain didn’t work the same as most people, so I had a difficult time making friends at school and found myself drawn to people like me. Since I had a learning disability, the school deemed it necessary to grant me testing accommodations to even the playing field during the big state exams. While reading that IEP in which I first learned of my diagnosis, an ominous line casually dropped in the middle of a page caught my eye. “We considered placing Alexia in the Special Education class, but decided against it because her academic abilities are too high for the class.”
This line terrified me. It gave the significance of my autism diagnosis, which I was just learning about at the time, a crushing weight. This autism thing wasn’t just a footnote in my greater identity. It was real, and it was a deciding factor in my fate as a student. I was teetering on the edge of a drastic change to the path of my education and from there the path of my life.
And because the path of my education was already so important to me, my identity as an autistic person became important to me largely because of its nearly catastrophic consequences on my status as a student.
In short, the education system has been the lens through which I see the world. It has been the perspective through which I built my philosophy. It has been the medium through which I have proven my value to society. It has been the source of many of my insecurities. It has been the place where I learned most about myself, and molded my identity into the woman I am now. Education has been nothing less than my world up to this point. It has influenced everything about me, including the way I write.