In my effort to do some summer reading that doesn't involve education, learning or leadership, I picked up two books this weekend. As some of you know, I love biographies & autobiographies. I have read hundreds of them, they have ranged from Che to Disney. There is something about the stories of people and their journeys in life that I find fascinating. This summer, I decided to combine two of my passions, music and biographies. As you can see, Garcia: An American Life by Blair Jackson and Life by Keith Richards were my choices. I love the Grateful Dead and I think Jerry Garcia led such an intriguing life full of sorrow and joy. The thing that interested me most about Keith Richards was his chronic addiction, terrible relationship with Mick Jagger and his mysterious public image. So why am I writing about this on a blog about education? Sixteen pages into the Garica book, it talks about his experience at school.
Jerry moved to Menlo Park (not NJ, outside San Franciso-Jeff) when he was ten and was there through early adolescence, from part of sixth grade through eighth grade, which he had to repeat because of poor grades. "I was too smart for school," he said in 1984, a chuckle in his voice. "I knew it; I don't know why anyone else didn't know it. I went to school; I just didn't do any work. It's not that I had anything against school or even learning. The point was I was reading things and I had my own education, my own program going, and I was really bored with school. I already had things decided for myself. I had things I wanted to do, I had plans, and I had my own interests and my own rate of learning and I couldn't see slowing down or stopping and wasting my time for schoolwork."
Sound familiar? He had his own plans, own interests and own rate of learning that he didn't want impeded by the work at school. So then, what kept the future leader of one of the highest grossing rock bands in history and someone that current business gurus call a "business visionary" in school?
"I had incredible luck with teachers," he said "I had a couple of teachers that really opened up the world for me. I was a reader, luckily, because I was sickly as a kid. I spent so much time in bed because I was sick, so I read; that was my entertainment. That separated me a lot from everybody else. then when I got down to the Peninsula, I had a couple of teachers that were very, very radical, absolutely far-out. I was lucky."
Well, maybe they just let him play guitar all day or experiment with LSD. How useful is that in higher education or society? Well, Jerry?
In interviews, Jerry often cited a teacher at Menlo-Oaks Middle School named Dwight Johnson for broadening his outlook on life and learning. "He's the guy who turned me into a freak," he said. "He was my seventh grade teacher and he was a wild guy. He had an old MC TC, and he had a Vincent Black Shadow motorcycle, the fastest-accelerating motorcycle at the time and he was out there. He opened lots and lots of doors for me. He's the guy that got me reading deeper than Science Fiction(Ray Bradbury was Jerry's favorite writer). He taught me that ideas are fun."
Ahh, the relationship. Knowing the student, accepting their thoughts, plans and ideas and pushing them in the right directions and they do it because......they trust you. Jonathan Kozol said today at the Constructing Modern Knowledge 11 Conference "The most important thing is the intimacy of the bond between the child & teacher"
It was through the influence of teachers like Dwight Johnson, too, that Jerry was admitted to what he called "a fast-learner program" in school, sponsored by Stanford University in nearby Palo Alto. "So I had the advantage of this elaborate accelerated program at school and a couple of far-out teachers who were willing to answer any questions and turn me on to where to go-"If you want to find more, this is what you read."
I am grateful (pun intended) that Jerry's teachers were able to fulfill his amazing creative, artistic and inquisitive needs. I will think of them a lot in the upcoming year.
This is from the last Grateful Dead show, Jerry would die a month later.
So Many Roads
The life of a complex man, I am looking forward to finishing the story this summer.
Keep on Truckin'
Jeff
Dwight Johnson was my teacher also, many years later, at a boarding school near Santa Barbara. He had moved on to Alfa-Romeos but was still exactly what Jerry said, a different kind of adult that talked to us straight and opened a lot of doors, talking about philosophy, religion, psychology and drugs. He was extremely proud of knowing Jerry but at the time had not heard those comments from Jerry's interviews. He also told us he lived across the street from Ken Kesey in Menlo Park and left his paintings with him when he went to study in France (just before the acid tests) and never saw them again. Fun stories but the truth is Dwight Johnson changed my life too.
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