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Day 10: Turnaround — How flunking Algebra got me into college

Posted on October 10, 2013 Written by Carl

If it hadn’t been for Algebra II, my life would have been very different. For years, I had scraped by, making D’s and F’s in all the important subjects throughout the year, but always managing to slip through with a C or D at the end. I was a regular Houdini at report card time, but I had run out of tricks.

From Day 1 in Algebra, II, I was lost. I couldn’t pull off any miracles because I didn’t know Algebra I. And even though I had begun doing my homework, I just couldn’t figure it out. By Christmas, I was seeking help from better students, but it was too late. Finally, sometime in the late spring, with five straight F’s and well on my way to a sixth, I just quit. The class was going over homework, and all I had was a blank sheet of paper.

“Why Mr. Carter, are you just going to give up?” asked Mrs. Heard. All I could answer was yes. I would have to try again in summer school.

I’d never understood factoring or multiplication and division of fractions. I didn’t know any of the theorems. In ninth grade, Algebra I, my teacher had been a family friend. That wasn’t unusual in our very tight society; I had known many of my teachers at Woodlawn for years through church.

But in this case, Algebra I was in the final period of the day, and I was on the tennis team. At least two or three days a week, the old friend let me skip class to go practice. He passed me through with a C or D because he wasn’t about to flunk a Carter. He had been a classmate of my oldest sister, and his younger brother was a schoolmate of mine.

So I got to Algebra II and Banks not knowing anything about Algebra I. And finally, after all those years, I had actually failed at something.

Summer school was better. It was a small class, with both an experienced teacher and a student teacher, who had plenty of time for individual instruction. Things began to click, and I passed with a B that I’d actually earned, for a change.

Now, I realized, I had an even bigger problem. With my grades, it was unlikely that I would get into even a third-rate college. Dad was pressing me to look at some kind of trade school. The first day of my senior year, I sat down with the counselor, and we looked at my grades.

“This is not a good record,” said the counselor. “It may be too late. But if you can make A’s and B’s this year and make over 21 on the ACT, you may have a chance of getting in – somewhere. I think you can do it.”

I thought I could do it too, and for the first time in my life, I took notes in class. I studied. I did every page of every homework assignment. I finally had a decent social life, but I didn’t let it get in the way. I was figuring it out.

It may seem ironic that it was my worst subject that turned me around, but if I had pulled off my usual end-of-year miracle D, I wouldn’t have gone to the see the counselor and would be changing tires somewhere.

I got my A’s and B’s and scored 24 on the ACT on my first try; my lowest score was a 22 – in math, of course. Auburn still wasn’t interested, and they suggested a year or two at a junior college. But Alabama said yes, I could come – on probation. Their computer gave me a less than 20 percent chance of surviving, but they offered me a chance, and I would take it.

Day 9: On the other side of the pain, I began to find myself

Posted on October 9, 2013 Written by Carl

I lost myself in 1966. That was the year Mother died, after a prolonged and losing fight with cancer. She spent her last days alternating between home and East End Hospital, taking nourishment from a glucose bottle, passing waste into a colostomy bag and vomiting into a little bucket. At the end, her stomach was bloated and she weighed maybe 80 pounds. I was 12, and didn’t exactly have the emotional tools to deal with it.

Courtesy of Karla Archer. Please visit her fascinating blog, www.livingthelifefantastic.com

That’s all I can say about that chapter in my life, except that I fell through the cracks. Depressed, lonely, making lousy grades and pretty much friendless. My social skills were lousy anyway, and I wasn’t much fun to be around.

Now, at Banks, I had a chance to try again. I didn’t really see it coming. We never do. But I had bottomed out, and the depression (for which I didn’t have a word) seemed to lift a little. I was a junior. The new kid, but it was the first year zoning was enforced, so there were a lot of new kids. That made it easier. I’d been living in Roebuck for a well over a year, and had already made a few friends there.

It didn’t have everything I wanted. I had always dreamed of being a Warbler – a member of the boy’s chorus at Woodlawn, which was well known for its Minstrel Shows, which ended with desegregation, because white boys wearing Al Jolsen blackface makeup and pretending to be ignorant blacks no longer had a place. The Minstrels were replaced by the Hobo Show, a thinly disguised version of the same thing, but it never felt right. It was like the Warblers were trying to hold onto something whose time had passed.

At any rate, while I had passed muster on the Warblers tryoffs going into my junior year, I would never be a Warbler. I never endured the Machine (the ultra-secret initiation ritual). Instead, I became a member of Banks’s Chancellors, which were a fine group of fellows themselves, but nondescript and devoid of tradition by comparison to the storied Warblers.

I was OK with that. I began to look for my own niche. The “approved” pursuit of the Carters was music – Mom taught piano and oldest sister Linda was an exceptionally fine pianist and organist who has spent her career in sacred music. More to the point for the short term, she had been the accompanist for the Warblers, making me a legacy.

Prom night. I was finally figuring out who I was.

The truth is that I had little talent or interest in music at the time. The love of music returned later. Despite years of piano lessons by Mom’s best friend Myrtle Jones Steele, I learned next to nothing. That’s how it works when you never practice. Nor could I sing. I could stay on pitch, but there was no tonal quality. Singing wasn’t our thing; even the gifted Linda didn’t have a great voice. It was on the keyboards that her talent showed.

So I sang with the Chancellors. And I got involved with the drama group – an extension of my work during earlier years with with Birmingham Children’s Theater. That crossed school boundaries, so I already knew some people in the Banks theater group.

Most importantly, though, I signed up to write for Banks Notes, the school newspaper, and was named editorial writer. One of the other writers was a fellow named Rick, with whom I ushered for a dollar an hour at the old Plaza Theatre at Roebuck Shopping Center. It had been the summer when Catch-22 was showing on our only screen, and Rick was obsessed with the gory scene where a guy gets shot up in an airplane and his guts spill all over the place. Every time that scene came on, Rick found a way to be in the theater watching. He went on to become a famous horror novelist. Go figure. There will be more about Rick later.

I was discovering quickly that my future had nothing to do with music. At my core, I was a writer. I had realized this at some level for a while, but I hadn’t begun to believe in myself. The previous year at Woodlawn, I had one of those special teachers who make a difference. Her name was Elizabeth Woodard, and I don’t believe she was even at Woodlawn for long, but she saw something in my essays that made me worth an investment on her part. She laughed at the humor, and felt the pain the darker ones. There were a lot of those, because it was a dark time in my life. She read them aloud to other teachers in the Teacher’s Lounge, and they would compliment me on it when they saw me in class or in the hallways. It was pretty much the only time anybody had an encouraging word for me, and I held onto it.

Mrs. Woodard invested in me when everybody else had given up, and I carried that seed of confidence with me to Banks, finally beginning to understand who I was. I wouldn’t be another Carter as the world knew us.

I would make my living as a storyteller, and I always have.

Day 8: Forged signatures and failure, and the chance for a clean start

Posted on October 8, 2013 Written by Carl

I was never a good student. I was fine up until the third grade, but my fourth grade teacher, Eloise Long – the strictest of teachers by many standards – had one quirk: She didn’t assign written homework.

Courtesy of Karla Archer. Please visit her fascinating blog, www.livingthelifefantastic.com

To be sure, I learned my multiplication tables. It was impossible to escape Miss Long’s class without knowing them. She had this submarine-shaped thing that let her flip through the combinations while we stood there in front of our classmates, one by one, and called out the answers. In those days, it was perfectly acceptable to ridicule a child, and Miss Long didn’t hesitate to apply the epithet of “bump on a log.”

But there was no written homework. I liked not having any.

Then there was fifth grade, and Miss Holt’s class, and there was homework again. But not for me. I simply didn’t do it. Nor did I do it in the sixth, seventh or eighth grade. My teachers would send home notes for dad to sign (Mother died when I was in the sixth grade – something I probably won’t write about in this series), but I had learned to forge his signature. I made excellent use of this talent.

Dad never saw the notes, and my teachers never knew why he didn’t seem to care that I was now making C’s and even D’s.

In high school, the F’s began to appear. Dad had to sign report cards, because he knew to expect one every six weeks. But by that time, I was a mess – a social misfit, depressed, flunking my way through school. It was impossible for me to imagine ever succeeding at anything.

We moved out to Roebuck after my freshman year, but I rode the bus to continue attending Woodlawn. It was my anchor. What I didn’t realize was that it was also a ball and chain pulling me down. Finally, the politicians and bureaucrats came to my rescue in the fall of 1970.

That was the year the school zones were finally enforced (a measure to accelerate desegregation), and I was forced to go to Banks. The mortal enemy. The cross town rivals. I was finally ripped away from the last vestiges of Woodlawn and Crestwood. Away from the endless chorus of disapproving voices and agony over my failure to measure up to what people expected of the Carters.

At Banks, nobody had heard of a Carter. I had to make my own way, and I began to make some new friends among a new crowd of people who didn’t know what a loser I had become. I started doing homework, and for the first time in four or five years, I began to believe in myself.

But I wasn’t home free yet. My biggest failure was dead ahead. We’ll talk about that tomorrow.