"Lizard" by Pedro Arizpe

When I saw this incredible graphic story by Pedro Arizpe of Portsherry, I flashed on my own childhood. I was born in New York state and went to school there through second grade. The curriculum at that time in New York valued reading and writing skills over math, which was planned to come later. But when we moved to Florida, the state approached math skills first, and I was totally lost. Having no foundation, teachers would just explain the same thing to me over and over, sometimes raising their voices as though yelling at someone who speaks a foreign language. No one bothered to assess why I could not grasp what they were trying to drill into my head. There was no foundational learning for me, I just had to jump in and pretend that, yes, of course, the answer is lizard, when what I was really screaming in my head was "How did you get LIZARD?" When you are a child, you don't know what you don't know. As an adult looking back on this, I see it clearly and I would love to go back in time and tell the entire school administration, "What the eff are you thinking? You call this is teaching? This is just creating trauma and a crisis of self-confidence."

What was most galling was that my New York-taught reading comprehension and writing skills were a few grade levels ahead of where they were in Florida and the other students in my class were embarrassingly bad at reading or writing, but no one seemed to care about that. To me, the students were bad, but for the teachers, they were where they should have been given the curriculum. Teachers saw I scored consistently high in English, but they weren't looking to those metrics for any measure of my general intelligence or understanding. As far as they were concerned, I was a sorry, slow, and maybe even special-needs learner, which of course was not the case at all. But I was treated like I was. So math class--and any extra "tutoring" I got--always ended up looking exactly like the story below...

Pedro, thank you so much for showing this so explicitly and giving it a name: INSTITUTIONAL NEGLIGENCE.

https://portsherry.com/comic/lizard/