College 101 | David McCoullough Jr. | TEDxYale

hi everybody it's a a great honor to be here and to be included in such a distinguished lineup of speakers and I'm grateful to be included and grateful to to the great people backstage who've worked so hard to make this happen where to begin when I was a boy before I learned how to read and write I would tiptoe sometimes into my father's office and I would secretly roll a piece of paper into his typewriter and I would like Bugs Bunny when he sat down at the piano I would poise my fingers above the keys and then I would go I would nnnnn and asterisk gastrous and seven seven seven seven mmm space ll QQQ and fill the whole page and then I would bring the paper down to my father and I would say what does it say and he would take it and he'd look at it and stern look on his face and he'd look up at me and back at the paper and up at me again and pretty soon a smile would emerge in his eyes would widen he said did you write this I see yes I did I said what does it say he says why I can't believe this four score and seven years ago uh that meant the world to me then it's fifty years later in a few weeks I have a book coming out he hasn't read it hasn't seen it I'm very eager for him to tell me what it says Hey On June 1st 2012 so 22 months ago or so I stood before a group of high school kids whom I knew pretty well and liked very much and gave a commencement speech when I came down off the stage my life suddenly changed very much and mild mannered quiet English teacher probably would have been played by somebody like Jimmy Stewart and the movie maybe had an opportunity to write a book and I didn't know if I could write a book but it just seemed too exciting a chance possibility opportunity to turn down and I got to work and well it's going to be out a few days I did not though in the book include a footnote about some of my own high school experiences and I'd like to share as a tribute to a very important teacher to me an experience I had when I was a freshman in high school I was 13 years old when I started high school and woefully intimidated about all I was going to face we were new to the town I knew no one at the school except nice mr. Mayhew who would drive by every morning on his his way to school he was the chairman of the math department there and he would wave to me and I would wave to him and I would want walk the street to the bus stop and he was gone around the corner and I discovered very quickly that high school was hard science was hard English was hard they expected you to know symbolism and then they handed me Shakespeare in English wasn't even in English Spanish was another language altogether history was easy history was easy and then they discovered that for me it was too easy those days so they said Dave I write independent project we want you to read these five books and write a 30 page paper on Teddy Roosevelt and trust-busting I was a freshman I scored worst of all the worst by far was for me mathematics Algebra one with mr. McCarthy was impossible I was the very portrait of incomprehension I would trudge into class I would find my seat in the back corner and I would open my notebook and in the margin just to the left of the red line in the notebook I would write 60 59 58 57 all the way down to zero and as mr. McCarthy would turn to the board and do problems I would look at the clock and just cross out the minutes until they were over and I would trudge home from school and my mother would say how is school dear and I would say lousy and I grew ever more forlorn and nowhere is they is there a target more vulnerable to advice than a forlorn 9th grader my father said well you're just gonna have to work harder which is not what I wanted to hear I could slam my head against the wall all day algebra to me it seemed like a code designed to keep me out once once math went out of numbers and into letters what's that about I mean x times two equals six well what's X well X is X what if she wanted it to be three say free but anyway it was misery it was misery it was misery my father said well you're just gonna have to work harder my mother said we'll go talk to the teacher and then my uncle Tommy stepped in every family needs to have an uncle Tommy uncle Tommy was Peter Pan uncle tommy was Zorba the Greek he was Henry David Thoreau he was unlettered but in his way a genius the genius for happiness and he took me aside he's a David David come here let me give you a letter advice in Massachusetts the word here has two syllables he yeah Kenny yeah I should one quick story to illustrate what the kind of guy tommy was there are nine hundred and fifty seventh this is sort of a quick one we used to my brothers and I used to go with Tommy and just sort of skunk around we'd get in his car and we go try to chase up some trouble we'd go to the beach and drill to build a driftwood fort and we'd make a driftwood fire and we don't put a can of beans and we'd spend the night there things like that all the time on one of our skunking around expeditions we all alerted him to a need to go to the bathroom and so he said okay fine he pulled over at the little airport and parked and we all got out of the car I have two brothers so all four of us get out of the car and we're walking in to the bathroom and tommy was he was his feet were always like this and he walked like this and so he comes walking into the men's room like this and he steps up to the urinal and pulls his hand out of his pocket to address logistics and as the hand came out a dime went flying it was like one of the slow-motion moments in a movie where you know you try to dive to catch the time before it goes into the well the dime went directly into the urinal there it said and Tommy stood there looking at it and we all watched and thought no is he going to do he looked at it and then he reached into his back pocket and he pulled out his wallet and he took a dollar from the wallet and dropped that into and then he reached in and took them both out it it wasn't worth reaching in for a dime so so when that guy gives a kid tommy was he was my parents generation but he was our age when tommy gives advice you listen and tom you said to me come here come here I'll give you some advice get F's in September I said what you said get F's in September that way in June when you get the D everybody celebrates and of all of all the advice I got about math that made the most sense to me so I'm in the back of the class counting off the minutes and the inevitable quiz arrives and I got an F there's my F in September the tests arrived I got another F another quiz F and I'm thinking oh this is so miserable this is awful maybe maybe I'll get a D in June and the report card came out in October and I really didn't want to look at it too closely but I finally snuck a look and there was algebra one mr. McCarthy D D I was the beneficiary of a fraud this this was often I suddenly I was cast into this terrible moral quandary I mean what do I do about this this was fraud but it's to my benefit and so finally I went to see mr. McCarthy I'd never spoken to him before and I said mr. McCarthy I'm David McCullough I'm in your 930 clods I know you are I said there's there's been some mistake and he said what's that I said well on my report card it said I have a D and he said to me you're the first kid in sixties when it was a thirty seven years of teaching who's come to me to complain about a grade that was too high I said well I you know I failed every quiz you've given me said you know what you're a good kid don't worry about it my daughter tells me today and that the expression I would have used then is swag on so I'm going to swag on so I thought okay got my D I'm alright and September FS became in class October FS which became November FS but the report cards kept saying D and I thought no I may be a good kid I guess but I'm a horrible math student this isn't right but okay I'll live with it until I learned in April that if one passes Algebra one one is then compelled to go to algebra two and I thought oh no the misery continues the humiliation it was just horrifying and I was cast immediately into it yet another horrible funk in which I was coming to specialize in that chapter of my life and I didn't know what I was going to do about it and so I went back to mr. McCarthy and I said mr. McCarthy yeah I appreciate these DS but I'm fearing what's going to happen to me next year so don't worry about it don't worry about don't worry about tell you if you pass the test the final exam you'll get to D you'll learn it you'll be fine okay well final exam time came and it was a scantron it was a fill in the bubble test and I looked at it and I looked at the questions and it was all to me still after a year sitting in the back of the room watching mr. McCarthy's back as he solved problems and I wondered what the heck the hieroglyphics were about i sat down and I said okay and I just went B C D D F be sort of like when I was writing for my father I just didn't matter I didn't know I passed a path that I new know algebra whatsoever I didn't want to confess as much to my parents but they read my mood pretty quickly over the course of the summer and I said you know mom pop I'm going to be in algebra 2 and I don't know anything about algebra and there was discussion about maybe buying me a textbook and that I could teach myself off or this or that and then mention was made of mr. Mayhew down the street nice mr. Mayhew who drives by and waves at me and I would see him in the high school from time to time he was mr. Macarthy my first-year teacher was really old he was probably 60 mr. May he was merely old he was 50 in there and he wore baggy corduroys and he would come down the hall and sort of build business fashion I I knew he recognized me I didn't think I knew that was one of those McCulloch kids I don't think he knew who I was particularly so we called him up and I said mr. Mayhew I'm David McCullough I lived down the street yeah I know who you are and I've been having trouble with alder reason yes I know you have I thought well how do you know that and I was wondering if maybe you might be willing to tutor me this was in August and he said yeah sure come on down and I said okay when would be a good time he said now I thought he was going to say a week from Thursday so I get on my bike and I pedaled down to mr. Mayhew's house and he met me at the kitchen door and to be I was then 14 to be 14 on a beautiful August day with summer coming quickly to a close the last thing you want to do is sit with the math teacher and be tutored and reminded how ignorant you are and how little you know and it was embarrassing humiliating I come up the steps and he says lo and shows me through the kitchen into the living room and I sat down on the couch and he pulled out a piece of paper and he wrote a problem on the piece of paper and he said let's see how you do with that one and I looked at it and I looked up at him and in looking up at him I saw on the far wall a picture of four Grumman Wildcats flying in formation and I loved World War two airplanes I could tell you everything about every World War two airplane World War two airplane was the coolest thing only cooler plane than the Grumman Wildcat was of course the p-51 Mustang which was the coolest plane of all anyway I look up and I said grumman wildcat and he looked at me said do you know those planes I said sure and I jumped up and I went over to look at it closer and he came over and he picked up as he pointed he said that one right there that's me what so that's me and in pointing to I also noticed that he was missing his fingertips on one hand though all the finger tips were gone as they were shorter fingers and he said that's me right there I said mr. Mayhew what happened to your hand he said oh I I got shot I said you were shot he said yeah that's me right there I flew ground support at the Battle of Iwo Jima I fought above he said he wasn't bragging he was very modest guys I fought above Guadalcanal mr. May you nice mr. May who flew Wildcats he'd been at Iwo Jima he'd been at Guadalcanal he was soaked on then he said to me let's sit down it's important you learn this stuff and as if a switch was thrown cliches as if a switch was thrown suddenly I thought this guy a world war ii fighter pilot wounded in action thinks it's important for me to learn algebra and I thought okay I'm going to try so I sat down and he helped me along and I didn't get very far I tried and I tried and I tried and we had several sessions but I went to him two or three times a week for the several weeks before school began and on the first day of school I got my schedule and I look town to see algebra two and the teacher was mr. Mayhew I worked very hard that September and when the first test came along I got a D and I earned it it was a real D it wasn't it it was a real D and I'd earned it flash-forward decades and I'm now a teacher and I see dispirited kids all the time I see kids who are struggling and I see kids who have given up and I'm very thankful to mr. Mayhew for engaging me with him showing me that he's a human being showing me the respect that it's important that I learned algebra I didn't care about algebra but he cared about algebra and he said it's important for me to know it perked me right up today one sees so many parents eager for their children to enjoy all the cultures plumbs that rather than an anxious about it that rather than inspire them to climb the plum tree rather than teaching them how to climb the plum tree they go by a stepladder or they reach up to a branch and pull it lower for the kid to get it or they take him to an easier tree and it's so frustrating as a teacher to see that kids today need to struggle they need sometimes to scrape along the bottom and then when they succeed and they will they'll realize it's their own doing and that they got it themselves that's my talk thank you very much you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 80,610

Keywords: ted talk, TEDxTalks, tedx, tedx talks, ted, Personal education, Education, ted x, English, United States, ted talks, tedx talk

Id: d-virvBetTM

Length: 17min 44sec (1064 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 19 2015