A Texas Education

Tom Segady

Description

Tom Segady looks back at a life filled with adventures that defined his life, beginning with a fateful decision to hitchhike from Colorado to southern California.
This is a book about personal experience, but it is not a memoir. While experiencing threatening situations and circumstances that define one’s life, the author invites encounters with others to teach him important life’s lessons, while in fact he has been a college teacher for over thirty years. Learning—and unlearning—can come from anyone at any time. What is critical is remaining open to the encounters with others and seeing the joy in the act of experiencing. Life and learning are performance arts and the teacher often can only learn the art of teaching if she or he is constantly learning through the life-worlds of others. The stories in this book are all of real encounters, ranging from backstage encounters in universities that reveal the social world of academe, to lessons learned from anxiety-ridden sororities girls, to a transforming encounter with a Black man who grew from a child working at jobs such as a chicken-catcher at nights to support his family and became successful and wealthy, to the point that he was able to buy the movie theater that forced him to sit in the balcony when he was young. Virtually all of these stories emerge from a chance encounter with a strangely familiar culture—Texas.

Sujets

• Educators
• Humor
• Biography
• Learning
• Higher education
• Autobiography

Informations

• Publié par: iUniverse
• Date de parution: 28 février 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781663235459
• Langue: English

Extrait

A TEXAS EDUCATION
 
Learning (and Unlearning) In a Strangely Familiar Land
 
 
 
 
TOM SEGADY
 
 

 
A TEXAS EDUCATION
LEARNING (AND UNLEARNING) IN A STRANGELY FAMILIAR LAND
 
Copyright © 2022 Tom Segady.
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
 
 
 
 
iUniverse
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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
ISBN: 978-1-6632-3546-6 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6632-3547-3 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-6632-3545-9 (e)
 
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022902126
 
iUniverse rev. date: 03/22/2023
CONTENTS
Pre face
Chapter 1Texas Winter, 1968
Chapter 2Back to T exas
Chapter 3Drama in the Ivory T ower
Chapter 4The Definition of Insa nity
Chapter 5Strange Days of the Fami liar
Chapter 6A Lesson from Mike T yson
Chapter 7False Promises and Cooling Out
Chapter 8The Importance of Unlear ning
Epil ogue
Bibliogr aphy
 
 
 
 
 
 
For Harlon and Alfreddie Brooks. Thank you for teaching all o f us.
 
 
 
 
 
 
I would like to acknowledge all those who have been my teachers. Most of you do not know that you have been teachers. For those of you who do know, I offer special thanks and grati tude.
PREFACE
The Places You’ll Go: An Invitation
E ver since I was able to stand up in the backseat of my parents’ spacious Packard, staring at the Pacific Ocean in open-mouthed wonder, I asked what was on the other side. We had traveled from Colorado, where it was possible to see the opposite shore of even the largest lake.
“Japan,” my mother said with perfect assur ance.
Whenever we stopped at the beach, I would strain my eyes looking for Japan, but I never caught a glimpse of it. This might explain my chronic myopic understanding of world geography; my nearsightedness requiring glasses at seven years old was probably gen etic.
But I learned a lot from our travels across the American West. If you are a parent of young children, do not hesitate to take them to Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, or, even better, hundreds of lesser-known places far less touristed as soon as possible. As they age, they may not remember much from second grade, but they will always be able to recall the experience of seeing wonders that are beyond belief. Those you meet along the way who have seen those places will not fail to regale you with tales of seeing them for the first time. These people are generally friendly and will welcome you into their world of experiences and what they have learned from them. This, in turn, may engender the beginnings of trust in people generally, along with a desire to learn from them. For me, traveling, learning, and meeting people with experiences to share became melded into a single worldview and a vital way of kno wing.
But with some age and experience, travelers know this trust can have early limits, depending on circumstances. Trust becomes tempered by wariness, and this too can become part of the learning process. With even more experience, there’s almost an intuitive feel to sense whom to trust and which situations are safe. There is an old adage that the more one relies on something, the more likely it will be his or her undoing. Relying too heavily on “It’s worked before” can provide a valuable lesson to be learned: don’t get too c ocky.
All of us have found, by fits and starts, our own paths to understanding the world. The first step on your path may have begun with the first book you read. Instantly, one book comes to mind for me: a book by the famous Dr. Seuss. The memory always conjures up an irresistible urge to go exploring. Dr. Seuss wrote Oh, the Places You’ll Go! late in his life. During car rides, I often found myself alternately glued to the earlier works by Dr. Seuss and the changing scene out the large windows. Whole new possibilities seemed to open up right before my eyes.
It might seem strange to pair Dr. Seuss with the even more famous Dr. Albert Einstein. But Einstein constantly emphasized that it was imagination that triggered creative and productive thought. Imagination and a sense of openness to understanding the world in different ways seem to be our shared destiny, to the degree we want to venture out.
That happened to me at an early point. Based on my happy experiences in traveling as a child, there were few places I thought were completely off-limits. Coming from the West, I never thought of Texas as being part of the West but did think of it as a place never to see. I had seen enough—every medium you could name caused me to magnify the image of Texas as unsafe and to be avoided at all costs. Racism and bigotry were woven into the very fabric of Texas’s culture. For those of us of a certain age, Dallas and the assassination of President Kennedy will be inextricably linked for as long as we live. Traveling to—or even through—a place like Texas was out of the question. I had seen enough on televi sion.
So it might be a surprise to learn that I have been a professor at a Texas university for the past thirty years. What is more surprising to me, however, is that much of my education occurred after my receiving all my college degrees. I barely made it over the low hurdles that a traditional high school education offered a middle-class white male, preferring to travel, whenever possible, along paths that were rarely even acknowledged as existing by most of my teenage peers. These paths began as rather feeble attempts to find interesting geography—both intellectual and physical. Since then, my travels have taken me to India to teach and do research and to Europe—primarily Germany—during a long period spent pursuing my dissertation under the auspices of a generous Fulbright award. I’ve traveled through much of the United States and Canada, and all of this has served to increase yearning for more travel and adventures. I am justifiably proud that all of these travels have been with a backpack and little itinerary. There may be some value in taking sponsored, guided tours, but that value is something I haven’t discovered. Somewhere, stored away in some too-long-neglected trunk in a forgotten corner, is the badly worn first backpack that accompanied me—and possibly saved my life—during a freezing winter in one land that, reasonably enough at the time, I never had wanted to see: T exas.
CHAPTER 1 Texas Winter, 1968
T he way I saw it, I had plenty of reasons to go. I was eighteen, just out of high school. I hadn’t read much in high school, but I just recently had read Kerouac’s On the Road , the ultimate road-trip novel. In high school, I would sneak off to find a corner in the school library to read Catcher in the Rye . Holden Caulfield was my hero. The book portrayed a teenage rebel; in fact, Holden has often been characterized as a teenage rebel icon. I liked the idea of being a rebel but not so much an icon. Icons were in a category of things I wanted to question. I had a backpack and a little money. Back in 1968, if you had an opposable thumb, you could hitch rides to anywhere from Colo rado.
But none of that was the reason I wanted to hitch all the way to Southern California. It was the middle of a Colorado winter. Colorado Springs was freezing and had been in that state for weeks. Somehow, I had acquired a minimal understanding of weather and geography but assumed if I traveled south far enough, it would be much warmer. Then, if I headed south and west, I could be in Southern California and with luck, in maybe twenty-four hours. It sounded like a good plan.
Even as I started, I knew there would be times when I thought the trip was crazy. All good trips begin like that, or at least they sh ould.
New Mexico was an enchanted land that I loved. It was also just as cold, at the time, as Colorado. Still, my plan, such as it was, took me through eastern New Mexico, which was perilously close to Texas. I had sworn years ago never to venture into Texas for any reason. Dallas had murdered my beloved president. There were rumors of places in Texas where there were still lynchings, and it seemed no one there would tolerate anyone who was a hippie—and hippies were the ones who were hitchhikers. I didn’t think I looked like a hippie, but I was certainly a bona fide hitchh iker.
But how bad could it be if that journey would last just a day or two? If someone gave me a ride that just touched along the Texas border but avoided Dallas, I could still be safe and warm. Maybe someone would pick me up in Colorado and head south, and at worst we would dip into Texas for a few miles. We would be traveling at night, and I would wake up in Arizona in a day or two—possibly even in California. In those days, possible was synonymous with li kely .
So, late in the afternoon on a freezing January day, I headed south. The one advantage the cold brought with it was sympathy—people would stop for you (during