I learned the word “obsequious” from Steve Martin’s “Grandmother’s Song” off his 1977 album Let’s Get Small.

A couple years before that, I recall vividly looking up and reading about Beelzebub (which led to similar explorations of Mephistopheles) because I was listening to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” over and over.

However, at school in my English classes, I hated (no, loathed) our vocabulary textbooks, vocabulary homework, and vocabulary tests. Those tests, also, kept me a steady B student instead of my usual A’s in almost all of my classes.

I also hated and often avoided reading the books assigned in my English classes, but at home, I was reading every novel by Arthur C. Clarke and many popular science fiction works such as those by Niven and Pournelle.

And I was collection and reading 1000s of comic books, meticulously and with great joy.

Except for two years with my life-changing sophomore and junior year English teacher, Lynn Harrill (who was an early adopter of the National Writing Project practices), I had stereo-typically harsh and traditional English teachers throughout junior and high school.

Grade 8 was spent dutifully plowing through the grammar book—exercises and chapter tests. Grade 9 was diagramming sentences and then diagramming more sentences.

My senior year of high school, I sat in the room of an English teacher who literally wore a bun of grey hair and most of us found ourselves receiving inspiring grades on our essays (in bold red ink) such as A/F or B/F because the department had a detailed list of errors and point deductions.

A fragment or run-on sentence was an instant F on grammar (the bottom grade) as was 6 misspelled words.

Despite my highly literate (and mostly closeted) life at home, I graduated high school with a great deal of affection for Mr. Harrill but mostly hating English and planning to major in physics (making almost straight As in math and science classes).

Despite all that, five years later, I sat in Mr. Harrill’s room, replacing him as an English teacher. I had also discovered in the mean time I was a writer.

Mr. Harrill planted some important seeds, but even in his much more progressive class where we wrote essays instead of marching through grammar books, he was mostly canon-centric (telling me to stop reading science fiction and read Fitzgerald instead)—and, yes, those damn vocabulary books.

My career as an English teacher started in 1984 with me seeking ways to avoid many of those problematic practices that essentially were barriers to my discovering and embracing my literacy life as a teen.

Let me point out that my journey started with many problems as well; I had only a couple years of some modeling from Mr. Harrill and my teacher prep was mostly grounded in traditional assumptions about teaching and literacy. My student teaching also found me in two very traditional and harsh teachers’ classrooms.

But my heart told me to focus on my students, and my practice gradually centered student choice over imposing what Lou LaBrant aptly called “adult weariness” in 1949:

We must therefore be careful in criticizing the writing of the young, or in talking over poetry they enjoy, not to superimpose our own experience on them. The metaphor which seems stale or worn to us may be apt and new to them, and it is a happy circumstance that this is so. It is therefore not important that the figure which the student uses be new or unique to the adult; but it is of great necessity that the phrase express what the student really sees or believes and that he be made aware of the pitfalls of the too easily accepted phrase. On the other hand, we should not, under the guise of developing literary standards, merely pass along adult weariness. (pp. 275-276)

All of formal schooling is too often driven by that “adult weariness”—but especially literacy instruction, which is often very traditional and conservative.

Take for example a couple articles highlighted in a recent email from ASCD:

• TEACHER VOICE: Big mistake — Schools are swapping out Shakespeare, Chaucer and Dickens for Kendrick Lamar and Taylor Swift
• Teachers banned slang after hearing too much ‘rizz’: A helpful lesson or ‘anti-academic’?

Even as a still-evolving critical teacher, I grounded my poetry unit in the songs of R.E.M., and we never banned slang but instead examined how words came to be and why language evolved (taking a descriptive grammar stance).

At the core of why I find the “science of reading” (SOR) movement so problematic is that “adult weariness” is a driving force of the reductive view of reading, literacy, and text characterizing SOR ideology.

As more scholars and teachers are noting, SOR defaults to a singular view of literacy and reading resulting in a scripted approach to literacy instruction.

The consequence of this reductive view of reading and teaching will be even more students having the same negative experience I had as a student.

Yes, in spite of those negative experiences, here I am—voracious reader, professional writer, and 41-year-long teacher of literacy.

Like LaBrant, I think there shouldn’t be an “in spite of” since literacy learning and literacy teaching can and should be things of joy.

Some times I worry that adults impose their weariness on children because adults resent childhood and adolescent joy, because adults have abdicated their own joy.

And because there was joy, in my 63-year-old soul, my 16-year-old self still smiles recalling Martin sing:

Be courteous, kind and forgiving
Be gentle and peaceful each day
Be warm and human and grateful
And have a good thing to say

Be thoughtful and trustful and childlike
Be witty and happy and wise
Be honest and love all your neighbors
Be obsequious, purple, and clairvoyant

In his silliness, there is a joy, an anti-adult weariness that has always inspired me.

Childlike, in fact, is a wonderful thing.