I Nearly Dropped Out of Education When I Was 16: Why I Teach
When I was in an English secondary school, I behaved badly…
Detention after detention, letters home. I’d skip school, argue back about everything, smoke cigarettes on the courtyard and in the stairwells. I even went to school drunk a few times. I also got sent to the isolation room on numerous occasions, which they called the “Discipline For Learning” room. Ironically, teachers would take turns babysitting 11-16-year-olds in this room, and didn’t really care if you did any work or not, so there wasn’t exactly any learning, just a demand for silence.
Needless to say, taking school seriously wasn’t on my to-do list.
When I was 14, I sat with a secondary school career counselor, who asked me various multiple-choice questions, like “On a scale of 1-5, with 5 being the highest, what is your fear of ladders?” (To which I answered 5, ruling out my potential career as a builder.) At the end of the long list of questions, the career path test gave me—perhaps ironically—the recommendation: Teacher.
Upon finishing secondary school with unimpressive grades (I got a B in History, a B in Maths, C in Science and English Language, a D in English Literature, D in Food Technology, and double-F for IT), I still applied to go to sixth form college. Upon enrolling, there was a long list of fellow 16-year-olds I knew from school and surrounding schools in the college library. Some lined in front, many more behind and out of the glass door entrance.
When I got to the desk and said my name, a lady in a red blouse, after studying the listed sheet of paper on the waxed desk, looked over her thick-rimmed glasses and said, “oh, you need to be upstairs.” I was confused. Everyone else I saw went to the right. I wanted to ask why, but I turned around, walked back past the queue of people and towards the stairs.
One old classmate asked me where I was going.
“I don’t know,” I said. I made my way upstairs, head sunk, while ensuring not to make eye contact with anyone below.
Upon getting to the top of the stairs, I learned that I wasn’t eligible to do “A-levels,” that my grades were too low, and that I was going to have to do an extra year, earning a BTEC, before going onto the next phase of my education. I tried to argue my case, that I knew a friend whose average grade was brought up because he dropped a class, and that if I dropped one of my lowest grades, I would have been above the average. “Rules are rules,” the white-shirted man, in a typically English, matter-of-fact bureaucratic fashion, responded.
I was extremely embarrassed, and I held a complex about being stupid then and for well over a decade afterward. (This still crops up now and then.)
I made my way down the stairs and left the campus.
I nearly dropped out.
I decided to take on a BTEC in Business Studies, although I very nearly dropped out due to frustration. I felt as if I was in a class with people who weren’t all that serious about learning, and I thought that I shouldn’t be there, that my overall grades didn’t show the capabilities I had — that I, despite evidence of the contrary — was too good to be there.
One night, I told my dad I planned to drop out of college. He came and sat by my bedside and managed to break through my usual stubbornness, telling me, “If you struggle through this, new worlds will open up to you.”
So I stayed.
Here’s me with my parents standing proudly at my Graduate school graduation.
I got my BTEC in Business Studies, and went onto A-level (studying media studies, sociology, and history), where I realized my love of reading (I read “A Brief History of Time” by Stephen Hawking, the first book I decided to tackle in my later teenage years that wasn’t a study requirement), got A-levels, then an undergraduate degree in History and a Master’s degree in Creative Writing, during which I met Rachael (at football tryouts — a story for another time), which brought me to her hometown, Malibu, where we got married.
Years on, I think of paths I almost went down. I could have dropped out of sixth-form college and been reacquainted with my old nemesis, the ladder. I almost swapped studying History for Psychology (but the waiting list was too long). And, before I was accepted to study a Creative Writing Master’s, I was rejected from the University of Amsterdam to read Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
Although I’m not a full-time teacher, I’ve been able to find ways to instruct. One is to be contracted occasionally to go into local schools with a team of fellow teacher-poets and guide young students through the act of writing poetry. One has been through hosting writing workshops as the Poet Laureate of Malibu, and sending craft emails to my mailing list.
The other, which is more frequent, is through YouTube, where I learn from poems, poets, and books about poetry craft and theory, distilling the information for people in video format.
I find joy in using YouTube to reach out to people and teach. Although I’m not employed as a teacher, nor I do not have a fancy professorship role, I have a purpose and a wealth of reading and writing experience, which I use to help others.
One of my life goals is to help people (as I learn, too) not just to develop a deeper appreciation for language, but to learn the limits of what language can do, to think clearer and more exactly about the language they produce creatively and in conversation. To explore the strengths and weaknesses at the core of words and how a poetry practice brings us closer to the fact that poetry is language that reaches beyond language, that is concerned with both the contemporary moment, the root of words and, for me at least, the spark of the Eternal.
At school, I wished I had a greater command of language to express the frustrations that caused me to act out and be a class clown, but I didn’t—that came much, much later.
Most recently, I made a video with Rachael, based on former US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s book, The Poetry Home Repair Manual, which includes 12 steps on how the viewers can write stronger poems, to use their language more strongly, effectively.
Doing this is my way of reaching out, teaching how I feel is best to teach, and opening a dialogue with people beyond the classroom. That’s what my YouTube channel, Nathan Hassall Poetry, and our company, The Poetry Vessel, sets out to do — to also help those get the tools they need to become more educated, to believe in themselves; not think they are stupid like I did.
I also make videos I know I would have wanted to find when I started writing poetry, 17 years ago, based on books I also wish I found earlier so I didn’t flounder through the dark for so long before encountering various elements of basic poetry advice. But here I am, righting the wrongs of my younger years, trying to provide free education to people worldwide using the amazing technology we should pinch ourselves daily for having — the internet — where we can learn about anything, should we use our time wisely.
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