Biography

"Reading the latest biography
Hoping that it might be someone like me
Just to find me a way out of my head..."
-- Jump Little Children, "Quiet"


I'm a people person. Always have been, always will be. But I'm better with people one-on-one or in small groups. I excel in retail. I'm good in small training sessions or classrooms. Playdates of 6 or less is fab. I dislike crowds.

People are the key to my learning too. If I have a good teacher, I'll do well. If my classmates are interesting people who also want to learn, I'll be motivated to work with them.

Here's the trick, though. I don't learn most subjects well unless there's a personal connection... to any person. I nearly failed my "general overview" econ class in high school. In college, a primary text was New Ideas from Dead Economists, a book that helped me like and understand econ better. Tell it to me from the economists point of view (not the market's point of view), and I'll get it much better.

I used to fall asleep in physics and bio and many of the history survey classes in high school and college. But for those lessons or units or courses that covered material in a more one-on-one (me-to-historical figure), it made things much more enjoyable. I still remember my 7th grade history teacher's retelling of Lincoln's assassination from Booth's point of view. Poor Dr. Mud.

Oddly enough, I never enjoyed biographies, though. When I was assigned a biography book report in elementary school or junior high, I read one of two people's lives: Helen Keller or Marie Curie. That's it. Three solid years of Helen Keller, then three solid years of Marie Curie. They were comfortable, old friends. But aside from that, I didn't read biographies in my spare time... much. I think I tried to read Hans Christian Anderson's autobiography once, but I kept falling asleep. I read Maya Angelou's series of books, but only because my mom praised them.

Interestingly enough, though, I've been keeping a list of people whose biographies (or memoirs) I'd like to read when I'm ready for that plunge. There's Juliette Low, JFK, Anne Bradstreet, Maria Montessori, Anderson Cooper, Joyce Dyer, Buck O'Neill, Bob Dylan, Cary Grant, Voltaire, Tupac, Che Guevara, L.M. Montgomery, Malcolm X, Nikola Tesla... and a thousand other people. I was watching the 1998 version of The Rat Pack and I'd have to add most of those people to my list.

In the workshop I'm taking this week, which will hopefully teach me to use my anthology and all of its ancillary materials correctly, a teacher from another school in the district said something interesting. He said that "biographies are the great levelers in the classroom." Students read who they want to read, so they're motivated to do so, no matter how hard the book is. Plus, the most famous of people - from Lincoln to Shaq - have dozens of biographies out about them, which means each book is a different reading level, too.

I've shied away from biographies personally, and somewhat in my curriculum too, because of my personal discomfort. But Josh's comment made a ton of sense to me. Yeah, biographies have a way of appealing to readers in ways that narratives, however well-written, cannot. I, of all people, should know this.