Introduction To Chocolate Van Go

Introduction

A Note from the Guidance Counselor & Faculty Advisor Harold Lyron, Sp.Ed.

Rarely in one’s career as a high school guidance counselor does one encounter a successful student who takes interest in those students who don’t keep up. Most high-performing students channel all of their energy into their own careers. They study diligently, they participate in extra-curricular activities, and they stick with friends who do the same. So it has been a delight for me to work with two students, Fiona Richards and Avery Blithe, as they compiled the materials for this case study. Undertaking this publication was an arduous task, yet many At-Risk Youth will undoubtedly benefit from the understanding and support that this volume generates on their behalf. So it is with great esteem to the editors that I turn to our subject, Oskar Quentin. Last summer, Oskar was one of the participants in Hilltop High School’s WELL program (Wilderness Experience for Learning Leadership), of which I am the leader. During WELL, I take a group of students deep into the forests of the Rocky Mountains, where we live in tents for 18 days and practice the arts of cooperation and co-creation. The curriculum promotes self-development, and each day of WELL presents learning opportunities that encourage students to tap into their most mature capacities. The students begin to identify themselves as highly capable persons, and they are recognized as such by their peers, very often for the first time in their lives. As a journey of discovery, WELL helps young people to explore their coming roles as citizen-adults. Had our group last summer been less resilient, Oskar’s behavior at WELL would have seriously jeopardized this dynamic. Yet we had a strong group, and among the emerging leaders on this expedition were Fiona Richards and Avery Blithe. Their example helped maintain a dignified attitude in our group despite Oskar’s behavior. And though Oskar’s letters as a dropout indicate that he resented Fiona and Avery’s leadership long after WELL, their success certainly remains seared into his memory. Someday Oskar may look back on his decisions with regret, and turn toward a more responsible life.

The transformations that occur within the young people in our program never cease to amaze me. Yet, in Oskar’s case, I was foiled. Every activity that was designed to support selfdevelopment became an outlet for Oskar’s self-absorption. What went wrong?

The Self-Development Profile® As an intensive growth-oriented program, WELL is not appropriate for many typical young persons. To succeed with the curriculum, participants need to possess an uncommon combination of inner potentials. They must have a well-rounded capacity for autonomous action—independence—and they must also have a well-rounded capacity for cooperative action—interdependence. Therefore, at Hilltop High School, we use an assessment tool known as the Self-Development Profile® to identify potential candidates for WELL. The SDP® measures a person’s aptitude along each axis, Skills of Independence and Skills of Interdependence, and it has been a reliable indicator of students’ capacity for success in the wilderness experience. Not all students who score well on the SDP® are successful yet at school. Many students with high self-development potential have not discovered themselves academically, they are what we call ‘atypical self-developers.’ These students have great potential, but not-so-great grades, and they are often overlooked by the school system. WELL is designed to be of particular benefit to these students. WELL brings atypical self-developers together with successful self-developers in an ongoing learning situation, and when all of these students, with all of this potential, are thrown together into a challenging, structured wilderness experience, they learn from each other. One witnesses over and over again the awesome power of positive peer pressure. It is a beautiful phenomenon to behold. Fifteen months ago, when I interpreted the results of Oskar’s SDP®, he appeared to be a perfect candidate for WELL. Oskar hovered near the bottom percentiles of scholastic achievement, yet he tested extremely high in four of nine fields on the SDP®, “Empathy,” “Assertiveness,” “Coping Strategies,” and “Cooperation.” Though Oskar was not succeeding academically, he presented the profile of a learner who could succeed. I was eager to enroll Oskar in WELL, but then I was quick to regret my decision when the program started. He garrulously challenged our basic rules of conduct, he debated the validity of each day’s activities, and if he had just participated in our program with half the vigor by which he railed against it, he could have benefited greatly from WELL. Instead, Oskar nearly foundered us all in what can only be described as a sustained burst of oppositional-defiant megalomania.

Oskar proved to have severe deficits in his Skills of Interdependence. He demonstrated little capacity for cooperative activity, in fact he was positively averse to it! So what went wrong? Did the SDP® fail? Or, is there something about Oskar Quentin that foils the SDP®? Reflections on the SDP® The research literature has proven the SDP® to be a reliable assessment instrument with many uses. For instance, among high school students, the Self Development Profile® can predict future dropouts with 95% accuracy. Future dropouts will have deficits in three or more fields, and will rarely score high in more than one. But does the SDP® always get it right? I think not. In rare instances, I find that a person like Oskar can score quite high on ‘Empathy’ when really his “fellow feeling” is no more than a projected feeling for himself. Whereas the SDP® attempts to measure ‘Empathy’ for others, it can instead register how much empathy the person feels worthy of receiving. Oskar himself may strongly believe that he is empathetic toward others, but in fact he is an egoist pure and simple. This is not empathy, this is what I call a false positive, and the SDP® registered more than one false positive in Oskar’s case. Oskar’s “Assertiveness” may be the only accurate score on his SDP®. And not coincidentally, “Assertiveness” is the most common aptitude for high school dropouts to score well on. As a counselor, I still rely on the SDP®, it is a useful tool. But to rule out false positives, I will now conduct classroom observations on students identified as atypical self-developers, and I will interview their teachers. How do these students comport themselves? How do they talk to their teachers and peers? Do they want to better themselves, or do they simply believe that they are better than others? Reflections on Oskar Quentin For the mature readers of this material, Oskar’s failings will readily stand out. One recognizes him immediately as a certain type of youth, one who attempts to own and embody high ideals which he does not truly comprehend. In his letters, we find Oskar taking himself seriously as an art critic, a poet, a lover, and a Ph.D., all while he has dropped out of high school and landed in a

low wage job without prospects. Indeed, when one realizes the extent of Oskar’s alienation from family, teachers, and friends, one suspects that Oskar might suffer from some psychological malady. It is not outside the bounds of possibility that Oskar suffers from clinical Oppositional-Defiant disorder. Yet, in my judgment, Oskar’s continual defiance lacks the compulsivity required for the diagnosis. His behavior is voluntary. He is the person whom clinically Oppositional-Defiant people are trying to become. In the pages ahead, you’ll see that Oskar’s step-brother concludes that Oskar is a narcissist. I think of Oskar as a common sort of megalomaniac. However one labels Oskar, it is apparent that Oskar has a long humble path ahead of him if he’s ever to find the road of productive life. For the young readers of this material I offer a simple caution: don’t mistake Oskar’s bright lights for brilliance. I understand that Oskar’s message has a seductive pull to it. Sometimes he appears to be so mature and right! This is why he needed to be isolated from our group during the WELL expedition: Oskar longs to attract a following, and he has a certain charisma that he uses to charm his peers. If you followed him, where would he lead you? You too would wind up being an unemployed runaway janitor. So think of Oskar as an ‘air guitarist.’ He acts like he’s the next Jimmy Hendrix, but he’s really just strumming on a broom, going nowhere fast. —Harold Lyron, Sp.Ed. May 28, 2008

Introduction by James Kallihar, M.A. What shall I say about Oskar Quentin, as an “At-Risk Youth?” Certainly, he has put his future in doubt by abandoning his family, friends, and school. And his disregard for basic classroom expectations may indicate a woefully inadequate ability to live by a law other than that of his own impulses. Yet I’ll stop short of calling Oskar a ‘bad influence,’ or even a ‘badly influenced’ young person. Perhaps I can reflect fondly on Oskar because I had only to deal with him in my classroom, whereas my colleague Harold Lyron had to wrangle with Oskar’s mind and body for 18 days in the wilderness. Be that as it may; let me just say that in my class Oskar was an ‘influence.’ For seventeen years I have taught English here at Hilltop High School, and I teach everything from remedial reading to college level writing. Every year I encounter a few students that seem to need some special attention to unlock their talent. Early on in his Tenth Grade English class, Oskar caught my eye and my ear. His oral contributions in class were often penetrating, but they rarely addressed our subject at hand. And in his written work I also found some uncanny insights into the texts. Yet Oskar rarely stayed on topic, and by the conclusion of his essays, he often was addressing an entirely different subject than the one he had started with (you’ll see what I mean in the pages ahead). Oskar was not tracking with the class or the material, and I suspected that the pace and the content bored him. If he were presented with a more challenging environment, I felt that Oskar would respond better. And so I arranged departmental clearance for Oskar to register for my Advanced Eleventh Grade English class, and to my delight, he readily accepted my offer. That year’s Advanced Eleventh Grade class was unwieldy at first. Sometimes, an entire class has a Teen Fog upon it. The classroom is clouded over with an impenetrable wall of preoccupied aloofness. The group of students seems to be determined to just spend their classroom hour grooming themselves, gossiping, goofing off, and basically going through puberty on the spot. You —the teacher—will hear the classroom buzzing from way down the hall, but as soon as you step in the door a dense Fog descends out of nowhere: mouths clam up and eyes go blank. You, the teacher, are not on your students’ agenda…. When I

encounter a class like this, I go to great lengths to gain my students’ participation. It took me several escalating interventions to lift the Teen Fog from that class (Oskar describes my ultimate intervention very well in one of his letters), and when I eventually did accomplish a turnaround, Oskar was part of it. From that day on, I could count on hearing from Oskar. Oskar always had something interesting to say, even when he had not read the material. He’d declare his opinions as if he were quoting from the Bible, and his positions spurred more classroom discussion, contention, outrage, etc… than I could have hoped to provoke myself. Many students who otherwise would have kept a low profile in class could not hold their tongues when Oskar spouted off. Yet Oskar presented some deficiencies which I could hardly understand. Despite frequent prompting from me, Oskar rarely adhered to the basic program of my class. Yes—he always turned in his homework, but at home he almost never worked on what was assigned. Take, for instance, the piece which has been included as an appendix to this volume: Anse Bundren’s Slightest Burden. Now, I like this quirky little rhyming meditation of his, and I shall say more about that in a moment. But his assignment that week was to write a five paragraph essay on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Instead, Oskar had written about a novel by William Faulkner! We’d finished discussion of that book months before! So Oskar chose a subject completely different from his assigned subject, and what he wrote was not in the form of a five paragraph essay. When I broached these discrepancies with Oskar, he countered me, saying that he had, in fact, separated the assignment into five paragraphs. Perhaps, I told him, I could consider those five things to be stanzas, but I’d never call them paragraphs. And why hadn’t he written about Pride and Prejudice? Oskar replied that “this thing about the father was on my mind.” The way he said it, I should capitalize it: “The Father.” When a student is obviously applying themselves in some way to class, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. Was Oskar expressing some deep and pressing inner experience? Psychologically speaking, was he being chewed up or chewed out by his father? Perhaps it was an internal necessity for him to get these words down on paper. Yet Oskar’s father is on the faculty of Hilltop High, and I know him quite well. Vincent Quentin is no Anse Bundren. Three times, in fact, he’s been voted teacher of

the year by our students. No, Oskar’s paper was not some product of a troubled home. I suspected something else: plagiarism. In his paper, Oskar addressed a theme that I had never identified in my readings of As I Lay Dying. To me, Oskar’s piece demonstrated a robust insight into the text—too robust, in fact, for his limited acquaintance with Faulkner, with literature, with life…. Was he lifting material from other sources? This would have explained his disconnect with class: it was taking time for Oskar to find other people’s ideas which he could pass off as his own, and he was simply presenting this stuff as soon (or as late) as he found it. My suspicions drove me to share Oskar’s piece with a friend of mine from graduate school who had specialized in Faulkner. My friend assured me that it would be impossible to garble any commentary about Faulkner into a text such as Oskar’s, and actually, she found it ridiculous that I could suspect such “jabberwocky” of origins anywhere beyond the moody orbits of a teenaged mind. So Oskar got a D on that assignment. I never wanted to fail Oskar, and because I have some discretionary leeway to accommodate peculiar learning styles, I succeeded in passing him. At times, I wondered: ‘Does Oskar have some form of Asperger’s Syndrome? or some kind of Attention Deficit Disorder?’ I don’t know, but I don’t think so. Oskar has a keen mind, in my opinion, but he is a bit loose at the reigns, as it were. Perhaps the horse is too strong for its young rider to handle. Oskar: wherever you may be, I wish you well. You are always welcome back in my classroom. As a teacher, there are ways in which I can help my students, and there are other ways in which I am a helpless spectator in their regard. It looks as though you are in for a wild ride my friend. I hope you find the help that you need. —James Kallihar, MA May 29, 2008

Horatio Burnsides, Ed.D. Superintendent, Hilltop School District From my perch here at the summit of Hilltop School District, where I have been for nearly three decades, I have seen how the tides of our times and the currents of youth culture can meet and dynamize into the most unexpected formations: some beautiful and inspiring to behold, and others horrifying and difficult to control. Barbarism forever lurks as a potential within youth culture, yet our society has always met and turned it away by the strength of our families, churches and schools. Today, with horrifying acts of school violence regularly commanding national attention, the Oskar Quentins might slip by unnoticed. But I suggest that, in their numbers and in their constant seepage, it is the Oskar Quentins who pose our greatest threat from youth culture. These are the kids who want to dam off adult society and declare themselves king of the pond. Our fear is not that these little lords of the flies will succeed, but that they will remain children into adulthood, and that their personal swamp will become our collective quagmire. I like to keep an optimistic outlook, and on days when I fear the encroachment of the tyrannically immature, I never have to search our schools too far to rekindle my heart. To my great fortune, Hilltop’s varsity squads consistently pull off winning seasons—go Vikings! And every class has its share of brilliant young minds. How often there steps through my door, at just the right moment, a young person whose seriousness and vigor lend me courage that all is well. Fiona Richards presented herself to me one day as a reporter for the Hilltop Gazette, and though her expressed purpose was to conduct a series of interviews with me about my background and my educational philosophy, she always stopped her recorder early and took time to discuss the case of an acquaintance of hers named Oskar. Indeed, Fiona believed that she was presenting a unique situation to me, and her purpose seemed to be to awaken me to such a phenomenon as Oskar’s. To a pure young mind, an event such as Oskar’s rejection of school occurs as a tragedy heretofore unheard of. I did my best to break the hard facts of the matter to her, and Fiona came eventually to understand that Oskar’s case is not unique, and far from being unrecognized, this phenomenon of wayward youth already

occupies an egregious bulk of my time and resources as Superintendent. This book is not about Oskar’s case. To me, it is about Fiona. As I often remind our teachers and parents, what is wrong with our young people today can only be made better by tapping into what is right with our young people; I doubt I could muster my daily energy for cases such as Oskar’s if I did not first find it there in the earnest attentions of young people like Fiona. Here is a young woman who has repelled Oskar’s incantations, who has maintained her chastity and her dignity. Fiona, your excellence and innocence are a strong current, and you will encounter many lesser souls who cannot swim strong enough to stay abreast of you. That is okay, for it may be the wake of your passing, and that alone, which has the pull to turn such young minds toward the path of honesty and hard work. You are a brave girl, Fiona, and in this brave new world, it is young persons like you who bulwark our civilization against the black tide of these little lords of the flies. God Bless You. —Horatio Burnsides, Ed.D. May 30, 2008

Editor’s Note Oskar’s case materials are presented in the same chronological order that Oskar produced them. This arrangement makes for difficult reading, as Oskar scatters his attention day to day, jumping from one subject to the next, but it clearly allows us to follow his wandering footsteps on the road to perdition. To help the reader make sense of the underlying story, we have divided this volume into four sections, roughly following what we have identified to be the four seasons of Oskar’s decline. Each section opens with Advisory Notes to prepare the reader for the road ahead and to help them identify the deceit and delusions thereon. In order to portray an accurate picture of Oskar Quentin’s language skills, the grammatical errors which occur in his materials have been left unaltered. The conversations which are included in this volume were transcribed by the editors. These conversations were preserved on Oskar’s MP3 recorder, which he left upon his grandfather’s night-stand on the evening of his disappearance. Oskar’s portfolio of drawings, essays, and poems was recovered from his desk, where it lay along with many other abandoned possessions, at his stepfather’s condominium. Oskar appears to have derived his information about the life of Vincent van Gogh from several sources, two of which we have identified. The first source is a book: The Letters of Vincent van Gogh, edited by Mark Roskill and published by Atheneum. This book contains a selection of van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo. Oskar was known to refer to this book often, and even to force it upon those he talked to about it, people like his brother Anthony Ohm and his friend Alfredo Abbrussezze. A second source of Oskar’s story about van Gogh is Lust for Life, the novel by Irving Stone. This book was found among Oskar’s possessions. Let the reader beware: whereas we can rely on Irving Stone’s research and faithfulness to the basic facts of van Gogh’s life, Oskar’s version of van Gogh’s life cannot be relied upon. Any reader who is interested in the actual life of van Gogh should refer themselves away from Oskar’s version of it, toward a bona fide source. This same warning applies to all of Oskar’s

‘research,’ on the history of chocolate, of rubber, of Native Americans, etc…. Spread throughout these materials are quotes that Oskar purports to have derived from various authors. We have not checked all of these quotes for accuracy, and we present them to you as Oskar presented them originally, in order to give an accurate picture, not of the truth, but of Oskar’s version of the truth. --A.B.