In sixth grade, I spent a majority of my time ignoring whatever my teacher was rambling about in favor of figuring out the inner-workings of �the pink dot game��a game involving two players each sequentially removing pink dots from a board until one player is forced to remove the final pink dot, thus, ending the game. According to the rule book, removing the final pink dot was, for some reason, a bad thing to do. In fact, the person who removed the final dot lost. Because I ignored my sixth grade teacher for a good portion of a semester, I was able to never remove the last pink dot. I stand undefeated, to this day, in the pink dot game. My fifth grade teacher forced the class to memorize every single state and its corresponding capitals. I had already memorized an Animaniacs song dealing with this very subject matter, so I slid past that one. We were also forced to pick one U.S. State and present a report on it in front of the class. The teacher, evidently, was big on states. My assigned state was Arizona�possibly as a creepy sort of fore-shadowing my move, two years in the future, where I was forced to leave everything I had worked for; every friend and connection I had made, and relocate to a scorching flat desert. More likely, I was just absent the day everyone got to pick their state and was, therefore, stuck with a scorching flat desert. It was these sorts of injustices that stick out in my mind�similar to the presidential assignments later in the year where the teacher let students pick their president in alphabetical order. My best friend, Robert Chavez, spent the entire walk home gloating about how he got to do a report on John F. Kennedy while I, Darin Webb, was stuck with William Howard Taft who, by the way, was the first golfing president and also the first president to throw the first pitch at the World Series. Those were two things included in my report, which consisted primarily of me snickering through an exposition of his being fat and getting stuck in a bathtub. Though I was not clever enough at the time, I now realize that �fat� is an anagram for �Taft.� I got an A on my William Howard Taft paper. Robert Chavez got a D. I pointed this out to him. A lot. Sometimes it helps to do an assignment on a subject about which no one knows anything. Robert�s demise came in the form of our teacher�s vast array of Kennedy knowledge. My success lay largely in the fact that I was actually able to report a somewhat coherent biography on such a bland, boring president. I also received an A on my Arizona project. We were all required to make a float representing the many aspects of our state, from the most abstract and metaphoric to the literal. The majority of the floats were done by the students� parents. Kevin�s dad made Colorado in shoebox form, with giant, perfect clay rockies. Andrea�s parents erected a Statute of Liberty replica, with the side of the shoebox depicting a quote from Emma Lazarus� �The Colossus.� My parents did not, would not, help me with my float. There were a few paper cacti and some glued sand I had usurped from my backyard. Enough to cover the Nike swoosh. There was also a picture of point guard Kevin Johnson taped to the side. And a fake cowboy hat, stolen from some generic action figure. My scope of Arizona history was limited. I was nervous even bringing the box to school. Though the kids picked on me during the initial line-up before class, Kevin confided in me that his dad had pretty much done his whole project. He pointed to a tree and said, �I made that.� �Well my father is an alcoholic and my mother works late into the evening.� I didn�t say that. I wouldn�t begin blaming my parents for my academic and social downfalls until well into high school. But it was the truth. My parents, either through desire to teach autonomy or through neglect�I�ll go with the autonomy thing�never helped me with my school assignments. It enabled me to make fun of fat presidents and tape basketball cards to my Arizona State Float. And when my teacher saw that old shoebox for the first time, caked with sand and paper cacti, she exclaimed, �perfect! I love it! It looks exactly like I want it to look. It looks like a float made by a fifth grader.� The fact that Vermont�s legislators congregate to Montpelier every year or that Taft was the twenty-sixth president, just after the first of the Roosevelt brothers, (who I found out later weren�t brothers at all, and only distantly related. In fact, their political agendas were downright opposing!) isn�t important in the vast canon of elementary education, or even worth mentioning in a two-page paper. It is the autonomy, the sudden realization that things slowly change and we slowly age and, sooner than we think, we must grow up and become responsible. The realization that we were cute in second grade, but we haven�t really grown since then and all the girls like Anthony because he�s tall. The only girl that had a crush on me was Emily, who for some reason was missing her front teeth. I ran past the junior high on my way to school because that was where Emily�s brother goes and he�s threatened to beat me up if he ever saw me. He ironically used the words �kick your teeth in,� which made me start to wonder if Emily has suffered the� I ran everywhere. I could never walk. I was in such a rush to be and do and see new things. I was wearing a brand new set of eyes, exploring a world that seemed almost big enough to contain my imagination and wonder. But the world would begin to fail me. And the world would continue to fail me, just liked it was failing everyone. My running slowed, jaded and unsatisfied. Tears sprang from my large, new eyes. I began to hate and ignore my teachers, these pillars of unearned authority, dictating what I could say or do. My classmates became distractions, docile little angels willing to adhere to the power of the teacher. They were just weaker than I was. They hadn�t yet figured out that students were supposed to hate teachers and that doing homework cuts into television time. They hadn�t figured out that scraping by on the bare minimum is the only way, at age eleven, to fight this system of oppression. Rain, which had once dropped wonder upon our small, ethnic California suburb, now stood as a reminder of the tyrannical dictator we called a teacher, as we ate our sacked lunches right there, in the classroom, unable to swing or play basketball or chase the girls. Instead, everyone we drew hangman on the blackboard or played Thumbs Up Seven Up and no one ever touched Eric�s thumb because he was a dirty cheater and we all knew this. We all knew Eric cheated. He wasn�t fooling anyone. The elementary schools aren�t fooling anyone, either. They are all the same. They have the same jungle gyms, the same kids waiting and counting in front of the swing sets, the same overbearing teachers who expect way too much or way too little of their students, the same haughty PE teachers, the same smiling, oblivious janitors, and the same lonely hallways, replete with kids� drawings and Xeroxed aphorisms informing us to �dare to dream� and delineating the �true measure of success.� There was something implicit in those hallway aphorisms that was never really taught in the actual classroom. But we learned it nonetheless. We learned it in our interactions and we learned it in our failures. We learned it on the rainy days and on our long walks from school. And its lingering lessons of scope and autonomy continue, and will continue to continue. |