by Kimberly Bunker
Joel felt that school was a gigantic joke played on him by someone who had not yet shown his or her face. To him, it was clear that what teachers were saying and what students were tested on was of secondary importance, a red herring--but you were supposed to go along pretending it was primary. He felt that all the while his third grade teacher went on about conglomerate rocks, while his sixth grade teacher explained sentence diagramming, while Miss Hart made them rewrite their spelling tests if the words were too high above the pale blue line and Mrs. Salvatore read excerpts from Heart of Darkness, they did it all with a wink. “Here is what I’m saying,” he heard, “but listen to what I am not saying. Everyone knows today’s spoken lesson is useless and boring, and you’ll forget it after the test. But I dare you to remember something.” He had seen patterns in the eraser swipes on chalkboards and heard them in the rhythm of the Pledge of Allegiance. He watched his teachers rearrange the children’s desks and sit and stare, almost defeated, at their own desks after dismissal. He had been both friendless and marginally popular. He went along with the joke and learned to follow arbitrary rules in order to accumulate abstract rewards. He observed how his name looked at the top of every page he handed in and understood that the formation of identity is ongoing, flexible, a choice you repeatedly make that no one else pays that much attention to, as long as it’s there. He learned mental liberation in physical captivity, that by being forced to study something so mind-numbingly dull in such an unnecessarily uncomfortable setting, one was being trained to look inward, to explore the recesses of the universe. One would not learn the nature of reality by being told to think about the nature of reality. No, Joel’s teachers were smart enough to know that one will only begin to think about that while suffering--so, to inspire thought (that is, to teach) the nature of reality, they must incite suffering, preferably of the mildest sort. Joel thought that his grade school was really stellar.
Heather was terrified of solar eclipses. She remembered one happening when she was in second grade; they had spent the day learning about it, and when it happened, they were allowed to look out the window with special cardboard glasses on. Heather had closed her eyes behind her glasses because she was afraid of going blind and she did not trust whoever made them, or the teacher who said they were safe. The other children looked, though, and the rest of the day they were bouncing of the walls, describing to each other the black circle and the flames. She mimicked them and no one knew she was lying. One girl had claimed that she’d removed the glasses and later complained that her eyes hurt. Heather didn’t know whether that was true, but for weeks afterward, she felt uneasy whenever she saw the girl, and wondered when she would come in to find the girl’s seat empty, and she, Heather, would eerily know what the teacher was going to say before he said it: “Boys and girls, Lindsey will not be joining us in school anymore because she is blind…”
That afternoon stayed with Heather, and now she was terrified of solar eclipses, because she did not trust her ability to resist seeing what one looked like. She was uncomfortably curious to know, and was sure that the next time one occurred, her rabid curiosity would overcome her, and she would stare at it with naked eyes.
Joel felt that school was a gigantic joke played on him by someone who had not yet shown his or her face. To him, it was clear that what teachers were saying and what students were tested on was of secondary importance, a red herring--but you were supposed to go along pretending it was primary. He felt that all the while his third grade teacher went on about conglomerate rocks, while his sixth grade teacher explained sentence diagramming, while Miss Hart made them rewrite their spelling tests if the words were too high above the pale blue line and Mrs. Salvatore read excerpts from Heart of Darkness, they did it all with a wink. “Here is what I’m saying,” he heard, “but listen to what I am not saying. Everyone knows today’s spoken lesson is useless and boring, and you’ll forget it after the test. But I dare you to remember something.” He had seen patterns in the eraser swipes on chalkboards and heard them in the rhythm of the Pledge of Allegiance. He watched his teachers rearrange the children’s desks and sit and stare, almost defeated, at their own desks after dismissal. He had been both friendless and marginally popular. He went along with the joke and learned to follow arbitrary rules in order to accumulate abstract rewards. He observed how his name looked at the top of every page he handed in and understood that the formation of identity is ongoing, flexible, a choice you repeatedly make that no one else pays that much attention to, as long as it’s there. He learned mental liberation in physical captivity, that by being forced to study something so mind-numbingly dull in such an unnecessarily uncomfortable setting, one was being trained to look inward, to explore the recesses of the universe. One would not learn the nature of reality by being told to think about the nature of reality. No, Joel’s teachers were smart enough to know that one will only begin to think about that while suffering--so, to inspire thought (that is, to teach) the nature of reality, they must incite suffering, preferably of the mildest sort. Joel thought that his grade school was really stellar.
Heather was terrified of solar eclipses. She remembered one happening when she was in second grade; they had spent the day learning about it, and when it happened, they were allowed to look out the window with special cardboard glasses on. Heather had closed her eyes behind her glasses because she was afraid of going blind and she did not trust whoever made them, or the teacher who said they were safe. The other children looked, though, and the rest of the day they were bouncing of the walls, describing to each other the black circle and the flames. She mimicked them and no one knew she was lying. One girl had claimed that she’d removed the glasses and later complained that her eyes hurt. Heather didn’t know whether that was true, but for weeks afterward, she felt uneasy whenever she saw the girl, and wondered when she would come in to find the girl’s seat empty, and she, Heather, would eerily know what the teacher was going to say before he said it: “Boys and girls, Lindsey will not be joining us in school anymore because she is blind…”
That afternoon stayed with Heather, and now she was terrified of solar eclipses, because she did not trust her ability to resist seeing what one looked like. She was uncomfortably curious to know, and was sure that the next time one occurred, her rabid curiosity would overcome her, and she would stare at it with naked eyes.
Kimberly Bunker's hobbies include livin' in the tenth dimension and trying to figure out what on earth that means.
