I'm reading an autobiography right now. It'll be featured in future blog post "Celebrity Autobiographies I've Read, Ranked" or possibly a cleverer title than that or possibly I'll never write it. Anyway, I'm only halfway through it now, but the author had some school anecdotes that reminded me of my own occasionally crappy experiences from kindergarten through undergrad. I really have no complaints about grad school, it was pretty great, one of my profs was kind of pompous but he was a good teacher, and I had another prof who was hot and also a good teacher so he canceled out the pompous one. But, I hit plenty of road bumps along the way to enrolling in Professor Hot's class and getting my M.A. I would never use, and here they are.
First Grade: A Hankerin' for Some Spankerin'
When we moved out to a small rural town when I was six, I was enrolled in the local public school. I consider this my first actual school experience, as that kindergarten did not count.
I had never had to sit at a desk before. I was the only kid in class who already knew how to read, and I was bored out of my mind. I couldn't sit still, I drew pictures all over my desk, I wrote in all of my books, I was sent to the principal's office I think my second day. I never disrupted anyone else, I just did my own thing because I was bored out of my mind.
In a later generation, I might have been diagnosed with ADD, which I don't think I actually had; I was just bored as ****, but my practically decaying first grade teacher had a different solution: spankings. I think this woman had had one foot in retirement for at least a couple decades. Even though our parents had to sign something when we started school there saying whether or not the teachers had permission to use corporal punishment, and mine said no, that teacher spanked me all the time. And I cried every time.
She also failed me in every single subject. I would later learn, it was impossible to fail anything at this school, but despite doing all my assignments correctly I got a "minus" in everything along with some notes I couldn't sit still and I drew all over my desk. At one point, I glued my handwriting textbook to my desk; I was kind of proud of that.
At some point during first grade year, though, we took IQ tests, and it turned out I was a genius.* Which leads me to
Second through Sixth Grade: Quest
As a result of the IQ test, I was put in something called "Quest."
Before you start thinking this is something like being sent to the Krelboyne class in Malcolm in the Middle, because I'm sure so far my story was sounding a lot like the Malcolm pilot, Quest was 1 hour a day of sending the "gifted and talented" students to one of the pods, and then sending them directly back to class.
We did some cool stuff in Quest. Like, we actually got to read instead of having stuff read to us. We ventured into chapter books, learned how to type, and were given some creative writing assignments, but this was just setting us up to be even more bored when released back into the general population in sixth grade. The most baffling thing, though, is that there wasn't a general population. It seemed really arbitrary who was in Quest and who wasn't. Some kids were in it one year and not the next, and we'd only taken that IQ test once. It seemed like they had a rule of two kids from each class being in Quest. So, basically it was "These two kids are better than you, so they get to leave for an hour. But, to make it up to you, we'll do something like play heads up seven up or practice for the school play while they're gone." (I couldn't be in my fourth grade play because I was in Quest. I was pissed.) "Oh, Randy, I'm sorry. You were in Quest LAST year, but this year we decided you're not gifted and talented. Sit back down."
Third through Sixth Grade: Worship Me, for I Am Thy God
In the latter part of my elementary school years, I learned that teachers in a small town school, most of whom never had any ambition other than to be a teacher and have been at this for years, are extremely set in their ways, can never be wrong, and will hold petty grudges if ever corrected by a student.
My third-grade teacher couldn't spell, occasionally taught us incorrect things about grammar, and would get upset when third-grade Mandie couldn't hold back from correcting what she'd written on the board. If they didn't want me being all uppity, maybe shouldn't have put me in Quest.
My life's goal at this point was to be a vet, and I proudly talked about that a lot. One day, my teacher brought her son's pet snake into the classroom, and while some of the boys were clamoring to hold it, she said, "Mandie is the one who wants to be a vet. SHE should hold the snake."
I was afraid to hold the snake. She informed me, "Well, you are never going to be a vet."
Later in the year, she told the entire class NOT to vote for me for the "citizenship award" when someone suggested I would be a good candidate. This was a glorified popularity contest that still got published in the town newspaper because there was nothing going on in our town.
My fifth grade teacher was even worse in that regard. I don't think she knew that "you're" is a word. When I pointed out something she did that was wrong, she'd tell me it was "inappropriate" to correct the teacher and find some loophole to assign me detention, like forgetting to put my student number on my paper. I gave up on trying to ever talk to the teacher again after I pointed out she was pronouncing and defining several of the vocabulary words of the week wrong. One that comes to mind was "raucous." Despite having the word defined in our textbooks, she believed this was wrong, and confused it with the word "ruckus." She gave us sentences to use it in like, "The children made a 'raucous' when they found the Easter eggs." I'd tried to show her why this was incorrect and what her confusion was, but this was not ok. I gave up and decided I was going to fly under the radar from here on out.
I tended to run into teachers with moral high horses that did not seem justified. They were generally opposed to "the idiot box" (TV) with the primary offender being "The Simpsons" (a.k.a. my favorite show and chosen family). Mentioning The Simpsons was grounds for punishment. Some of the boys in my class found ways to sneakily say "d'oh" in conversation in front of the teacher and that brought me joy.
Seventh through Eighth Grade: Worship Me, for I Am Not Only Thy God, but Thy Savior, Also Watch This TV Show I Like
In seventh and eighth grade, we went to the junior high esque format of going from one class to another rather than the same teacher all day. Other than the core subjects, many of these classes lasted only six weeks, and there were some wild ones.
Like, for one, there was a class called "Life Education." Before you start to wonder what that class might be about, like, career skills or managing a budget or sex ed (we'll get to that later), you're wrong, we just had to watch Degrassi Jr. High. The final was filling in the blanks to the lyrics of the theme song from Degrassi Jr. High.
The teacher who taught this class, I shall call him "Mr. Degrassi," was also the eighth grade English teacher. He believed himself to be the second coming of Jesus but with better grammar.
He was full of emotional stories about how he had saved children's lives in the past. What kept these stories from having any credibility was the fact that one of the first stories he told us was incredibly stupid.
"Once, a girl came up to me and asked what I thought was a very personal question. She said, 'Can I go to the bathroom?' I didn't know why she was asking this medical thing. I kept just saying, 'I'm so sorry, I can't answer that question.' If she had only said 'may' instead of 'can,' I would have been able to understand her and she wouldn't have went to the bathroom on herself."
This is the man who was teaching us Life Education. He claimed to not understand the sentence "Can I go to the bathroom." Also, he felt like he was tapping into the teen experience and teaching us everything we needed to know by showing us a Canadian sitcom that had aired around the time we were born.
Mr. Degrassi fully came into his element one day, holding up a piece of paper. "I'm holding here the most important piece of paper a teacher can ever receive."
"A paycheck?" one student quipped.
"No! If I were here for the money, I wouldn't be here. This is a letter I received from a former student ..."
He went on to describe how we were about to write autobiographies. He'd had a student who sent him a letter saying that he was about to take his own life, but just as he was stepping out on to the ledge he remembered a teacher named Mr. Degrassi who had cared about him enough to think he should write a story about his own life.
Of course, the autobiographies would not be free-form but rather would be predetermined chapter titles with specific questions to answer in a five-paragraph format. I skipped the chapters "My Friends" and "My First Crush" because I did not have any friends and was being bullied way too much to think about crushes. I turned in a single page for each chapter saying they did not apply to me.
This is when Mr. Degrassi should have swooped in and saved my life, right? I was the kid who hid during lunch hour, was afraid to make eye contact with anyone, and who he probably should have suspected had an eating disorder.
Nah, I got a C on my autobiography for not writing all the chapters. It's fine. It was impossible to fail out of this school (more on that later).
Eighth Grade: You Really, Really Can't Fail at this School Even if You Try and I Tried
I tried to fail eighth grade.
Maybe part of it was a cry for help. But mostly I was hoping that I would have to repeat eighth grade and not be in the same class as my bullies anymore. The seventh graders seemed nicer, and they didn't know me, so there's that. Or maybe my parents would pull me out of the school system and send me somewhere else. I'd been campaigning for that for a while.
I had been a straight A student, so you'd think someone might notice or care when I started actively trying to fail. Not really, though.
I didn't read any of our assignments. I dropped to a C in history, and in literature. (I actually was interested in the books we were reading in literature, so I'd read them, just, later. After the test.)
I was trying my darndest to fail and I only got down to a C. But, I guess that makes sense, because there were three kids in my class who spoke no English and were passed through every year, despite apparently not speaking a word of English and never completing an assignment. Were they my age? I don't know. They mainly just spoke to each other, and in Spanish.
Wishing to be invisible, I never said anything, even when what was happening around me was completely ridiculous.
For example: We had a class called "Council Fires" that was supposed to be about character building but it was just putting us in the gym and having us play kickball.
We had courses in gym on juggling and roller skating. I could not juggle or roller skate, and no one attempted to teach me, so I spent every 45-minute gym period pretending to throw balls and then chasing down the bleachers after them if I dropped one, or holding on to the wall for 45 minutes straight, respectively. No one commented on this.
We had a huge event also covered in our local paper where each of the core classes taught about a single subject for two weeks. Seventh grade, it was ancient Greece (we all tried feta cheese for the first time), and eighth grade, it was World War II.
We had a teacher who was old enough that she'd been alive during World War II. Granted, she'd been 6 years old. She taught the class on D-Day.
"I still remember it. I was 6 years old, and I was sitting in the hammock, and all of a sudden people were yelling, 'It's D-Day! It's D-Day!' And I jumped out of the hammock, and ran into the house, and my parents were saying, 'It's D-Day!'"
"What's D-Day?" one of my classmates asked.
She looked flustered for a moment. "Well, it's the day the war ended. You knew that."
I knew this was wrong, despite trying to fail history, but, again, given up at this point.
On the final day, we had a few other very old people who lived in our town come in for World War II Q & A. Most of them said they didn't really remember the war, but had relatives in it, and they were proud they'd lived in this town their whole lives and Main Street used to be a lot different and things used to cost less.
Only one student had a question for our expert panel. She asked, "Were any of you in the Holocaust???"
I mean, if you just did an intensive World War II unit and one of your students didn't even realize the Holocaust happened in Europe, then maybe ... never mind.
When graduation was nearing, we got our proposed schedules for freshman year at the local public high school. Which I wasn't going to go to. Something had finally tipped my parents to the point they would send me to a private Catholic school in the next town. As we were looking over the schedules, one of my classmates asked, "Speech? What's that? Learning to talk Mexican?"
... Never mind.
High School: I Have Sex with You
I honestly do not see how I could have graduated if I'd continued in the public school system. But, then again, given my prior section, I don't see how I could have failed. I have no idea what would have happened, but I didn't have to worry about that. I was going to private high school.
For the most part, I got a pretty solid education there. A couple classes were tough enough I struggled with them even when trying, a new experience for me. But there were a few exceptions, like the fact we learned "World History" through movies (I'm glad I got to catch All Quiet on the Western Front and Good Morning Vietnam, but I doubt the accuracy of Jurassic Park) and the final exam was to do anything related to history. I put together a 3D puzzle of a castle. I'm really not good at puzzles, so I feel I more than earned that A.
But the class I'm going to call out here was a requirement for all freshmen: Christian Sexuality (shortened to "Christian Sex" on your schedules).
This was an abstinence-only sex ed course. Not that the mechanics of sex were ever actually discussed; other than "Don't Do It" lectures, we watched videos about the trials of abortion and teen pregnancy. And a lot of stuff that was just general morality, like not drinking and driving, and listening to your parents. It was kind of D.A.R.E. part 2, and I remember our textbooks presenting cartoony moral dilemmas in exactly the same format as the D.A.R.E. manuals I'd gone through in sixth grade.
The thing is, no 14-year-old in that G-rated class took it seriously, at all. It was a joke that horny 14-year-olds used when saying who they were in class with. "Oh, I have sex with _____." "Remember when I had sex right next to _____ last period?"
One day, we were learning about why masturbation is wrong. I respect your religious opinions if you believe masturbation is wrong, but this specific D.A.R.E. esque worksheet was showing that young men shouldn't masturbate because they're often thinking about topics like goats or their own grandmothers.
After I had sex (giggity) first thing in the morning, period 2 was French. We started every French class with a prayer, and the teacher asked for prayer requests. One of the boys I'd had sex with (giggity) in the last period said, "I would like to pray for goats. And old ladies."
The final for that class was to sign a document saying we would not have sex before marriage. I do not have said document. It was taken from me and put up on the band room wall as part of a freshman hazing thing.
College: I Missed a Final and Got an A
I admit I did not go to the best college in the world. Much like my high school, it was a mixed bag where there was excellence combined with the occasional Jurassic Park-watching or non-masturbating freeforall.
One of these was French I. Everyone had to take Spanish or French as a gen ed requirement.
Let's face it, most people who are taking Spanish or French (or German or Latin, in bigger schools) just because they have to, do not care about learning the language. I might have kind of wanted to learn French, but it wasn't a priority. I'd taken it in high school, so I had a leg up, right?
(I think in high school, a lot of kids pick the language they take based on what country they want to go to for the famous no-drinking-age-in-Europe class trip. I dated someone who took German because he'd rather get beer drunk than wine drunk.)
I had more than a leg up. I had both legs, both arms, and my entire torso. This might be the easiest class I've ever taken. Even easier than the Degrassi one, because if I hadn't filled in the blanks on that Degrassi theme song test, I might not have gotten an A.
I missed the final for my French class.
This is not like me. It especially is not like college-era neurotic people-pleaser Mandie. I still don't know how it happened. I realized the next day, while preparing for one of my other finals, that the French one had happened and I hadn't shown up for it. Granted, the class consisted mostly of watching videos and playing with magnets, so I didn't have any prep for the final exam.
I got a 0 on the final, which was 10% of your grade. However, I'd had slightly above a 100% in the class due to an extra credit thing I did at some point. So. I got an A in French.
I had to go to France for work years later.
I don't speak French.
At all.
College: Blue Man Teletubbies, How to Make Popcorn, and My Fake Major
I had a vision when I went to college. I was going to double in music and English, and live my dream life of teaching music while writing and/or editing, with my supportive, sensitive husband at my side.
I didn't feel like it was a huge dream, but oh man, it was. Heck, lately I feel like even renting an apartment is something you have to sell your soul for.
I took music and English classes throughout my first two years. At the end of sophomore year, all music majors/minors had to take a competency exam in piano and voice. I failed it.
I don't know why I failed the piano portion. I had been playing piano for years, but I was nervous and I choked. The voice portion, I just guess I didn't sing right. I'd been told most of my life I was a good singer, but I was told after two years of paying the school for music tuition that my technique was wrong.
I'd been getting straight A's in my music classes up to this point.
I was not permitted to take any more music classes based on failing the competence exam. I often wish someone had told me sooner to stop trying if they sensed I did not have the talent. I was pretty well taken care of financially because I had a good scholarship to this school, but what if I hadn't? I'd be in an incredible amount of debt in addition to the lost time.
I focused on my English major and a theater minor that I picked up. And I took some really great classes, that helped me reimagine my future, that changed my critical thinking process. But there were also some ... not so great classes.
1) Business and Technical Writing
My main complaint with this course is that we had to do an internship and we had to find it ourselves. We had to rack up 30 hours of business/technical writing experience and we had no guidance at all.
I tried so damn hard. I at last found a job editing an article for the local history museum for a local newspaper. (WHY did I not think of the newspaper from my hometown? PTSD probably, but I'm sure they needed people. CURRENT MANDIE SMACKING PAST MANDIE IN THE FACE.) The local history museum is one room guarded by an antisocial guy who didn't want to talk to me. I milked everything I could out of this but could only stretch it to five hours. What do I do. What do I do.
Luckily, my best friend and I worked at a movie theater. (I never thought I'd say that sentence.) I asked my apathetic boss, "Can I write a training manual for working at the movie theater?"
"Sure."
And so, I spent 25 hours doing the same job I normally do except also writing about it. I chalked up hours to my internship that might be spent cleaning popcorn, counting boxes of sour wormz, or chatting with my friend while we waited for the last showing to start. I did write a very detailed manual. My boss put it in a file cabinet somewhere.
2) Visual Literacy
This was a requirement for English majors and theater minors, and I was both. Essentially, we were supposed to write analyses of visual media.
That's it.
There was a textbook, and some kind of structure, but my three major papers were visually analyzing a website, a TV show, and a movie.
I wrote about catsinsinks.com and Teletubbies for the first two, and the third I decided to throw them (them = the TAs) for a loop and write about Citizen Kane.
We also went to see Blue Man Group so we could visually analyze it. I didn't want to be in the splash zone but I was. I got banana mush on me.
The final project was to do anything visual.
Two of my castmates from The Crucible were in the class, and they just re-enacted a scene from The Crucible.
I put a small amount of effort into it and found a website that let you play a virtual keyboard using color coding. I did a fake presentation showing one of my classmates how to play a song using just the colors.
His presentation was cooking something. I forget what. I wanna say cookies.
3) My major wasn't real.
In the final class, Senior Seminar, we were informed that my college was eliminating English as a major moving forward. To major in English, you'd have to double major. English Education was the most likely choice, but it was too late for any of us, as far as that went.
So, in short, academia was a wild ride for me. I started out failing, then I got into the largely meaningless "Quest," then tried to fail on purpose, but failed at failing, then tried to succeed, then got straight A's in a major I was not able to complete and a major I was told after the fact was being discontinued.
But, working in a junior high cafeteria sucked, so I threw myself back into it to go to grad school.
*I'm not a genius. I think knowing how to read gave me a major advantage in that first-grade IQ test that came out to a 163. Don't worry. I took another IQ test when I was in junior high and I was 130 something, and if it's continued to decline since then, well, it's no wonder I don't even know where my keys are. Where are my keys???
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