Back to School
10:35 AM |
My little sister is nine years younger than I and is nearing the end of seventh grade at the school I attended for six years. My high school. The place where I started by secretly applying beige eye shadow in the third floor girls bathroom in grade seven, and where I finished off by streaking through it near-naked with my best adventurous girlfriends two weeks before grad. I made that school my bitch, and I totally won the game that is high school. PS- You win it by figuring out how to get the best grades with the minimal work possible so as to devote the necessary 12 hours of every day to drama and the “Oh my god, he didn’t! He did? Oh my God!” while still maintaining the doting eye of most teachers.
Suck up? To some. Bright-futured student who makes crappy teaching work worthwhile? Perhaps. Last night gave me a chance to step back into it with four years of university perspective. I went with my little sister to the school talent show and bumped in to some of the teachers who are still there.
One I had thought was an awesome and hilarious science teacher I have subsequently found to be a giant a-hole who invited girl students over to his house to fool around with while his own young daughters slept upstairs. The teacher who was everyone’s favourite, our moral compass in Birkenstocks and Gap collared shirts, who was married with 3 beautiful girls, had an affair with the Spanish teacher, also married with children. One teacher became the staff bicycle- everyone had a ride. She was pushing through the crowd to get backstage at the talent show and the woman looked like a worn, walking STD. Lesson learned: Wear my sunscreen and don’t become school skank at age 45. Yikes!
I saw my favourite English teacher, the one who showed me the importance of writing beyond the five-paragraph essay formula and who encouraged creativity beyond curriculum guidelines. I take her words and lessons with me everywhere I write. She offered me a smile and a frenzied hello as she rushed to a meeting, late as always.
It was as though I’d grown a full foot since leaving grade 12. In seeing the faces that once presided over detentions, lectures and assemblies, now as equals, as humans with fault lines and fractures, I felt…better. I didn’t feel better than them, because even the ones that cheated and became more scandalous in their lives than the events of after-prom parties, have once been like me. Twentysomething, wide-eyed, full of wonder at the potential of any given person in this world. I just felt better to know that those teachers who had once held my future, my grades and my lessons were now teaching me what could only be learned in returning to a talent show….the lesson that we’re all faulty, we’re all forced to keep going, and we’re all allowed to make mistakes. You’ve no idea what a relief that is as everyone keeps asking me what’s next in life, what am I going to make of myself.
Suck up? To some. Bright-futured student who makes crappy teaching work worthwhile? Perhaps. Last night gave me a chance to step back into it with four years of university perspective. I went with my little sister to the school talent show and bumped in to some of the teachers who are still there.
One I had thought was an awesome and hilarious science teacher I have subsequently found to be a giant a-hole who invited girl students over to his house to fool around with while his own young daughters slept upstairs. The teacher who was everyone’s favourite, our moral compass in Birkenstocks and Gap collared shirts, who was married with 3 beautiful girls, had an affair with the Spanish teacher, also married with children. One teacher became the staff bicycle- everyone had a ride. She was pushing through the crowd to get backstage at the talent show and the woman looked like a worn, walking STD. Lesson learned: Wear my sunscreen and don’t become school skank at age 45. Yikes!
I saw my favourite English teacher, the one who showed me the importance of writing beyond the five-paragraph essay formula and who encouraged creativity beyond curriculum guidelines. I take her words and lessons with me everywhere I write. She offered me a smile and a frenzied hello as she rushed to a meeting, late as always.
It was as though I’d grown a full foot since leaving grade 12. In seeing the faces that once presided over detentions, lectures and assemblies, now as equals, as humans with fault lines and fractures, I felt…better. I didn’t feel better than them, because even the ones that cheated and became more scandalous in their lives than the events of after-prom parties, have once been like me. Twentysomething, wide-eyed, full of wonder at the potential of any given person in this world. I just felt better to know that those teachers who had once held my future, my grades and my lessons were now teaching me what could only be learned in returning to a talent show….the lesson that we’re all faulty, we’re all forced to keep going, and we’re all allowed to make mistakes. You’ve no idea what a relief that is as everyone keeps asking me what’s next in life, what am I going to make of myself.