First of all, I'm so happy! The pictures of Cthulhu came out so hopefully before I die or go insane I will have evidence that will shock the known world. Or perhaps not if you keep up with Ohio politics.
However, even though I last "went back to school" in 1991, I still have that weird little ball of apprehension in the pit of my stomach, as I do every August. I hated school. Me and formal education have had a very uneasy relationship. (And even though I got a BA in English, I still write things like "me and formal education" instead of "formal education and I." Screw it, this is my blog, not Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Anyway.) The educational part actually wasn't that big a deal. I've always been one of those people who does well on tests, or at least I did back in 1992 when I last took one, so teachers etc. assumed I was book-smart and, oddly enough, that meant they expected less from me, not more. I've yet to figure that one out. But the problem came when I had to be surrounded by members of my peer group for eight plus hours a day.
Now, looking back as a middle-aged adult, I don't hate children. But I remember being a child, and how miserable an experience it could be. Summers, at least between the time alcohol abuse in my immediate family stopped and the time when I left my parents' home for good, meant long days outside swimming with my cousins at Brookside Pool in Ashland, or under a tree in a field somewhere reading a stack of books, and no one making any assumptions about what I was like based on the fact that I liked to read or did well on those stupid standardized tests they made you take. (On the off chance there are any young whippersnappers reading this: they didn't make you take them all year long and you weren't relegated in life to checkout clerk at Wal-Mart if you failed one, so I guess we had it good in a sense. But they were still stupid.) Yeah, I had to do things like Girl Scouts (fun once I got into it) and vacation Bible school (worse than actual school, since there wasn't even any academic value to it. In fact, the dumber you are, the better you do in vacation Bible school generally. And it only had one textbook), but mostly my summers were my own, free of academic pressure and, I'm sure, of intellectual achievement. But they were mine.
School was something else. School was all about the reputation you had from the moment you walked in the door, and seeing as I went to the same small, rural school district for all 13 years of pre-college education, my reputation was pretty well targeted by the time I got to high school. I'm proud to say that I added some new facets to it, like "scary" and "not very concerned with hygiene" by the time I made it to senior year. (In the time and place I grew up, being voted "most likely to become a serial killer," as I was, was considered a somewhat crude and hurtful joke, not a signal that I should be expelled from school. That's another explanation of a slightly kinder, gentler age for you young whippersnappers who are reading random blogs. I'm glad I'm not you, although I'm sure you do OK.) And school was about being reminded that lots of people in a small space made me want to run away as far and as fast as I could. Unfortunately for me, I had a hard time fighting this panic response, which resulted in some really wiggy and completely antisocial behavior. Looking at it from my peers' perspective, no child really wants to feel that a peer, especially a peer who authority is constantly pointing to and saying, You should be as smart, is rejecting them. So, most of my peers made a sport of shoving me away from them. Which would have been fine if we had been able to follow our instincts, me to leave and them to get me to leave, but since we were required by law to be cooped up in a school together... the consequences were pretty dire. So, I always have anxiety dreams and trouble eating this time of year.
On the other hand, the sales kick ass.
However, even though I last "went back to school" in 1991, I still have that weird little ball of apprehension in the pit of my stomach, as I do every August. I hated school. Me and formal education have had a very uneasy relationship. (And even though I got a BA in English, I still write things like "me and formal education" instead of "formal education and I." Screw it, this is my blog, not Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Anyway.) The educational part actually wasn't that big a deal. I've always been one of those people who does well on tests, or at least I did back in 1992 when I last took one, so teachers etc. assumed I was book-smart and, oddly enough, that meant they expected less from me, not more. I've yet to figure that one out. But the problem came when I had to be surrounded by members of my peer group for eight plus hours a day.
Now, looking back as a middle-aged adult, I don't hate children. But I remember being a child, and how miserable an experience it could be. Summers, at least between the time alcohol abuse in my immediate family stopped and the time when I left my parents' home for good, meant long days outside swimming with my cousins at Brookside Pool in Ashland, or under a tree in a field somewhere reading a stack of books, and no one making any assumptions about what I was like based on the fact that I liked to read or did well on those stupid standardized tests they made you take. (On the off chance there are any young whippersnappers reading this: they didn't make you take them all year long and you weren't relegated in life to checkout clerk at Wal-Mart if you failed one, so I guess we had it good in a sense. But they were still stupid.) Yeah, I had to do things like Girl Scouts (fun once I got into it) and vacation Bible school (worse than actual school, since there wasn't even any academic value to it. In fact, the dumber you are, the better you do in vacation Bible school generally. And it only had one textbook), but mostly my summers were my own, free of academic pressure and, I'm sure, of intellectual achievement. But they were mine.
School was something else. School was all about the reputation you had from the moment you walked in the door, and seeing as I went to the same small, rural school district for all 13 years of pre-college education, my reputation was pretty well targeted by the time I got to high school. I'm proud to say that I added some new facets to it, like "scary" and "not very concerned with hygiene" by the time I made it to senior year. (In the time and place I grew up, being voted "most likely to become a serial killer," as I was, was considered a somewhat crude and hurtful joke, not a signal that I should be expelled from school. That's another explanation of a slightly kinder, gentler age for you young whippersnappers who are reading random blogs. I'm glad I'm not you, although I'm sure you do OK.) And school was about being reminded that lots of people in a small space made me want to run away as far and as fast as I could. Unfortunately for me, I had a hard time fighting this panic response, which resulted in some really wiggy and completely antisocial behavior. Looking at it from my peers' perspective, no child really wants to feel that a peer, especially a peer who authority is constantly pointing to and saying, You should be as smart, is rejecting them. So, most of my peers made a sport of shoving me away from them. Which would have been fine if we had been able to follow our instincts, me to leave and them to get me to leave, but since we were required by law to be cooped up in a school together... the consequences were pretty dire. So, I always have anxiety dreams and trouble eating this time of year.
On the other hand, the sales kick ass.
posted by The Surtsey Islander at 8:45 PM
2 Comments:
Sigh--I wish you could have gone to our (Brad's and mine) High School. The geeks got together (the divine plan from Jill, Keith, and Josselyn) and made their own gang--
Sometimes when I think back to grade school/high school (I really loved college) I can't help but think that Daniel Quinn was right--it's a formalized "holding pen"
Alas. Could have been much better.
Nah, you know what, I did sort of hang out with the band geeks until someone realized I was a terrible sax player and I ended up in choir instead. But that was by junior year.
I did have friends in high school, after a fashion, but it wasn't until college that I learned how to be a friend and not some emotionally disturbed person who had good, friendly days every once in a while.
I look at it as training for life in a way. My workplace (and lots others I'm sure) is a lot like high school in many ways, so I have the coping skills now at least.
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