Of Quiet and Chaos

            As an Education Minor still serving as an undergrad, I hadn’t, before writing this blog, yet worked in a single classroom as a teacher or intern. The closest I had previously come, came in the form of those classes I occasionally taught while at the 377^th MI Army Reserve Component. I recently spoke with Doctor Kaplan about how best to remedy this situation in preparation for my upcoming career as a teacher and creative writing instructor. Doctor Kaplan pointed me towards a fellow classmate, a graduate student whom I shall refer to as J.T. J.T. allowed me to observe him in action, teaching at a school I shall refer to as CHS.

            After arriving at CHS, I checked in with the front desk and went in guided search of J.T., who worked as a floater, meaning that he hadn’t a designated classroom. Because of this, he must move from one room to the next between classes. He must carry all his files, books, and other equipment with him in a cart, ferrying them from one room to the next. Fortunately, all the English classrooms are in the same building, and J.T. is an English teacher.

            In J.T.’s first class, he taught a ninth-grade, English class. He instructed them to read Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Or, at least, he tried to. The class, half of which hadn’t arrived, made little to no effort to read the book. Most outright ignored the novel, leaving it closed on their desks or in their book bags.

            Between J.T.’s first and second class, he had what is referred to as a “Teacher’s Planning Period.” He and I retreated to his office for this period to discuss what I could expect from the rest of his students, each of whom I would meet throughout the day. J.T. shared his office with three other teachers. He told me that he used to also share this office with a pair of sickbay cots, which had, at the time, served as his desks. He also told me that it had taken weeks for him to even receive this much. Prior to recently, he hadn’t an office at all.

            His second class closely resembled his first. A ninth-grade, English class, half of which hadn’t arrived. J.T. explained that many of the absent students hadn’t arrived for one of two reasons. The first was that the Junior ROTC program was conducting a field trip. Many of the students enrolled in ROTC ditched class to participate in such trips. These students planned a career in the military and had discounted all other aspects of their education as unimportant. These students didn’t seem to understand that they would each have to complete the ASVAB before they joined the military. The ASVAB would test them on their skills in such subjects as math and English. Their scores would limit which jobs they could obtain while in the military. Without a good score, they might easily discover themselves limited to dodging bullets on the frontlines.

            The second cause for the heavy absences was due to an unofficial Senior Skip Day. None of J.T.’s students are seniors.

In J.T.’s second class, what few students who had arrived also refused to read To Kill a Mockingbird. They said that the book bored them, that they couldn’t force themselves past the first page. I write novels, and I hope to one day publish them. I now know, more so than ever, that my every line must captivate my audience.

            While one or two students pretended to read the book (they never once turned a single page), most didn’t bother to put up a front. They chatted amongst themselves, inspected their nails, and argued with their teacher. J.T. repeatedly tried to make Harper Lee’s novel relevant to their lives, but the students fought him every step of the way. These same students felt the same way about Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

These kids start with the classics before they learn to read anything modern, written in their own language, about subjects with which they can immediately identify. Starting with the classics sends the wrong message to students that they are not smart enough to grasp what they read. It builds a negative self-image that haunts them and disinterests them from future reading.

            The cafeteria at CHS closely resembles a fast food joint, in its shape, set-up, and menu. For “food,” the students choose between pizza, spicy chicken wraps, or hamburgers. J.T. demonstrated the kindness of forewarning me against the burgers. While milk is an option, most students grab a sports drink loaded with high fructose corn syrup, sugar, and other nastiness. There are alternatives to the lunchroom. There are snack machines filled with candy bars and a takeout window where students and faculty can grab chips and candy.

            Just over half of the tenth-grade class arrived for third period. Some of these students were not tenth-graders. Several were seniors retaking Sophomore English for the second (sometimes third) time.

To my relief, most of this class actually read there novel, though many of them were behind in chapters from where they should have been. One student’s cell phone rang. The teacher caught another student texting. J.T. gave the latter student the option of surrendering her cell phone or going to the principal’s office. If she chose the former, her parents would have to come to school to retrieve the phone. The student took her chances with the principal.

            After the third period, J.T. and I spoke. He showed me several papers that his students had turned in to him yesterday. Suspecting these papers as frauds, he typed into Google random lines taken from the papers. His face failed to display the slightest hint of shock as each and every one turned out to have been copied, pasted, and printed off the internet. Next, J.T. tried this method against a paper just handed in to him. In seconds, he located the stolen paper, in its entirety, on the internet.

            Just as despair set its claws into me, we arrived at J.T.’s fourth and final class of the day. This ninth-grade class couldn’t have been any different from those that preceded it. While these students were anything but quiet, though they couldn’t seem to sit still to save their lives, they actively dove into Antigone. They exchanged fascinating questions, challenging what they read, and comparing it to those events that took place both in the real world and in modern forms of entertainment. J.T. never attempted to silence his students. Rather, he encouraged their input. By some teachers’ standards, this final class might have appeared as the most rambunctious. Such teachers would be right, but I hope such teachers wouldn’t fail to also observe that this class accomplished far more than the quieter classes before it, in which little was accomplished beyond fingernail-inspecting and text messaging beneath the desks.

Emily's Greatest Hits

Prior to the age of twelve, all that interested me were dinosaurs and killer robots. Then I turned twelve, and the whole system went straight to Hell. All that interested me afterward were girls (and killer robots). I quickly discovered that puberty is a time-consuming, expensive disorder.

My actions thereafter should have resulted in someone baker acting me. Three-in-the-morning, and I’m awake, manipulating fistfuls of aluminum foil, trying to unscramble Cinemax. How I must’ve horrified my dear, sweet mother by taping posters of supermodels to the ceiling right above my bed, as if my reasons weren’t grotesquely obvious.

Because that “series of tubes” otherwise known as the Internet hadn’t yet been invented, my only understanding of sex at that time came from those dirty jokes I didn’t understand but laughed at, nonetheless. It never crossed my mind to ask my parents for information about sex because, as far as I could tell, they never experienced it. In fact, it’s entirely reasonable to assume that the two of them have never kissed, touched, spoken to or thought about each other, occupied the same room, gone bungee jumping with a fully grown gorilla, or were ever once aware of the other’s existence.

When my fifth-grade teacher announced that my class would take a sex education class, relief slammed me like a truck. Of course, I had had the presence of mind to fake boredom, because, of course, I already knew everything, and therefore there wasn’t anything school could have taught me.

Finally! Education I planned on using in my adult life. The class began with a slide-show of barnacle-like lumps of soggy, cornflake-ish material covering what perhaps were once some poor bastard’s genitals. My teacher—a hideous woman who couldn’t have gotten a date without the aid of chloroform—explained to my traumatized classmates and I that if we so much as thought about sex, our entire bodies would become infested with these grotesqueries. She said this the way a priest speaks of the plagues God visited upon Egypt. The second part of this class made the slide-show seem sensible.

My teacher read aloud jaw-dropping, doomsday statistics. My teacher told us with an astonishingly straight face that one-in-five people had AIDS and didn’t even know it.

Yeah. That survey could’ve happened:

“Excuse me, sir. Could I trouble you for a moment? I’m conducting a survey with which to scare the living crap out of small children.”

—“Why certainly. What would you like to know?”

“Do you have AIDS?”

—“Why, yes. Yes, I do.”

“Are you aware of it?”

—“Nope. Haven’t a clue.”

As the other children in my class counted each other and performed their fearful math, I actually heard my teacher’s lingering credibility scream as it was forever vaporized.

My teacher, and many like her, only wasted her breath. Male spiders and praying mantises mated knowing that the female would afterwards murder and eat them, and they still went through with it . . . and spiders and mantises aren’t exactly cute.

In high school, girls noticed me the way a dog notices the color green. The other boys (who towered over me because they were all mutant-troll-mastodon-hybrids created by a God who had enjoyed a few too many rum-and-cokes) noticed me the way a bull notices the color red. Frankly, I don’t know why I wasn’t more popular with either. I was a sixty-pound bookworm who thought Huey Lewis and the News rocked (and they so do!).

            Once I turned sixteen, I decided to acquire a job, so that I could buy all the crap that television swore would get girls to notice me. I trusted every commercial that promised me that, regardless of my looks, owning a pair of two-hundred dollar sneakers would make me attractive through the scientific process known as “magic.” I tried to drown my social awkwardness with Old Spice. I came to believe that women were attracted to people who had loud, important-sounding conversations on expensive cell phones. My parents disallowed me a cell phone because they wanted me to remain a virgin all my life, because deep down, they hated me (to be fair, cell phones were still unreasonably expensive and only owned by pimps and men who carried briefcases with them everywhere they went). I ended up having loud, important-sounding conversations on a bar of Irish Spring Soap while hoping no one would smell the difference.
            Shortly after graduating high school, I learned to lie. I told the girls I met at clubs and bars (to which I always brought a book) all manners of bullshit. I became a bullshit artist. I invented someone I that I had wished I was and pretended to be him. The girls were accommodating enough to pretend to believe me, but in return, I had to pretend to believe that each of them was the person she pretended to be. This suited me fine for a few years, until I had the unpleasant realization that none of these women were sleeping with me, but rather with the fictional character I masqueraded as. They never met the person I pretended not to be, and I knew nothing about any of these girls I never truly met. This resulted in me telling myself lies about my lies.

This is only a temporary fix.

I’m just getting myself through a rough week.

I can quit anytime I want.

Then, one eventful Easter, I experienced the worst lonesomeness of my entire life while getting laid. This comprehension sucker punched me so hard that everything I thought I knew about space and time went swirling down the thunder bucket.

            So I pledged to find a real relationship. Because I didn’t know any better. Only while faced with such a goal could I have noticed how many girls just want to “have a good time.” It was as if I were trying to learn how to cook, and someone kept handing me coupons for free food at McDonalds. McDonalds will fill you up, sure, but . . . well, when you’re younger, you love getting a Happy Meal (sometimes it even comes with a surprise toy). After you grow up a little, however, you just hate yourself after a BigMac.

I met and fell in love with a magnificent girl named Cheyenne, but . . .

Me: “So what have you been up to?”

Cheyenne: “Loving Jesus.”

Me: “Right. Right. But physically, I mean. What have you been doing as of late?”

Cheyenne: “Just praising Jesus’s name.”

Me: “ . . . Okay. Well, you want to catch a movie?”

Cheyenne: “Only if there’s nothing in the film that might offend out Lord, Jesus Christ.”

Me (wondering why she felt the need to specify which Jesus she referred to): “Yeah, they pretty much all will. So if a movie’s out of the question, what would you care to do?”

Cheyenne: “We could go to church and pray together.”

Me: “We could. Sure. But that would suck. How about if we just grab something to eat?”

Cheyenne: “It can’t be anyplace that serves alcohol.”

Me: “I agree. That sounds perilously enjoyable.”

Cheyenne: “I’m going to put on some music.”

Me (because I know what’s coming): “Please don’t.”

Music: “Jesus is great. Jesus is perfect. Jesus’s armpits smell like a Cinnabon stand. Blah. Blah. Blah.”

Cheyenne: “This is my favorite song of the entire fifty-disc box set.”

Me: “How can you tell them apart?”

Music: “JesusJesusJesusJesusJesusJesusJe . . .”

            Next, I dated Maggie, a cute, affectionate girl who on several awkward occasions tried to count the number of hairs in my eyebrows. She used an egg-timer to ensure that she brushed each tooth for the same number of seconds. On the day she told me about my cat’s former life as a Geisha, I smiled, nodded, and knew for certain that if sex didn’t feel so damn good, nobody would put himself through this kind of crap.
            Towards the end of our doomed relationship, I might have only stuck around out of morbid curiosity for what she might do or say next. Here are some sample tracks from Maggie’s Greatest Hits:
            Track 3: “Do you ever wonder how clouds work? They seem complicated.”
            Track 7: “If it weren’t for my neighbor’s parrot, I might still be trapped in that van.”
            Track 11: “I thought Korea was that teddy bear place from Return of the Jedi.”                                           
          This she decided to share with me during sex. It was sort of a show-stopper, to tell you the truth.
          About a year after Maggie disappeared to join the circus, I meet a girl named Emily. Like a moron, I plunged irreversibly in love with her. I imagined our future together, and I treated these delusions as forgone conclusions. I asked her to move in with me. I planned to eventually marry her and buy us a home in Portland, Oregon. I came home early one night from my third-shift job and overheard her and her ex-boyfriend in my bedroom.

Something inside me wilted as I realized that the only thing worse than hearing someone fuck the woman I love is hearing someone fuck her better than I could. I couldn’t have coaxed that much noise from a piano.

I left without making a sound—not that there was much chance of being overheard. I went to the twenty-four hour gym. I exercised on the back machine, lifting all the weights at once, as I conspired to kill her, her ex-boyfriend, myself, and then the ex-boyfriend once more for good measure. I schemed to become a filthy-rich rock star just so she would painfully regret her disloyalty. I would have gone through with this plan had I possessed a shred of musical talent or stage presence.

In the morning, Emily and I shared a volcanic altercation. She packed her things, and most of mine, before moving in with her ex, an unmotivated, unemployed douche nozzle named Ryan, who never showered or awoke before one in the afternoon. Ryan’s only claim to fame was his high score in Halo. Emily considered Ryan a god.

That evening, my back ached from its torture session at the gym, but since I hadn’t anyone to rub Icy Hot into my throbbing muscles, I had to get creative with a pair of spatulas and the only mirror I hadn’t yet broken.

            About this time, I realized that I could no longer name half the dinosaurs I had known so intimately when I was ten years old.
            So it went. From one ridiculous setting to the next, I met the wrong woman over and over again and missed the joke every time. I grew pessimistic, miserable, and exasperated. I became envious of organisms lucky enough to reproduce asexually, for surely splitting in half couldn’t be as painful or messy as the alternative.
            The catch is that if I had met the right woman right away—if so much were not required of me in this pursuit—I might have become an unmotivated, unemployed douche nozzle who never showers or awakes before one in the afternoon, whose only claim to fame will always be his high score in Halo, and who’s currently living in Portland with a much fatter, angrier version of a girl I thought I wanted to marry.
           

Hey, gun nuts

            Have you ever heard something so stupid that you wanted to punch a Wookiee in the dick? I just finished listening to a man rant at me about how gun control is just “the government’s way of keeping the public from rising up against it.” Yes, Stay Puff Marshmallow Man-look alike. The government, with its aircraft carriers, and unmanned drones, and nukes, and Defcon-5, is terrified of you and your cute stash of popguns. It amazes me how many people I meet who won’t vote but stockpile weapons just to “keep the government in line.” I believe these are the same guys who achieved their first hard-on while playing Duck Hunt.

            Now, I believe that a person has the right to arm her- or himself. Totally. If you feel too terrified to walk out your front door without a loaded firearm, or you simply can’t fall asleep at night without the soothing reassurance of a Desert Eagle resting beneath your head, then by all means, you are entitled to own a weapon. Whatever helps. However, I don’t particularly grasp the notion of owning piles of automatic weapons. Unless you’re a Hindu god, you only have one or two arms. How many weapons are you going to fire at once? If the first five magazines’ worth of bullets bounced off your home invader, what makes you think the next few are going to make a difference? At what point are you spending more for ammo than you did for the television set that you’re so feverishly protecting. Why do you believe that you need armor-piercing rounds? Why do the deer in your neighborhood have bullet-proof vests? Who’s selling those to them? How are the deer paying for the vests? Why didn’t Bambi’s mother have one?

            What concern me most are the people who speak with a gleam in their eyes about the day some “poor bastard breaks into my house.” You shouldn’t look forward to the day that you take another person’s life. The law that states that you can’t shoot someone if they’re fleeing your property is not bullshit. Stop pouting about it. Killing a person is the last resort in a him-or-you situation. Not, “He’s got my TV.” It’s just a TV. If we can’t march into the Senate building and arrest the greatest criminals of our country, then we can’t kill a poor person over a television set.

            I don’t own a gun. When I tell people this, they sometimes ask, “How will you protect your family and loved ones?” They have a point. If someone breaks into my house, how better to protect my family and belongs than for me to recklessly spray the living room with ammunition? Yes, I know some people can just aim, squeeze, and drop the intruder. I am not one of those people. I will blast apart everyone and everything in my house but the intruder. Of course, the joke would still fall upon the thief. How much cash can he get for a bullet hole-infested, plasma screen?

            On a final note, I want to address the question that always follows a workplace- or school shooting. Everyone always asks, “What if someone else had had a gun? Wouldn’t that person have been able to take down the shooter?” Maybe. More likely, this would happen:

            Okay. You and I are at, let’s say . . . a grocery store. You’re in aisle three, squeezing mangos or something. I’m in aisle seven, getting shot down (pardon the pun) by some hot redhead. Somewhere in the store, some idiot slips a firearm from a holster. We both hear the shots and screaming. You draw your weapon. I draw mine. We both turn the corner and see each other, each of us holding a weapon. Doesn’t take a genius to determine what will happen next. But I’m going to ask a genius, anyways.

            Mister Stephen Hawking, what will happen next? Blink once, if we’re going to save the day. Blink twice, if we’re probably just going to shoot each other.

            <blink> <blink> Well. That’s not good.

            Even if that doesn’t happen, even if you draw your weapon and hunt for the gunman unhindered, what happens when the police arrive and see you clutching your weapon? And while the cops are punching more holes in you than are in the plot of an M. Night Shyamalan movie, the real gunman is probably slipping out the backdoor while munching from a stolen package of Goldfish crackers.