“We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn.” Mary Catherine Bateson ***
I spend a lot of time in introspection. (Yes, Muse, I have better things to do, but I’m writing this right now, so hush.) Lately, I’ve been thinking about school days or, as I prefer, the cute title of Spike Lee’s 1988 film, School Daze. Anyway, wordplay aside, I don’t mind admitting that I was not too fond of school, not any level of K through 12. One exception: kindergarten was okay. I had a beloved kindergarten teacher named Ms. Carrott. It’s incredible that I still remember the names of all my grade school teachers.
It wasn’t the learning that fueled my dislike of school; it was the annoying students who enjoyed picking on other kids. If you were skinny, fat, unattractive, or didn’t have a trendy wardrobe, you were a target. Today, those annoying students are called bullies; back in my day, they were just mean (bad-ass) kids.
I wasn’t the brightest student in any of my classes, and because of negative peer pressure, I didn’t want to appear that way, either. Nobody likes the teacher’s pet. However, because I effortlessly made the honor roll a few times during my school years, I knew I wasn’t the dumbest student either.
Although aggregating classmates were less prevalent in high school, most of the subjects I was required to take were as boring as music in a call queue. My least favorite classes were math – primarily algebra and geometry (Hated it! When have I ever used either of those? Someone tell me when?) Running close behind my disdain for math was U.S. History, U.S. Government, and Science. The Science teacher told us on the first day that to earn a passing grade in his class, we’d have to dissect a frog; otherwise, we’d flunk the course. Not in my wildest imagination could I fathom cutting up any animal, not even a dead one, back then. The thought made me sick to my stomach. I took the F.
My English class was more tolerable, and although diagramming sentences and conjugating verbs stressed me out, I enjoyed writing and literature. It probably helped that I had a secret crush on my English teacher, whose hazel eyes made him look much like a young Harrison Ford when I think about it now. I often babysat his and his wife’s five blond-haired, well-behaved children. My mother told me that several months after I graduated, had married, and moved out of town, he called one day to see if I still babysat. Mother said that when she told him I’d gotten married and moved away, he told her that he wished I’d told him and said that he and his wife would love to have attended my wedding if I had invited them. It was a different world back then, during the tumultuous sixties. I didn’t have a single friend who wasn’t black (that was by chance, not choice), and my thoughts at the time were that a white couple, even one who knew me well, wouldn’t care to attend a black girl’s wedding. (My Muse tells me I am disclosing TMI – too much information. Well, it is what it is, or in this case, it was what it was. Over the years, I’ve made friends of various ethnicities and racial groups, some of whom are as close as kinfolk.)
Although I wouldn’t say I liked the course when I studied U.S. Government in high school, it didn’t prevent me from admiring the people who held influential positions like the U.S. President. My adolescent mind told me that any man who won the presidential election had to be the smartest guy in the land. No women were vying for the job during my high school years. However, during the years after I graduated high school, the “Unbought and Unbossed” New York Representative Shirley Chisholm and Lenora Fulani on the New Alliance Party ticket would run for the highest office. I was registered to vote by then, and having sprouted my activist and quasi-feminist wings, I voted for both women.
As I matured and my interest in government and politics grew, I realized that not all Commanders-in-Chief, throughout history, had been playing with a full deck. Just because they held the title didn’t mean they were stable geniuses. And – not to name names – only God (and perhaps some unidentified co-conspirators) know what twist of fate facilitated the election of the 12-shy-of-a-dozen brain cells, morally bankrupt POTUS in 2016.
That same naïve school girl perceived Supreme Court Justices as the country’s most fair and unbiased citizens. She believed they were nothing less than modern-day King Solomons. After all, didn’t they solemnly swear (or affirm) to “administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and the rich,” and blah, blah? Well, so much for idealism. The current court – one woman and six men in black, in particular – that handed immunity to the former joker-in-chief squelched my admiration for SCOTUS.
My school days are decades behind me now. And everybody knows that holding a job title, whether a CEO or POTUS, doesn’t mean you’re incapable of corruption, trickery, and treachery. It doesn’t make you an ethical person, either.
“Learning is not attained by chance; it must be sought for with ardor and diligence.” -Abigail Adams.