I was the reject from the rejects. You know those kids who don’t fit in: braces, wears a turban, walks with a limp, has really bad acne, smells awful, etc.? Well, I was so low on the totem pole that I was the one they mocked and ridiculed.
A few years ago, I finally got around to telling my brother (an award-winning sommelier) that I was an anarchist union organizer. He rolled his eyes and said, “You’ve always been an anarchist.” And I guess he was right. Looking back, I’ve never been able to knuckle under to authority of any kind. I’ve always hated bullies with a passion, whether they are kids, teachers, politicians, or cops, and I was always the one who wasn’t afraid to stand up and express defiance to nonsensical orders or oppressive treatment. You can imagine how popular this made me in school, the purpose of which is to pound children into nice, obedient, cookie-cutter drones.
Despite having tested as one of the 30 brightest children in the city, I graduated highschool with a 42% average, and the only reason I graduated at all is because all of my teachers and the vice-principal browbeat my poor math teacher into giving me a 50% pass instead of a 49% fail so that I would not return the next year. I wasn’t even invited to my own graduation, and the school never mailed me my diploma. When I returned to the school 25 years later, my old English teacher spotted me in the hall instantly, confronted me in a rage, and demanded to know why I was there[1].
“And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps.” – H.L. Mencken
[1] I can explain why he hated me with such a passion that he recognized me instantly, 25 years later. I’ve always loved books and reading. I taught myself to read and write – both block and cursive – at the age of two, so reading has always been a passion. I was dismayed when I discovered that in highschool, books were taught one chapter at a time over a period of weeks and then dissected in a way that made them boring, ruining all of the magic. So, what I’d do is read the assigned novels in a single night, as I was wont to do. To prove that we had read the assigned pages, we were required every day to write out a series of essay questions pertaining to the material as homework. The answers were never actually graded, simply checked to make sure they were written, and then discarded. If one had done the homework, one got full marks for it. Otherwise, one got zero. This homework was worth 10% of one’s final grade, and I knew I could afford to discard it, so I informed the English teacher I would not be doing his assignments, and that he could mark zeroes across the row in his marking book.
For the next few days, he would come to my desk to see whether I had done the assignment. I would inform him that, as I had already told him repeatedly, I would not be doing the assignments. He warned me that I would receive zero out of 10, and I nodded and said that was acceptable.
After a couple of weeks of this, other kids began to realize that they could do the same thing I had done. As more and more students joined the rebellion, he became angrier and angrier until he finally declared that in addition to receiving zero, failure to do the essays would result in a detention after school. All the other kids went back to doing the essays, but I decided I could tolerate the detentions.
So, for the rest of the year, every single day after school, I would sit in his classroom and read while my English teacher sat behind his desk alternately glaring at me and then pretending he was too busy to look at me. At one point, after a few months of this, he looked up and said, “Aren’t you tired of wasting your time just sitting there every single day when you could be doing something else?”
I looked up from my book and said, “Nope.” Then I went back to my reading.
His face turned red and he yelled, ”Well I am!”
And for the rest of the year, through the remaining months of detention, we never spoke again.
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