(no subject)
Aug. 6th, 2002 09:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wickedfleaIn grades 5-9, I was in a class called PEAK. I can't remember exactly what that stood for -- something like Punishing Every Asshole Knucklehead, I think. Or maybe something even goofier like Program for Enriched Academic Knowledge. Same difference. Anyway, it was supposed to be for intellectually gifted kids. (God knows how I crashed that party.) They probably should have called it the Underachievers' Club; most of us were fuckups to at least some degree. (And, as it happens, most of the straight-A, perfect-attendance types couldn't score high enough on the intelligence tests to get into PEAK. I always got a kick out of that.) Instead of enriching our academic knowledge (whatever that means), what this class did best was give a bunch of precocious shitasses an hour each day to -- well, to be precocious shitasses.
To wit: each year, we did the Odyssey of the Mind (formerly Olympics of the Mind, 'til the IOC got ahold of 'em). In the eighth grade, my group's assignment was to conceptualize, build, and act out several circus acts on a ridiculously low budget -- like $20 or something. When it came time for the regional competition, all the circus teams from other schools performed highly polished, imaginative acts. The high point of our circus, however, featured ringmaster Anton Webber lashing Mike Boyd and me with a homemade whip as we shuffled along the floor in a dog costume made of a brown bedsheet and a few strands of yarn. Mike and I were the most morose, untrainable, un-circusly dog that ever drew breath. We couldn't even be bothered to bark. We learned later that our judges thought we were a cow. Other kids from my school watched from the gymnasium bleachers and laughed until they cried, but our judges were not amused. We came in dead last, but in our minds we'd succeeded because we'd made the other fuckups from our school laugh. (My mind still works that way all too often.)
The next year, my cronies and I focused our energies on making our new teacher's life hell. For the first month of school, we got along well with her, but somewhere along the line we decided that she didn't like us. Naturally, we dubbed her "Stymie" and set about doing horrible things to the poor woman. In the course of the year, we hid broken eggs in the bookshelves so that they'd reek to high heaven, spray-painted "Stymie" street-artist style on the sidewalk outside the building, put a big clump of jheri-curled hair into her plastic container of Coffee Mate, and tried to make her pay the bill at the Holiday Inn for our repeated viewings of "Sex World" on an overnight field trip. We turned that woman's hair gray in a matter of months. For years after that, whenever I'd see her around town, Stymie would always give me that sickened look like she'd just swallowed a mouthful of something really foul. You know, like jheri-curl coffee.
It was a real drag for a lot of us when we got to the tenth grade and there was no more PEAK. We had to channel our creative/destructive energies into our regular academic classes. This didn't always work out too well; for instance, my debate teacher got quite bent out of shape when my homie and I built a whole health-care reform plan around acronyms such as EATMERAW and CRAMPS. Damned public schools.
To wit: each year, we did the Odyssey of the Mind (formerly Olympics of the Mind, 'til the IOC got ahold of 'em). In the eighth grade, my group's assignment was to conceptualize, build, and act out several circus acts on a ridiculously low budget -- like $20 or something. When it came time for the regional competition, all the circus teams from other schools performed highly polished, imaginative acts. The high point of our circus, however, featured ringmaster Anton Webber lashing Mike Boyd and me with a homemade whip as we shuffled along the floor in a dog costume made of a brown bedsheet and a few strands of yarn. Mike and I were the most morose, untrainable, un-circusly dog that ever drew breath. We couldn't even be bothered to bark. We learned later that our judges thought we were a cow. Other kids from my school watched from the gymnasium bleachers and laughed until they cried, but our judges were not amused. We came in dead last, but in our minds we'd succeeded because we'd made the other fuckups from our school laugh. (My mind still works that way all too often.)
The next year, my cronies and I focused our energies on making our new teacher's life hell. For the first month of school, we got along well with her, but somewhere along the line we decided that she didn't like us. Naturally, we dubbed her "Stymie" and set about doing horrible things to the poor woman. In the course of the year, we hid broken eggs in the bookshelves so that they'd reek to high heaven, spray-painted "Stymie" street-artist style on the sidewalk outside the building, put a big clump of jheri-curled hair into her plastic container of Coffee Mate, and tried to make her pay the bill at the Holiday Inn for our repeated viewings of "Sex World" on an overnight field trip. We turned that woman's hair gray in a matter of months. For years after that, whenever I'd see her around town, Stymie would always give me that sickened look like she'd just swallowed a mouthful of something really foul. You know, like jheri-curl coffee.
It was a real drag for a lot of us when we got to the tenth grade and there was no more PEAK. We had to channel our creative/destructive energies into our regular academic classes. This didn't always work out too well; for instance, my debate teacher got quite bent out of shape when my homie and I built a whole health-care reform plan around acronyms such as EATMERAW and CRAMPS. Damned public schools.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2002-08-07 05:30 pm (UTC)no subject
no subject
no subject
Date: 2002-08-07 06:44 pm (UTC)no subject
"Fill your hands, you son of a bitch!"
no subject
My teachers must have been smarter than yours. They managed to keep me out of the classroom most of the time until I graduated at sixteen, even sending me out to run errands or do research for them at the college library.
no subject
Date: 2002-08-07 06:50 pm (UTC)Re:
Date: 2002-08-07 07:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2002-08-07 06:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2002-08-07 06:55 pm (UTC)