High school high

by RAF KATIGBAK

What is it about being in high school that turns young people into precocious little assholes? Of course I speak as someone who was, himself, a precocious little asshole throughout pretty much his entire secondary education.

Before I continue, I’m not saying that every kid is at the core a demonic little bastard. In fact, most kids at my school, if you’d meet them alone at home or at the mall, were actually pretty normal. But growing up, it seemed the soccer field behind the school, the gently cresting hill to the east and concrete barriers that demarked the bus parking in front, formed some kind of invisible force field within which kids would somehow find themselves transformed into precocious little assholes. It was like the Bermuda Triangle but with wedgies and lots of hairspray.

Maybe it was the hormonal apocalypse that was raging in my teenage body or the Day of the Locust-hysteria of peer pressure, but I found myself doing things that, in retrospect, were pretty strange. I’m not sure what compelled me to help barricade my geography teacher out of class using desks and chairs. Or what made me, once given the signal during a lesson on Pythagorean theory, to spontaneously join the entire class in the scream/singing of the theme song to Cheers. All I know was that we were young, we were having fun and we felt pretty much untouchable.

Teachers couldn’t do anything to all of us. They had no power, they had no respect. As a result, I grew up thinking teaching was a bit of a joke. In my short yearlong stint in university, I sat in class feeling trapped, like I was forced to watch a television show that I hated but I couldn’t change the channel and I couldn’t get up and go. I thought it was a one-way mirror. Anything scheduled at around 4 p.m. and I would automatically fall asleep. According to my course calendar, I was registered in “Intro to Ethics,” which my brain would then register as “nap time.” But I didn’t feel bad. The class was so big that I thought no one could see me. I was totally fucking wrong.

Recently I was asked to give a talk at a journalism class at Concordia. At first I was kind of freaked out. Not only does the idea of going back to any kind of academic institution give me the butterfly-shits, but talking in front of an audience really freaks me out. Probably because my brief flirtations with public speaking were, let’s just say, craptacular. In high school, as a lark, I entered the public speaking competition and made it as far as the regionals (if you can believe there is such a thing), where I promptly arrived and went down in what was one of the most embarrassing moments in my life. I won’t bore you with details, instead I’ll offer advice to any would-be public speakers out there: never base your grand finale on a magic trick that a) you’ve never done before, b) involves fire and c) also involves a “miraculously appearing” spring-loaded candle that, when revealed incorrectly, could turn into a projectile that launches at the judges and nearly takes an eye out. I don’t even remember what I spoke about, but am 98 per cent sure it had something to do with world peace.

Once I revisited that trauma and buried it deep within my psyche, I started really getting into the idea of speaking to a class. “This could be my chance to make a difference in some students’ lives,” I thought, “to be the teacher I always wished I had.” I suddenly imagined myself as a straight-talking rogue educator that whipped up his rag-tag bunch of ne’er-do-wells into a crack team of brilliant students. Like Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds, or Edward James Olmos in Stand and Deliver, or Mark Harmon in Summer School.

The actual experience of being in front of a classroom was weird. Aside from having a few out of body experiences where I would make internal remarks about how boring what I was saying sounded or how I repeated what I had just said a minute ago, the talk itself went fine. The biggest revelation was when I noticed that I could actually see what each and every student was doing.

This was huge because 1) it made me want to call out the kids not paying attention. And 2) it made me realize that throughout my entire education, teachers totally knew what the fuck was going on. They saw me when I was asleep, when I was fucking around making fart jokes with my friend at the back of the class. Perhaps they may have not expected us to belt out the theme song to a popular ’80s TV show, but they probably weren’t surprised. Teachers may have been powerless but they weren’t total idiots.

Well, maybe a couple were.

Riff-Raff@sympatico.ca