I think I've been living a lie. For as long as I can remember, I've taken comfort in the thought that, when it came to school, I was a good kid. I was never suspended, I never started fights and I never defiled school property. If you pretend that high school didn't happen, I was an A student all of my life and won more awards than anyone else I knew. Back in 1990 parents were lining up around the block at area hospitals trying to return and exchange their kids for a model like me. At least that's what I remember.
Now that I have a kid of my own I've been doing my "overanalyzing" thing. I'm very meticulous when it comes to things and I treat parenting like a business strategy. As we speak (or should I say, as you read) there's a board meeting going on inside my head regarding the school clothes budget for the fiscal year 2013. The image consultant is pleading her case to the boys from Accounting. I'll release the minutes from that meeting at a later date, but the point is that I think a lot about my daughter's future and sometimes I use my own childhood as a reference point.
I always operated under the assumption that I used to be, currently am and will always be awesome, but I'm starting to have some doubts. Actually, I'm starting to think that maybe there are two kinds of bad kids: Future criminals and future politicians. The former is self explanatory, but the latter can be described as those who are highly intelligent, look good on paper and run their mouths way too much, often to their own detriment. Yeah, I think that was me. A lot of examples come to mind, but I'll share one with you:
In third grade my principal called my mother to ask if she was okay with the idea of me going home for lunch. My grandmother lived up the street and was home during the day, so he felt that it would benefit all parties if I no longer ate with the general population. Confused? Let's backtrack for a second.
Everyone ate lunch at the same time and often times that place would get loud. The principal would come in with his megaphone and tell us to quiet down or else he was canceling recess. If we didn't quiet down he'd tell us to immediately stop eating, line up single-file and we had to stand there in silence for the remainder of the lunch period. If this happened during the first five minutes, then we stood there for the next 55 minutes until lunch was over.
I don't know where or how I got a copy of the DCPS school code, but I went to school the next day and convinced people in my class that it was against the law for them to deny us a certain amount of time to eat. I tried to lead a mini sit-in whereby we all would refuse to stop eating and stand up. This, of course, did not go well. It was my first civil rights protest, so we were easily defeated, but deep in my heart I true believed that we would overcome...someday. And that day was gonna be the next day...or so I thought.
The school code said something about not striking children, so when the lunch monitor raised her yard stick at another kid as part of her idle threat to "sit down or else," the little Black Panther in me jumped to his aid to apprise him of his rights. She could not under any circumstance strike him and if she "jacked him up" his mother could press charges for assault and sue the school. "Let her hit you. You gonna own this joint!" My oppressors sent me to the office again.
They tried to silence me and destroy my credibility by punishing everyone else. "Since Ordale can't keep his mouth shut, all of you are going to have to stand up today. Everybody thank Ordale." As everyone started grumbling, my inner union leader came to life: "See! They know I'm telling the truth. That's why they don't wanna let me talk. They can't treat us like this. This is illegal." I'm not sure how much of this was audible to the other kids, as I was saying it while being led back to the office.
By the end of the week I'd threatened to call the board of education for about ten different things, but I think the final straw was when I convinced some people to pretend to be dizzy and complain of thirst so that they'd have to let us outside where there was fresh air or at least let us out of line to go to the water fountain. There was a mole in our camp and I ended up in the office yet again. The principal didn't say two words to me, he just picked up the phone and called my mother at work.
He told her that he'd be sending liability waiver forms home with me and for me to bring them back the next day. My goal was to get us unconditional outdoor recess, but I landed myself an even better deal. Starting that Monday I was to leave the building at noon and not return until 1PM. They made the crossing guard come back for just that hour and she'd just stand there shaking her head in disgust as I crossed the street and walked up the block to my grandmother's house.
Half the time my grandmother wasn't home, so I'd make myself a fried bologna sandwich and some oodles of noodles. Then, I'd play Nintendo for an hour before heading back to finish the rest of my day. This went on from third grade until I graduated sixth grade. I used to think I was a baby MLK or Malcolm X. Now I realize I was more like The Joker...an instrument of chaos.
No comments:
Post a Comment