The Astral Plane
The closer I come to mastering the challenges that life throws me, the more I realize that the rules are changing in such complicated ways that my effort seems irrelevant. After my years of bitter cold, revealing clothing, and inconvenient practices, my final varsity cross country race involved a small amount of straightforward running. The rest was an intricate dance through the sticky mud.
I have to remind myself that school has not become meaningless, it has simply moved beyond any comprehension, into rarefied strata that have not yet been explored by the mind, but are just beyond hands grasping air. Two of my classes this week have involved dizzying and gratuitous games, besides abstract and tangential class presentations. Whenever a teacher announces that students will present information to the rest of the class, you can bet that at least half (who am I kidding, all of them!) will try some novel, unconventional method of explaining, for instance, the significance of slavery or Macbeth, if they are going to try at all.
I am guilty, too. My group met at "Char"'s house on Sunday to make a film of Macbeth Act V, which required me to play three characters in one scene. Overall, it was pretty traditional, no new age wind instruments, mirrors, or rips in the fabric of space-time.
Of course, none of this would matter if these performances were informative, but half of the English presentations were more concerned with making a skewed statement than actually preparing us for the test (and AP exam). Number one, "How to Make a Macbeth", which involved four girls dressed as witches, throwing ingredients (bread crumbs, green liquid, candy) into a cauldron, would not have been too bad, but the directions became stilted and confusing after a while. How are you supposed to remove a dash of Banquo and Duncan after you've mixed them in, anyway? But the first offender was the Jeopardy game, which consisted of trivial information (What happens in Banquo's dream? What does the Porter do before he opens the door?), which my team, of course, could not answer, especially since the other team had the teacher. (And worse, in the passion of the game, after [hmmm-hmm-hm] told me to "Sit in a desk like normal people...", I replied, "But you're not on my team!", to which he replied without the subtlety of the forensics craft, "I'm the teacher, sit in a desk!")
(Fortunately, some people took the time to connect their creativity with the subject matter, so the hand puppet performance of Act IV was actually informative and funny to the point of being impossible to push out of my head).
Unfortunately, APES has been playing Quake Estate, a Left Coast, socially-conscious Monopoly knock-off for the past two days. After almost four total hours of playing, my group, especially Petra, decided that we had had enough of the baseless pursuit of material possessions. We stopped rolling the die and started to add in random "Whooo"s to keep up the impression that we were still playing, because we did not especially want to do anything else. The Doctor is not preparing us for the AP exam. Shame.
Today, I had three tests: in Calculus, English, and Chemistry. About ten hours after I was supposed to turn it in, I finished the improvised take-home Calculus test without cheating. ("He said you couldn't look in your book, but you could always look at your notes or on the Internet," someone claimed earlier today as justification for their plans to cheat. "He knows it's wrong and we know it's wrong, but it is a loophole...").
I am already worked up about the weekend. Still, I need to finish The Sound and the Fury.
I have to remind myself that school has not become meaningless, it has simply moved beyond any comprehension, into rarefied strata that have not yet been explored by the mind, but are just beyond hands grasping air. Two of my classes this week have involved dizzying and gratuitous games, besides abstract and tangential class presentations. Whenever a teacher announces that students will present information to the rest of the class, you can bet that at least half (who am I kidding, all of them!) will try some novel, unconventional method of explaining, for instance, the significance of slavery or Macbeth, if they are going to try at all.
I am guilty, too. My group met at "Char"'s house on Sunday to make a film of Macbeth Act V, which required me to play three characters in one scene. Overall, it was pretty traditional, no new age wind instruments, mirrors, or rips in the fabric of space-time.
Of course, none of this would matter if these performances were informative, but half of the English presentations were more concerned with making a skewed statement than actually preparing us for the test (and AP exam). Number one, "How to Make a Macbeth", which involved four girls dressed as witches, throwing ingredients (bread crumbs, green liquid, candy) into a cauldron, would not have been too bad, but the directions became stilted and confusing after a while. How are you supposed to remove a dash of Banquo and Duncan after you've mixed them in, anyway? But the first offender was the Jeopardy game, which consisted of trivial information (What happens in Banquo's dream? What does the Porter do before he opens the door?), which my team, of course, could not answer, especially since the other team had the teacher. (And worse, in the passion of the game, after [hmmm-hmm-hm] told me to "Sit in a desk like normal people...", I replied, "But you're not on my team!", to which he replied without the subtlety of the forensics craft, "I'm the teacher, sit in a desk!")
(Fortunately, some people took the time to connect their creativity with the subject matter, so the hand puppet performance of Act IV was actually informative and funny to the point of being impossible to push out of my head).
Unfortunately, APES has been playing Quake Estate, a Left Coast, socially-conscious Monopoly knock-off for the past two days. After almost four total hours of playing, my group, especially Petra, decided that we had had enough of the baseless pursuit of material possessions. We stopped rolling the die and started to add in random "Whooo"s to keep up the impression that we were still playing, because we did not especially want to do anything else. The Doctor is not preparing us for the AP exam. Shame.
Today, I had three tests: in Calculus, English, and Chemistry. About ten hours after I was supposed to turn it in, I finished the improvised take-home Calculus test without cheating. ("He said you couldn't look in your book, but you could always look at your notes or on the Internet," someone claimed earlier today as justification for their plans to cheat. "He knows it's wrong and we know it's wrong, but it is a loophole...").
I am already worked up about the weekend. Still, I need to finish The Sound and the Fury.