Moments of Delinquency
*does a stupid little dance* Pirates. Pirates. Pirates!
Since I'm pompous and like to get out my lighted pen and pretend to be a film reviewer, I have reviewed it ... I'll post in the morning ... but first, there's a story behind the way we saw it.
Every year since Pearl Harbor came out, my journalism/economics/US government/US history teacher has taken his classes to see a film after the end of AP exams. The idea being, that since we have difficult college-level work and research papers over the summer, we deserve to take a tiny portion of that time back once we've taken all of our exams. Last year we went to see "The Da Vinci Code," and certain members of our math, science and foreign language departments threw an absolute shit fit. Further trips were nixed, because our principal is easily swayed by the vociferous minority of teachers.
So this year, myself and certain other members of the senior class put together a trip for the AP classes to go see Pirates of the Carribean. (Our rationale is that since Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution grants Congress the power to punish piracy on the high seas, this relates to AP Government). About two hundred people ended up coming ... I think that the nice ladies who I made the reservation for the private screening with still have no idea that it wasn't a sanctioned trip. And frankly, how fantastic is it that we did this? That we organized that well? That word of mouth took us all the way up to the day before?
Then this idiot girl decided to tell the High Queen Pwner of Field Trips, a.k.a. the Spanish III teacher, exactly what was going on. I don't know her, but I'm told she does the whole sabotage-everything-for-attention thing fairly often, which would cause me to pity her in other circumstances. Now half the staff is screaming for my suspension. *shrugs* I'm not exactly untouchable here, but given that my dad's the assistant principal AND I'm a top student AND I've been offered a job at the school next year, I think the staff members who adore me can stall, stall, stall for the two weeks until graduation.
I suppose technically it's my fault that certain teachers caused a whole lot of grades to plummet, but ... I told my fellows how to fix that (dropping already-earned scores because of an absence is so illegal it's not even funny), and if everyone's too lazy to make a well-placed phone call then it's their problem.
What irks me is that the football team does this all the time, and band and choir miss classes all year long, but if AP students take three periods off to see a damn movie it's grounds for educational execution. After some consideration, though, it's even more satisfying, in a way.
We scared those teachers who patronize their students and think we're incapable of making decisions. They saw that their perfect, 4.0 GPA little AP robots had minds for something beyond their oh-so-helpful homework assignments and their condescending little life lessons. We gave them a bit of a fright, because this was in the works for three weeks before a whisper of it reached their pricked ears. It scares these teachers that something involving two hundred students, over a thousand dollars, deals with a corporate office, weeks of planning, could go on without their signed-and-sealed approval. It scares these teachers that we can organize without their guidance.
And deep inside me, in the part of my independent heart that would sign on to be a pirate in seconds flat, that makes it all worth it.