If Only I Paid More Attention in School
Oh, the places I’d go
School sucked.
That would have been my fourth-grade answer to anyone asking. That probably would have been my answer for most grades. Outside of art, which I loved, and music, which I tolerated (until my mom would — without my knowledge — schedule a violin recital in front of the class), I didn’t care much for the other classes.
Beyond the shock value of dissecting a pig heart or hearing my 80-year-old teacher say genitalia body parts, I couldn’t keep the bones of the body straight, and math went about as well as math could go for someone who hated it. Underlining verbs and circling nouns was the equivalent of math for writing. I went to school because that’s what I was supposed to do and I did my homework because I was afraid of my parent’s wrath if I didn’t.
I doodled in class — which the teachers didn’t like — and I’d scribble out soap operas for whatever subjects I was supposed to be studying because I found it funny to think about an octagon in an isosceles love triangle with his brother’s sister, the rectangle.
Funny how my work now centers more around what I wasn’t supposed to be doing in class.
And yet, every once in a great while, something in school would pique my interest. Sometimes an image connected…