Brief Intervals of Horrible Sanity One Season in a Progressive School

"This is why Columbine happened." Cindy Fernandez, on the other side of the room, is yelling something. She's got a loud voice, a voice part bullhorn and part plaintive baby, and when she decides to use it, which she does, often, there's not much space for anything else. She's yelling something, something insulting, which again, is something she does, often, and the only thing I notice, as I huddle in my chair, as close to Peter Garcia as I can manage without being obvious about it, is that she's not, for a change, insulting me.Why should I care, why should I be such an egomaniac to mind what anyone says to me, but yet I notice its absence, the absence of insult of me, I can, instead of being the target, watch this: Cindy Fernandez whip up the two girls on either side of her, her cronies, two-thirds of class 9B's very own Witches of Endor, Cindy Fernandez whip them up, and thus her side of the room, into a passion. A passion of what? It doesn't matter: a passion of passion. The thing itself, a motor simply whirring with no purpose but the whir. Peter Garcia pushes his chair back, which is a sign that he is pissed off, really, Say any more, Cindy Fernandez, and you might be sorry,because while Peter is no macho posturer, and certainly, no bully, he is a Hobbit-reading, skateboarding, peace-loving boy, he has a sense of honor and self-respect that many an adult might envy, and "This," he repeats, in that calm voice of his, that voice that never loses its cool, "thisis why Columbine happened." I agree. I agree. I have begun to understand, from the inside now, how high school can be a place of such storm and terror that something terrible could bubble up in a boy. How day after day of insult and confusion and the thought that this is it, that these classmates, these halls, are the world, the only world, could corrode you from the inside out. I think this, and worst of all, it doesn't even shock me to think this. It is late in the year, and I have about given up the policing which, despite any high-falutin' language to the contrary, I was really hired to do: Hats off, do-rags off, Walkmans off, hands off, Tim, did you hear me? Save it for later. Save it for the park. The street. The gutter. Shirts on. Pants on. Is that all you're wearing, Miss? Big Macs put away. French fries put away. Sodas put away. Magazines put away. Is that the language you want to be using? Hats off. Do-rags off.And so on, and so on. I have given it up, I almost never even walk to the other side of the room, the side of the room ruled by Cindy Fernandez instead of Peter Garcia. "Yeah," says Peter, "it started like this," and before I can stop myself, I talk to him the way I would to anybody, I am so grateful to have that sane human presence in the room that I quite forget he is just fifteen. "I'll say," I snap. "I'm surprised a teacher didn't grab a machine gun and do it herself." I appall myself. How could I have said such a thing, such a heartless thing? I appall myself. But now I have the luxury of appalling myself. I am not in that room, that room I grew to hate, Room 313, with its computer screens and its sour human smell and the one window too high up and too small for anyone to jump out of. I'm not in that room, if I have any luck at all I'll never walk into that damn room again. This is a story about high school. But not only a story about high school. It may be more accurate to say this is a story of idealism run amok, in a place that happens to be a high school. In some ways it could be any high school. There are bullies and the bullied; long dull days and moments of enlightenment; virtuoso teachers and those who need a course or two in classroom management. There's a principal intoning the improving jargon of the day and posters on the walls telling those who can't read to Read!as if thatGold, Elizabeth is the author of 'Brief Intervals of Horrible Sanity One Season in a Progressive School' with ISBN 9781585422449 and ISBN 1585422444.