Passionately Promoting A More Perfect World

Oh, yeah. School was always awful. Until grade five, I had been completely convinced that the school I was going to was the single worst place that ever had, or ever could exist. What changed my mind? For grade five I changed schools and my new school was worse.

I don’t mind talking about it. I don’t think I’ve ever been triggered by the process of describing my past? It’s repeating events in it that’s a problem for me.

So, stories. Hmm. How about this one:

I was in grade three and it was Friday afternoon. My (first) primary school ran half a day on Fridays so we would have time to prepare for the Sabbath. Some kids didn’t actually go home the moment the day ended on Friday because our parents didn’t observe the Sabbath or had to work or whatever.

Because of this, the class teacher had to watch the remaining students for as long as it took their parents to collect them. I would often stay in the classroom and read during this time, while most other kids would go outside to play.

However, that day, my teacher was feeling tired and just didn’t want to deal with us. Thus, she told us all to go outside and not interfere with her. She said that if anyone came to her to complain about anything another child did, both the defendant and complainant would be beaten. (NB: Corporal Punishment: The Backbone of Caribbean Education.)

I correctly interpreted my incentives and the incentives of my peers, and did the most logical thing: The moment I got outside, I hid. I think I hid pretty well, too. Doesn’t matter. Within half an hour, the rest of the class found me and dragged me out of my hiding spot.

Two other kids slammed me against the fence and held me there; face pressed into the wire. Meanwhile, about a dozen other kids hit me with rocks, cricket balls, mangoes, and anything else hard and throwable they could find. They called me a wide variety of slurs for “homosexual” and, if there’s one thing Caribbean dialects are good at, it is having an extremely wide and creative range of homophobic slurs.

After I had mostly dissociated and stopped struggling, they started getting board. I have never understood when people claim that bullies leave you alone when they get board. In my experience, this is completely untrue. Whenever the game became dull, my classmates just got creative.

At first they tried throwing me to the ground and kicking me. This didn’t work. Next, they tried picking me up and swinging me as a battering ram against the fence. Nope; too dissociated.

Then someone thought of something clever. Earlier in the day, I had been info-dumping my special interests at my board/hostile classmates, because I used to be a fucking idiot. At this time, I was all about medicine, and I had been talking about tetanus and how you could get it after being cut with a dirty object.

It turns out one person had been listening to my monologue, because he suggested that the group of them try to give me tetanus. Three kids held me down while he went looking for something sharp. He found the lid of a can which had started to rust and held it up triumphantly. He then returned and used it to cut the palm of my hand.

I had a sever panic attack because I thought I was going to die. Presumably, this was suitably entertaining, because the other kids were satisfied by it and wondered off to play football. After they were gone, I just lay in the dirt waiting to die and not even caring too much about it anymore. I mean, why live?

After my mother found out about this, she was horrified and screamed at my teacher over the phone. She told me that the teacher had apologised and promised to never do that again.

The teacher never apologised to me, of course. There was a general policy of not apologising to students, because expecting apologies from teachers was disrespectful to them.

Anyway, I can never say school taught me nothing; I learned something new every day. That day, I learned that my problem wasn’t just that every other student hated me. I learned that the teachers weren’t there to look out for my interests. I learned that, as much as they were willing to praise me for my grades, they were about as indifferent to me as the rest of the world. Most importantly, I learned that indifference is just as important as oppression when it comes to the cause of suffering in the world.

[Obligatory plug for the Being Less Indifferent Club]