Underwater Basket Weaving

Essays

Sep 10

I once took a full-semester class in college called Women and Crack Cocaine. There was a book by the same name that we read. It was incredible because it was so nuanced. The semester before I took a class called Deviance. I loved my second college and my advisor, Al, who taught both of these classes. I went from failing business college to straight A grades because of the freedom of choice. You’d be surprised what students can accomplish when you open up the bandwidth on their educational opportunities.

People associate grades with intelligence, but the inverse is possible. In restrictive educational environments, entrepreneur minds are stunted because they aren’t allowed to deviate from the syllabus. Teachers are handcuffed to their desks and requirements, and the students are left to carry the boring pieces of the puzzle to their grandma who has to place the big dog face where it goes.

I was the sole advisor to a Museum Management Masters program at a local university for three years. They were closing the program and weren’t enrolling any more students. The university wouldn’t run a class without eight people signed up. I explained to them that there were only five students in the program who hadn’t taken a specific class and there were no new enrollments. They made me teach independent studies to each of them instead of catering to their own flailing program.

My Constitutional Law teacher in law school used to sit on the end of his table in his dumb cardigan and antagonize the entire class. I always wondered what his home life was like. Did his wife hate him? Did he have kids? Did they hate him? Or was this just an act to encourage us to buck up as future lawyers? No matter what story I tried to tell myself about him, he was always a dick. And Con Law was boring enough as it was.

I taught police offers at the police training institute about DUI arrest and prosecution in the late 90s. They thought we were against them because we were trying to help them make better arrests that actually stuck in court. It was like telling young bros that their PE sport for the week was underwater basket weaving. It was an uphill climb. A month later, I had to drop a DUI case because one of the cops who was in my class didn’t listen to what I said.

When I taught university classes, I didn’t think they were apt to solve world peace. Exhibition Design, The Business of Art, Art and Law - they were art-centric freewheeling education. I told them at the start of the semester to always turn something in. I told them that if they wrote, “Ur mom,” on a piece of paper, they would get a 55, the number amount I assigned to a turned-in F. However, if they turned in nothing, they would get a 0 and it would collapse their final grade. I can’t even count how many times students took the 0.

In tenth-grade Chemistry class, there was an aggressive girl who was the most fun to be around. But it was impossible to concentrate in class because of her. She wore skimpy Desperately Seeking Susan garb and cursed like a sailor while talking about sex while the teacher was going over the elements on the giant chart we could never escape. She told me one day, midway through class that I had “fuckable thighs.” I am still betwixt.