[RL] High School and Me: A Very Bad Fit

Someone on Twitter asked people to say what the most "them" thing they did in school was, and I knew my answer immediately.

The most me thing I did in high school was not really go to it.

Midway through my freshman year of high school, I had a doctor’s appointment at lunchtime. My mother dropped me back off at school, but I was too late to go to my class; my school had a strict "if the bell rings and you’re not in the classroom, it’s the tardy room for you" policy. It was up to the tardy room teacher to determine if you had an excused tardy or an unexcused tardy, but either way, you couldn’t go back to class.

I had never been to the tardy room before, but I found it pretty easily. It was a small cold classroom with most of the lights turned off and a series of cubicles facing the walls, some of which were occupied by students. It was also completely silent, because the teacher in charge, who I will call Coach because he was mostly the wrestling coach (we had a top-ranked team or something and it was a Big Deal), ruled with an iron fist.

That first day, he did not so much demonstrate his iron fist as confuse the shit out of me.

“I’ll call your doctor and check, you know,” he said when he heard my explanation. (This was back when you could still call a medical professional’s office and ask if a person had been there and they were allowed to answer.)

“Okay,” I said. “His number’s —“

“Oh no,” Coach said, sounding oddly smug. “You tell me his name and I’ll look it up in the phone book.” (Because this was also back when phone books were a thing.)

I was deeply confused about why he’d want to go to all that extra trouble when I had memorized the phone number just so he could avoid it, but I figured maybe he liked using the phone book. He was the wrestling coach, after all. He wasn’t a real teacher. Possibly phone books were an exciting skill development opportunity for him.

He went through a whole elaborate thing: looked up the number, copied it out on a Post-It, pulled the phone towards him, and put his hand on the receiver. He looked up at me at each stage of this process for what felt like too many seconds. I assume my face was a picture of puzzlement. I could not figure out why he was making such a production out of dialing a dang phone number. Like, yes, he was the wrestling coach, but surely even he could use a telephone without all this drama.

After he stared at me for a few seconds with his hand on the phone, he said, “I’m going to call now.”

“Good?” I said, completely lost but trying to be supportive.

He made the call. After my doctor’s office confirmed that I had indeed been there, he hung up the phone and said, “Okay, so you did have a doctor’s appointment.” He sounded surprised, and I finally realized what was going on.

“If I had just been late, I wouldn’t have lied about it,” I told him. “I don’t care enough to lie about it.”

He studied my face, and I deeply wished I could read expressions, because he was obviously thinking a thought. “Understood,” he said. He told me that since my tardy was excused, I didn’t have to do the work my teacher left with him in case of tardies. I told him I might as well, since I was there, and took it to my assigned carrel, right between two guys who reeked of weed and who were making very limited progress on their work but great progress on tracking individual dust motes.

Fifteen minutes later, I handed it back to him. “I have an answer key,” he told me, but did not make any move to open the file drawer and actually get it out.

“Okay,” I said. A few seconds passed in which he just watched me, chin propped on his hand. “Do ... you want me to check it?” I guessed.

“Nah,” he said. “Are your answers right?”

I blinked at him, because that was not how this conversation was supposed to go, but I answered him. “Yes,” I said, with the serene confidence in my own personal rightness that was possibly the most obnoxious thing about teenaged me.

He nodded and wrote 100% at the top of the paper without even looking at my answers. Then he said, “Mrs. [Name] didn’t leave anything else with me. Let’s see how long this takes you,” and handed me a word search.

I liked word searches, and also it was a very easy one, and also he’d challenged me, so I finished it standing at his desk (being somehow both incredibly shy AND a terrible show-off was another of my annoying teenaged traits, of which I had an abundance) and handed it back to him.

He watched me do it. “So how about you do some other teacher’s assignments?” he suggested, in experimental tones.

I agreed. He laughed out loud, badly startling several stoners, picked out a work packet from a history teacher, and sent me back to my carrel. I turned it in a few minutes before the bell rang.

“It’s been interesting, Miss [Lastname],” he said as he handed me my official excused tardy note. “I don’t expect to see you again.”

But he was absolutely wrong about that, because I had learned two things:

1. The tardy room was quiet. Like, no sounds were allowed at all in the part of the room where the carrels were.
   
2. The work in the tardy room was at your own pace and if you finished early you got random other work as a surprise bonus, meaning you could basically snoop on classes you hadn’t taken yet.

Since my entire school career to that point had been a mostly unsuccessful attempt to avoid both boredom and noise, I was very, very sold on this place.

A few days later, I decided I did not want to go to Communications class, which was taught by a hideously peppy (and loud) woman who, a few weeks before all this, had reported me to the school nurse as a troubled and potentially dangerous student. (She assigned a Christmas poem. I, a Jewish kid, wrote an anti-Christmas poem. The poem she liked best and read to the class as an example of How To Poetry featured the line “Money, money, money, give me more,” so I felt like my poem was extra justified, but I still had to sit through several lengthy sessions with the school nurse and the guidance counselor because of it, and I was embittered.) I waited in the hallway as it emptied out, and then walked through blissfully clear and quiet halls to the tardy room.

“I was in the hallway when the bell rang,” I reported to Coach when he asked what happened.

“Why?”

“Because I didn’t want to go to class.”

He covered his mouth with his hand for a second. “Okay,” he said. He pulled out the Communications teacher’s work folder and looked at it. Then he snorted. “Well, this is an unexcused tardy, so you absolutely have to do this work,” he said, and handed it to me.

It was a word search. When I looked up from finishing it, he was working on something with one hand while holding out another wad of history stuff to me with the other, and I took that to my carrel.

The next day, I was already halfway to the tardy room when the bell rang for Communications class to start.

A few days went by like that. Then, on a Monday, I walked into the tardy room right as the bell rang, and Coach had a hefty stack of work set out for me, neatly squared away on the corner of his desk — it had a post-it note with my name on it and everything.

I looked through it. “What class is this for?” I asked, because none of it looked like anything we were doing in Communications. Or in any other class I was taking that semester. Or any of the work I’d sampled in my random tour of Coach’s file drawer.

“I went down to the university and got some coursework for you,” he said. “Since I’m seeing you so much.”

“I’m a freshman. In high school,” I pointed out.

“Oh,” he said. “Well. I guess it’s just too hard for you, then.”

“IT IS NOT,” I snapped, and I spent the next two weeks working determinedly through a bunch of sociology coursework on criminal justice and social control, because I was going to prove him wrong.

At some point in there, Coach asked me, “Are you ever going to go to Communications class again?”

“No,” I said.

He nodded like he had expected nothing else. I did sociology and psychology coursework and read chapters of textbooks that he checked out of the university library for me, and I was happy. So happy that I started skipping other classes to go to the tardy room.

Within a month, I was in the tardy room more than I was in the whole rest of the school. My stack of work on Coach’s desk grew ever larger and developed colored tabs and labels. (His, not mine. I was never that organized.) When I stopped going to US History, Coach introduced me to the concept of primary sources and had me read diaries of American women from the 1800s from different social classes and parts of the country and compare and contrast them. When I stopped going to Civics, I became the possessor, only in the tardy room, of a politics textbook and a bunch of photocopied readings, and I was expected to write lengthy responses to questions about both sides of current contentious issues, which Coach read, underlining logical fallacies and factual errors and inadequate transitions and poorly-selected quotes and anything else he didn’t like. After a while, I was spending twice as long on them for the smug hit of satisfaction I got when he couldn’t find anything to underline. I was getting away with SO MUCH, and I loved it. I mostly didn’t even have to have a teacher anymore! (Yes. I actually thought that.)

But, of course, I still wasn’t actually going to most of my classes, or doing any of the work for them, so I was very surprised when I got my grades that quarter, the third quarter of my high school career, and I had As. When I got to the tardy room after my English class homeroom that day, Coach asked to see my report card, glanced at it, and handed it back to me. “Wanted to see what you got in Language Arts, German, and Chemistry,” he said. (Those were the classes I was still going to.) “I gave you the rest of these grades.” I have no idea how, but he’d somehow persuaded the teachers of the classes I was no longer attending to let him grade me. I didn’t even have excessive tardies on my report card. He told me, “You won’t go to your assigned classroom, fine. I don’t believe anyone here can make you. But you’re still going to class. I don’t count you as tardy anymore.”

I did not, at the time, realize how incredibly weird this was, that everyone had just accepted without any discussion or even notifying my parents that I would spend my school days mostly in the tardy room, doing work selected for me by a teacher whose job was supposed to be barking at stoners to stop giggling and scaring the crap out of kids who threw stuff at their teachers. All I knew was that I liked this way of doing school better and apparently no one was going to try to make me to stop.

At one point, I told Coach I would not be in the tardy room in the afternoon the next day, as I had signed up to take the ASVAB, a test intended to determine your aptitude for the military, and which you could take in any grade at my high school. (Almost everyone did, because you got out of class for it, which even at the time I found dodgy. I just couldn’t resist the allure of the test.)

His whole body went tense. “I did 20 years in the Marines,” he said. “I loved it. And I am not telling you, I am not ordering you, I am asking you. I am begging you. Please don’t join the military.”

“Oh, I won’t,” I told him. “I just thought the test sounded fun.”

“Recruiters are going to call you,” he told me. “Please do NOT listen to anything they say. You are NOT right for the military. It is not the place for you.”

I didn’t really understand why he thought I wasn’t right for the military, but, after all, I didn’t want to join, so I promised. I took the ASVAB (he was right; I would be talking to recruiters for the next six years, which made the whole "getting out of classes for an afternoon" thing much less of a good deal, but I kept my promise and listened to absolutely nothing that they said) and went on with my policy of only going to the classes whose teachers I felt had earned my attention and time.

I enjoyed this freedom to set my own educational rules. A lot.

The next year, I had to go to a different school (because the first school did not want me back), and there was no tardy room teacher at the new school. Also, by then, because I lived in a state where you could basically get a learner’s permit in the womb and be fully licensed to drive approximately seven minutes after your birth, I had the use of a car and could go wherever I wanted to. Also, I was very good at forging my mother’s signature.

This was exactly as bad a combination as it sounds like it would be.

Very quickly, I formed some innovative new policies about school attendance. I was supposed to go to school to learn things, right? But my classes all followed the same pattern: on Monday, new material was introduced. Tuesday through Thursday, that material was discussed or elaborated on, or there were worksheets on it. Friday, there was usually a quiz or a homework thing or a movie or something.

So, if I understood everything presented on Monday, my reasoning went, then I didn’t really need to go to class on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. I wouldn’t be learning! Surely no one would want that. More to the point, I did not want that, and I didn’t actually care what anyone else wanted.

So I went to school on Monday. On Friday, I went to school with an excuse note for the previous three days with my mother’s forged signature on it. The other days, I skipped. (And, yes, my school district had a mandatory attendance policy, and you were supposed to get in trouble with the district and the truancy officer if you missed more than 11 days. I missed more than 11 days every month. No one ever reported me to anyone. I assume that’s because I was a middle-class white girl and also incredibly annoying to have in class and they actually preferred it when I wasn’t there.)

But where did I go on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays? What terrible trouble did I get in? Well, I got into all kinds of trouble as a teenager and made all the bad choices in the world, but I didn’t get into any of it during school hours, because in school hours, I was at the university library. (Or sometimes the public library. I varied it, because back then I thought librarians would actually maybe care if someone was in the library who should be in school. Tip: librarians did not care then and they do not care now. They did occasionally suggest I check out some materials instead of using them exclusively in the library, but that was as far as it went.)

And I was, again, happy. The library was quiet! There were nice carrels to sit in where no one would interact with you! You could decide to read the complete works of Thomas Hardy! (Tip: do not do this, as much of his fiction will remove the soul from your body and replace it with a black hole into which hope and joy and all things good get drawn, never to be seen again.) You could research anything and cover pages and pages and pages of your notebooks with details of extremely sketchy early psychological experiments, or find out the most dangerous chemicals, or learn much, much too much about the treatment of suspected witches between 1400-1700. (Tip: do not do this last, as I learned things that I would pay large sums of money to forget.)

Eventually, this did come to the notice of someone, but because I was a privileged white girl, the person who noticed was the guidance counselor, Mrs. T.

She called me into her office and said, “Why are you missing so much school?”

Now, in retrospect, I realize this was my cue to lie. But, as with so many other cues in my life, I blew right past it. Instead, I explained to her, honestly and sincerely, with many supporting examples, my theory of only really needing to attend class on Mondays and Fridays and for tests. She listened quietly and occasionally nodded like I had said something interesting. After I was done, she spent some time looking through my file, which was sitting in front of her.

“What do you want to do after high school?” she said, after a few minutes of contemplating whatever terrible things were in there.

“College,” I said confidently. After all, I spent a lot of time at the local university already, both during school time and after it. In addition to looking random shit up, I was also doing research for grad students in my mother’s department and teaching new students in her lab how to do lit reviews and doing data entry for various experiments. (This was, let me just note here, a fairly bad idea, for a variety of reasons, but I enjoyed it, except the parts that involved other people. No one should ever have had preteen or teenaged me teach anyone ANYTHING, but that is another story.) I felt pretty sure I was going to enjoy college a LOT more than high school.

Later that week, Mrs. T called my parents and told them that high school was not a good fit for me.

I am pretty sure my parents responded, “We know. We know.”

And then Mrs. T changed my life forever by suggesting that maybe, just maybe, I should not finish high school, and instead go right on to college, given the whole bad fit situation. She was right, and I did just that. I remain extremely grateful to her. (She got in a BUCKET of trouble with the administration for it. Although I assume they were mostly angry that she made the same recommendation to my friend Boris, who was not nearly as difficult as I was and both smarter and better for the school’s stats.)

College, as I had predicted, proved to be way more fun than high school. It was basically a place where you were encouraged to set your own educational policies! And you could randomly sample any field you wanted just by signing up for a class; you didn’t even have to finish your work early so you could get a random draw from a file drawer! I was much happier in college.

And all of that is a very long-winded way to say that the most me thing I ever did in school, and the thing I did over and over again, was not really go to school, and somehow still end up doing more work than I would have if I had just gone.

Basically, my teenaged specialty was playing myself.