Retrospect

During the past week, now that I have returned to Portland, I have spent a lot of time with Leeor. Having absconded to Germany for the first seven months this year, he has crossed my path recently. Aside from catching up and having our famously abstruse arguments that stretch on for hours and hours, we spent some time visiting teachers at Wilson together. It was a bit more interesting than I had anticipated. I had several observations, but here are two notable ones.

In primary school, it is surprisingly easy to go through classes without ever knowing teachers well. Teachers instruct well over 100 students, and there is rarely any incentive to befriend teachers on a personal basis, or for teachers to befriend students. Indeed, given the unruly behavior that can characterize students of the age 14-18, having such close relationships can corrode a teacher's position of power to enforce discipline. While I thought I had very good relationships with most of my teachers, interacting with them now surprised me. The conversation was exactly like meeting an old friend: they asked about my life, and they told my about theirs and their families'. They did not feel afraid to share their (sometimes negative) opinions about their coworkers or administrators. One of the most surprising things I learned, in fact, was that all the respectable teachers dislike the same administrators and teachers for all the same reasons that the students do. Everyone with whom I spoke seemed a bit more human and likable.

My other observation occurred when filling out an application for a scholarship. The form asked for a list of my honors and awards from high school and college. Lest I were to become even more arrogant than I already am, I had relegated all of my awards from high school to a junk heap in my closet and I tried to forget about all of them. To refresh my memory, I looked through the junk and found a somewhat complete list in an application for a scholarship I completed a year and a half ago. As I was reading it, I was actually genuinely impressed with the volume of junk I had accomplished and won. There was a lot of stuff on that list. At the same time, however, I finally understood how utterly trivial and meaningless it all was. This list was nothing more than a long list of winnings in a very elaborate game. While I honestly did enjoy doing and winning practically everything on that list, it was dubious whether I would have still done it all the same if there were not the expectation that writing competitions or mock trial were the sort of stuff that "good" students do. Moreover I found this copious list of awards to incredibly ironic, given that the more I learn the more I understand how horribly ignorant I am in general and compared to other people. In this sense, all of these awards truly were meaningless; they were nothing more than dangerous illusion of some kind of skill or enlightenment. While it all did it's duty, giving me access to four more years of excellent education--and saving me about $160,000--a disturbing amount of it was nothing more than the modern academic version of the Cheyenne tribe's custom of decapitating their enemies in battle and carrying the severed heads as trophies of their conquest.