The oddest memories come bubbling up to the surface when you least expect them. While I was brushing my teeth, quite out of the blue, mind you, I recalled a pair of personal experiences that I’ve never shared before. The first memory was when I was in middle school. The assignment was to write a paper on something historical and I chose Hitler, the Halocaust, and I used a complicated word because at the time it fit with the theme of what I was writing about. The word was “schizophrenic” but what really was a surprise to me was the teacher at the time, who I don’t really remember beyond being rather older and probably a sports coach more than a teacher picked my paper to read to the class. I think, as I remember it, he was trying to shame me or belittle me in front of my classmates by singling me out and demonstrating a poorly written paper. I sat back and took it and chuckled to myself, inside my head when he got to that big word and couldn’t pronounce it. My argument was cogent and valid and I was supposed to feel bad because I didn’t use real words in my writing. I think it was this first thing that struck me, that first real strong signal that adults were really full of shit. I was a kid, he was a teacher, so that was that, but it stayed with me. The whole part where I was supposed to feel chagrined but actually what I felt was pity for this older man, that he struggled and stumbled over this one word and since he didn’t understand it, that I obviously just made it up.

This memory carried a very particular emotion with it, which called out to another memory which came on the first one’s heels. I remember I was on a bus, I was in my mid-teens, and I was going on some sort of class field trip. I brought along a book I was reading, which just happened to be Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time”. I was making quite a bit of progress reading the book and I was minding my own business when the teacher, a different one from the first in this story, chatted me up. He was curious about the book I was reading and he asked me how much of it I understood. I was taken aback by this as I figured that everyone who wanted to read this book could progress through its contents without too much trouble. That if you were curious about Stephen Hawking, you’d likely have some background ideas about what you were getting into and that anyone in that state could manage just fine. Then the teacher told me that the book I was reading was beyond him. I closed the book and put it away and left it like that until I got home. I felt strange that I was working through a book that a teacher confessed he couldn’t even think of tackling.

It may have been these things, and just life in general as I grew up that I realized that for some, people like me, a little bit at least, just had to go through the motions before I could do things I wanted to do, things I wanted to study, and the only person I had to impress with my wit and intelligence was myself. I kept to myself in grade school, middle school, and high school. I was never included and it was just part of what had to be. It was unpleasant but I knew that it was terminal. The unpleasant students that surrounded me, the unpleasant (except not all of them) teachers, and in general the entire situation was something that I just had to endure.

I used to think that school was a trial by fire and that all kids had to walk the same path. As I grow older I see things with a more mature perspective and I feel now that it was needlessly awful. So much of my potential was ignored or belittled, and I knew I was right and these adults were fools. There is no reason to weep over spilled milk, but now, when I see such brightness in kids I want to stop and clear a space for them to explore and think and blossom in a way that the rigid structure I was in never had room to allow. But these aren’t my kids and I don’t have a place or the power to effect the real change that my impetus calls for. One thing I will take from these memories is a respect for some young kids, that they can wrap their minds around really complicated ideas and to always be vigilant when evaluating the intellectual passion of others. Just because you don’t know a thing doesn’t mean someone who is *supposed* to be a learner and has a firmer grip on things than the teacher should be made to feel small, wrong, or awkward. Kids that carry around books that are, let’s say, atypical, really should get more focus and more to work on.

Just because someone is young and perhaps foolish doesn’t mean they aren’t bright. Sometimes people you never expect shine brightest of all.