Cool Cherry Cream

Teachers lecture. That’s what they do. They lecture to deaf ears. They say “you have to come to class, because if you don’t, you’re going to fail”.

Well, I’ve got news for you. You know those people you’re talking to? They’re in class. They’re not the ones you should be yelling at.

And you know the people you’re telling to hand in their assignments and not to be late? That’s not the majority of people in the class, and we, the many, have to suffer for the few.

I made the conscious decision to become a part of that few this week.

Okay, so maybe I’m trying to justify not doing the assignment by coming up with this crafty, condescending explanation because I don’t want to say “I just didn’t feel like doing it”. That’s the sign of a true slacker, n’est-ce pas?

In the past, I have left parts of assignments unfinished, like in grade 11 English. The teacher had us all come up to her desk and show her our work, and if we weren’t done, she’d ask why. People before me would say “oh, I was really busy” or “I had to work” or “my dog died” or whatever. But not me. I just said “I have no excuse”. She had nothing to say to that, so I just sat back down at my seat.

Teacher don’t get that. They expect you to whine to them and ask for an extension. Not me. I don’t do that. I just plain and simple didn’t hand in this paragraph. I didn’t go up to her and ask for an extension. I don’t deserve an extension. If I got an extension, the rest of the class should be pissed at me, because that’s just not fair to them.

It’s not that I didn’t agree with the assignment. It didn’t go against my beliefs. I didn’t think it was stupid or anything like that. I actually quite liked the assignment: you were supposed to write a paragraph that described your best friend, then rewrite it using biased words to give a negative impression. Honestly, it sounded like fun. But Sunday night came ’round and I just wasn’t feeling it. I tried, but ultimately felt that whatever I wrote would be lame, and I don’t really like writing lame stuff.

This particular teacher confuses me. For one, she doesn’t like to hand stuff back, which is one thing I hate in teachers (along with teachers who don’t give solid due dates — “it’ll be due in a couple of weeks”). She also explains things in weird ways. She doesn’t mean what she says, but I usually think I know what she means, so I’ll do what I think she means rather than what she actually says, you know what I mean?

So when she says that there were about five people in the class who just plain didn’t get the political cartoon assignment, I don’t know if that includes me or not. She asked us to write a replacement for the Lord’s Prayer to be read in Parliament. My understanding is that they want to remove the Prayer because it is exclusively Christian, and that doesn’t apply to everyone. So I wrote a secular “prayer” that basically said “we are here to serve our country” yada yada. Of course, the inclusion of some Led Zeppelin lyrics in it could allow me to make a case for it being satire, if that is in fact what she wanted.

Am I reading too much into it? Was *I* one of the people she was aiming the lecture at? I’ve never been one of those people, so I can’t tell.

University. They always threaten us with university. It’s the high school teacher’s greatest weapon, as high school was to the middle school teacher. “University isn’t like this, you know. They don’t take the kind of crap you get away with here in high school. And you’re paying for it!” Heard it a thousand times before, and I’m certain I’ll continue to hear it the rest of the semester.

But you see, this is exactly what proves my sheer genius. I already heard her lecture before she even said it. That fateful Sunday night, I heard her say that “you pay for university, and if you don’t hand stuff in, you fail, and they don’t give two shits about it”. And that is precisely the reason that I didn’t do the assignment.

I can get away with it now. There are little to no consequences. “Some of you have gotten early acceptance, but that doesn’t mean you can just stop working”. Well, technically, since I’m a post-grad, I already have six 4U courses, including prerequisites for my program, and I don’t need this grade to get into university. Sure, getting a 90% in it would definitely help me boost my entrance average for a scholarship, but considering English teachers are… English teachers… I can’t see that happening.

“Some of you are eighteen and think you don’t need to do anything anymore”. This is what got to me, this is what really makes me think she was talking to me. I don’t know most of the people in the class, which would mean most people are grade 12s and not post-grads and are thus only seventeen.

But being eighteen never even crossed my mind. If someone asked me how old I was, I would probably still say seventeen. I was seventeen for a whole year, but I’ve only been eighteen for less than three months. I’m used to being seventeen.

This isn’t an age issue. I’ve never used being eighteen as an excuse for anything. I’ve never taken advantage of the fact that I can sign out of class whenever I want. Even today, when my afternoon teacher decided not to show up again, I went through the regular ritual of signing in for first class, sitting through study hall, then signing in for second class before going home. I didn’t automatically think “I’m eighteen, I don’t need this bullshit, I’m going home”. No. So don’t bring age into it. Your argument has holes in it.

And even so, one missed assignment at the beginning of the semester isn’t going to fail me. I think things through, you see, and I know where I can make sacrifices.

Yet another fact that plays into my choosing not to do the assignment is that my life goal is to do everything. And not handing in an assignment is included in everything, isn’t it? In my fifteen years in the education system, I’ve handed in every single bloody thing that’s ever been asked of me. New experiences are good.

Like I said, it’s just further proof that I am perfect. I thought it through, I looked at the consequences and realized that nothing bad would happen if I didn’t hand it in (in fact, it gave me something to write about).

You can’t even call it a mistake, because I intended to do it, after all. And not making mistakes, that’s kind of the definition of being perfect, isn’t it?