Our Rapt Attention (Fiction)

Summer school is not for the achievers in life.  It’s for folks who were deemed to have not been paying enough attention during the school year. I’m not sure how this lack of attention was quantified or justified. After some cryptic process which equates time spent in proximity with actual awareness of whatever it is that happens, by fiat it was determined that the summer school prospect  has failed to pony up enough of this attention commodity.  Thus the summer school student is required to make up this deficit. It is, however, a one size fits all make up. It’s 25 days, whether you were only partially goofing off, failing in an entire learning realm or flat out bong comatose during the entire previous school year. In return for 25 days of the early summer tacked on school time, the slacker may join his age specific herd the next regular school year.

It’s not a fun position to be in. I feel sorry for the kid who just barely qualified—usually due to absenteeism.  Get the mumps or mono or have your parents split up or, God Forbid, be dragged out of state so that a parent can tend to the needs of a near death relative—and you are in summer school, no matter how brilliant of a student you otherwise have been. (There were also a cadre of parent types who sent their kids to summer school essentially because they hated childhood.) I personally never just qualified for summer school. For me it was a question of how mandatory my participation was going to be. I was a typical attendee, given that I was a demonstrable scholastic non achiever. I was somewhat atypical, inasmuch as I was there every year. From second grade through junior high, summer school was how I spent Labor Day through the 4^th of July.

While everyone else was running off and playing rugby or mass soccer or exploring the swamp, I was doing time.  For some of us attendees, it would set a pattern for the rest of our lives. The great majority of the people you meet in summer school are the same people you will meet later on in detention and, if you still haven’t gotten the point, of the same general stripe that you will rub shoulders with in prison. (1) It does teach you how to do time, provided you are capable of learning at least that.

It is an introduction to the fine laws of limited recourse.  Nothing you do in summer school will improve your official lot in life. Ace it or get a D and it’s all the same. It’s 25 days, spread over about six weeks, with some of them half days. You can’t miss more than two days. Don’t get kicked out. That’s it.

There was actually more good than bad to it, at least for me. The bad parts are easy and obvious to itemize.  You are in with your fellow non achievers, largely—most of whom are behavior problems. You are sweltering.  At the time, summer school was held in the most central school that wasn’t yours. In my day, they didn’t bother with air conditioning. Since it was assumed that you weren’t the most social types, group projects were rare. Also somewhat rare was reading aloud, chalkboard work or any other form of public humiliation. They already knew you were tards. There was no point in riling you up. In fact, the environment was engineered to maintain a form of serenity not normally found in classrooms. The teacher, who was also sweltering, had very little incentive to expend energy. All they are asking you to do is something vaguely school-like and not make a ruckus.  Any sustained outburst of disruptive behavior gets you expelled. (2) Endure the kid who eats glue. Don’t sit by the bullies. Keep busy and quiet. And in 25 days it’s over.

I weirdly thrived in this sort of setting. It gave me time to explore the academic experience, unfettered from the need to buck up on my many deficiencies.  I found things I liked to do. And I did that. I read novels. I wrote. Most importantly, I learned to lose myself in the doing of a task. These inadvertently attained skills carried over to my real scholastic life and eventually to life life.

If only regular school had been this way. I should also mention that the summer school teachers seemed to not hate me. No slight intended to my regular teachers. There was something about me that caused a number of instructors to become infused with (occasionally murderous) rage after several months of exposure. In small doses I wasn’t able to trigger that sort of reaction. From what I can tell, if left to do my own thing, I’m something of a model student. At least for 25 days.

Mind you, my objective was to just get through it. The good stuff just sort of happened.  As a veteran attendee, I was adept at getting  into the swing of summer school. Midway through my career as a good-only-in-summer school student I had an actual life-lingering school experience.

There were twelve boys and six girls in the room. As per usual, there was no rotating classrooms. We spent the entire day together.  Eight of the boys (including myself) are mild to severe behavior problems. Four of the boys and the majority of the girls are special needs level learning disabled. Assigned to the classroom is a single instructor, a Japanese woman in her early twenties. During the regular school year she is a reading teacher, an art teacher and a gym teacher.

Some of the boys are taller than this woman. She’s at even weight with most of the boys.

She’s a quiet person. You have to actively listen to hear her. The classroom was sun blanched and humid, so much so that fans normally used for floor drying were brought in and every single window was open. Compounding the distractions, the widows faced a somewhat  busy street.

It was a challenging set up.  I recall the teacher asking for a change of rooms. At first I think most of us misunderstood her request.  As opposed to a room change, we thought she didn’t want to be with us.  It set a bad tone and the first two days were somewhat tense. Any road noise, paper flutter, or other distraction became some student’s cue to do something they absolutely should not do. It was not entirely out of control—for a pen of sweaty animals—but it wasn’t quite a classroom, even by summer school standards.

Day three the boulder appeared. I’m sure the boulder wasn’t the size of a bowling bag, but that’s how I remember it. It was a grainy, misshapen lump of red, tan and gold. The thing had the overall feel of fine concrete, although it did flake off dust.

From the moment the boulder appeared, every time there was some sort of disruption—environmental or man-made—the teacher would call on someone to move the boulder. It went from the desk to the counter to the rear book shelf and back several times a day. The boulder was heavy and cumbersome. Every time you moved it, you had to go wash your hands. (The classroom’s only amenity was a sink.) Sometimes the person being called on to move the boulder had been misbehaving, but more often than not the choice of movers seemed random.  By the end of the first week, everyone had moved the boulder several times.

No one asked her why. Boundary testing, even in summer school, has its limits. I think she had us unnerved. As it was, she was attempting to teach us Yoga and Ti Chi and Haiku poetry and various other cultural handicrafts, none of which seemed to be on our collective wavelength. On the other hand, she wasn’t screaming or calling for Dr. Death the principal, so if having you move a heavy slab around was her thing, so be it.

Mystification only lasts so long. By the start of week two, the animals had decided to assert themselves. Oddly, at that point, the boulder was on the teacher’s desk. I cannot recall the circumstances entirely, but the project involved paper Mache, a confluence of glue and newspaper. No sooner were instructions given and the stuff manufactured  when globs of it started flying about the room.

The chaos reached a splatter plopping  crescendo as the teacher drifted behind her desk. She held up one arm and glowered at us.  Then her wrist came down with a lightning flash, disintegrating the boulder. It popped, with a talcum mushroom cloud. A spray of fine sand spilled off the corners of her desk. Only coin sized nuggets remained.

She had our attention for the next twenty days.

The paper Mache lantern project was followed by a kite project and a general practicum in origami and calligraphy.  We were taught some basic draftsmanship. We practiced yoga in the parking lot. We wrote and read haiku poems. We made shadow puppets with biographies based on mythology. It may not have been on our wavelength, but that seemed not to matter. 

On the last day of class, the boulder reappeared. It wasn’t the same one. This one came with a twin. Both seemed to be equally grainy and similarly colored. One of them she let us pass about. She explained that it was limestone, actually sand compressed over millions of years. In its normal state this is like any other rock.

She retrieved the rock from us and dropped it on the table. It thudded. Then she held up its twin. “But if you soak it over night and let it dry out,” she said, letting it fall. It exploded in a flourish of dust. 

(1)    Summer school attendance does not necessarily lead to the lethal injection. One would hope that the majority of youths afflicted with an  inability to behave hop off the short bus to doom at some point. It is a graduated process with accelerating consequences, based on the concept that even sociopaths have a pain threshold.

(2)    Expulsion on the one strike rule wasn’t always enforced. It depended on what your reason for being in summer school was.  For the most part, the student is in summer school in exchange for not flunking a grade level. Therefore, if you flunk summer school (by being kicked out), you also flunk the grade level.  So there is a strong motivation to behave.