From The Classroom: Seth Perry Doesn&#8217;t Get It

From The Classroom: Seth Perry Doesn’t Get It

Posted on 08. Dec, 2009 at 11:16 am by Seth Perry in COLUMNS, From The Classroom

Hi there, all the adults in my readership.

You don’t get us and we don’t get you. That’s a fact.

You think we’ve got it made. No cares, no worries, no responsibilities. You’re confused by your mortgage payments and tax code–everything is spelled out so simply for us.

I think you’ve got it wrong. We’ve got cares (OMG I LOVE U ROBERT PATTINSON), worries (OMG GOSSIP GIRL MIGHT GO OFF THE AIR) and responsibilities (OMG I HAVE TO TAKE OUT THE TRASH AGAIN FML). And if you think you’re confused by the tax code, you wouldn’t believe some of the things they try to teach us in school that make no sense. Read on…

In art class, we’re drawing things. Correction–the class is drawing things. I am doodling aimlessly on a piece of paper, pretending that it comes from deep inside my soul. My art teacher comes up. “That drawing looks flat,” she says.

I resist the urge to tell her that this is because paper is flat, and therefore, unless she provides any tinfoil to draw on, my drawings will always be flat.

Instead I say “I didn’t know that.”

“You might want to round it out a little more,” she says, rolling her eyes.

I resist the urge to crumple it into a ball and ask her if it’s round enough. “What can I do to round it out?” I ask.

“You want to balance the colors. You might want to use a different color right here.”

“What different color should I use?”

“Well, you tell me. What’s the opposite of blue?”

Now, here’s where I’m confused. After a lot of head-scratching, my art teacher sighed and let me know that the opposite of blue was orange.

An opposite is something that is totally different from something else. However, blue and orange are both colors. They’re also both colors my art teacher wants me to use in my drawing. Those seem to me to be similarities. You would think the opposite of blue would be something that has no connection to it at all, like, say, fried chicken.

More things that confuse me:

As I walked into Geometry class, my friend came up to me.

“Dude, have you taken the French reading comprehension test yet?”

“Next period,” I said. “Is it hard?”

“It’s terrible!” he said. “It’s impossible to understand. They’ve got, like, partially future tense in there.”

Partially future tense?

I imagined myself breaking the space-time vortex and placing half of my body in the present and half of my body in the future, dancing partially in each one.

Of course, the section of the play we were reading was about a lawyer who convinced a tailor to give him free cloth. There was no breaking of the space-time vortex. There were no halves of people’s bodies dancing in the future.

More things that confuse me:

Every so often, we go over the tried-and-true 5-paragraph essay format in English class so we don’t forget. I understand the point of essays–they teach you research skills, they help you with your writing, they help you express yourself more articulately, and they help you craft an argument, which is great to know if you want to start a war or end a marriage.

What I simply don’t understand is the fifth paragraph, where you sum up and restate everything you’ve said in the previous four. I mean, redundancy is not something we’re going to need to use in the real world. I mean, you don’t see hamburgers called Big Macs That Are Big and Served at McDonald’s, or government branches called The Department of Homeland Security Which Provides Security to Our Homeland, or ice cream flavors called Mint Oreo Which is Made With Mint and Oreo.

I remain skeptical about the value of the fifth paragraph. I have not fallen prey to the redundancy trap yet. You can tell by the fact that I have not titled this article From the Classroom: Seth Perry Doesn’t Get That Which He Doesn’t Understand Because It Doesn’t Make Sense to Him and He Is Baffled By It.

More stuff I don’t understand:

In history, we are studying religions of East Asia and reading excerpts from the Tao Te Ching, which preaches non-action, or passive action, a form of simply going with the flow. What I want to know is how non-action includes writing a book. That’s far from a passive act. I’m working on a novel right now, and let me tell you, those things don’t write themselves.

Got stuff that confuses you about high school, teenagers, or anything else I may be able to talk intelligently about (i.e. if you have a question about art, you’re out of luck)? Let me know, and I’ll dedicate a column to it.

Have a confusionless day,