A Young Adult Writing Experience

 I haven't written anything in a long while, despite my good intentions.  To get started again requires something I'm in short supply of: self-discipline.

This morning I was inspired by a Calvin & Hobbes cartoon which neatly summarized something that happened to me a few years back.

Found on FaceBook and used without permission.

I graduated high school in 1970, which put me in sixth grade in, let's see... 1963 - 1964.  I was twelve years old with an active imagination.  Back then dirt was not a brand new thing (that was my grandfather's era), but the concept of actually teaching children something without the threat of physical violence was.  No, I'm not kidding.  In the generation prior to mine, if you didn't learn you were beaten and humiliated until you did learn - it was assumed you were lazy and obstinate.

Mrs. Levy was my sixth grade teacher.  She was a twenty-something woman, fairly attractive, and  probably just out of her stint as a student teacher.  She wasn't all that bright, had very little experience, and was prejudice as hell.  She  didn't like boys, she didn't like the goyim, and she hated anyone who dared to contradict her infallible knowledge about everything.  Me, I tripped over an empty gin bottle and guess where I landed?

One fine day Levy gave us a prompt for an English composition assignment.  We were to use the prompt and write a short story.  The prompt was one child tripping over another's feet, which had all the literary inspiration that a rousing game of slap jack might have to a top ranking player from the English Bridge Union.  When the class complained about the lack of substance, Mrs. Levy suggested that one or both of the two characters might be mentally ill.

Oh yeah.

Grossly underestimating the sanguinary proclivities of the boys, she turned us loose.  The resultant stories were, charitably speaking, a bit intemperate.  Possibly one-third of these junior grade potboilers would have given Hannibal Lecter pause.  We were directed to read our work aloud, and about halfway through the boys contributions to the Western Canon she called a brief intermission to remark that we, the great authors of the future, should be careful about what we write least the author be turned over to a psychiatrist for evaluation and possible treatment.  I think the word lobotomy was mentioned.

I strongly suspect that this is how I ended up sitting across the desk from a school councilor a few weeks later, who rejected me on grounds of normalcy.  Crazy ain't stupid, you know.

One thing I do know for a stone cold fact is that Levy passed me out of sixth grade because she didn't want to see me again.  Next year I'd start Junior High (grades 7, 8, and 9) and I'd be someone else's problem.