After rereading this, I now understand a little more why teachers don't like me, and why I wil likely never pull off a real education

I think I am going back to school. It should be pretty simple - I've now completed most of the math courses offered on Khan academy, which go beyond highschool level anyway, and never had any real trouble with other courses beyond occasionally completely disagreeing with the point of view offered by the textbook or teacher.

Which has really kind of screwed me up a bunch over the years.

Take, for example, my 'Finding Forrester' assignment, one of the few I really remember. We had to watch this movie about this kid who is a basketball star but secretly loves to write, and his relationship with his literary idol.

The big theme of the assignment was "Explain the story, and detail how "Kid's Name" grew and developed across the course of the movie".

The big problem I had was that to be pretty frank, it was a shitty fucking movie, and "Kid's Name" didn't really develop at all, or grow, or change, or learn new things until the very, very absolute end of the movie, when he had to in order to allow everyone to have a happy ending. I get why things are that way - if he'd had an epiphany in the first five minutes rather than the last five minutes, then the rest of the movie would have been pretty fucking dull, because what's the point?

Now, had they picked a classic horror movie instead of a sappy movie, I could have done it. Take a show like "I Still Know What You Did Last Summer". Sure, it's a meaningless story and stars annoying people, and while it could be argued that it's not school appropriate, I distinctly remember reading the novelization around the age of 10, when I stumbled on it in the English portion of the school library.

The point is that it follows a very classic horror formula:

Take a weak, shy, or innocent girl, and place them with some rowdy friends. She will be the wallflower, the hidden beauty, the one without a boyfriend or with a dick boyfriend.

Put them somewhere remote, and start the creepiness.

At first, she will run and cry and hide, and any boyfriend that is present will spend his time trying to protect her.

By about midway through the movie, some people will be dead, and she will have begun to lose her fear. Research into what is happening will probably begin, maybe the boyfriend will die. As things progress, it will become clear to her that someone needs to really step up.

By the end of the movie, our heroine usually is now well armed, and has fought a battle with the villain. Maybe the boyfriend is dead, maybe not, but regardless, he is unavailable, and she will have to truly face her fears. No longer will she be the wallflower - she's pissed and out to kick ass.

Should the villain be defeated, we will usually be treated to happy scenes afterwards of how much our heroine's life has improved and how much more outgoing she is.

And that, poorly written and thought out as it often is, is far more character development that you can squeeze out of Finding Forrester or movies like it.

So, I ended up doing two essays. One as a persuasive attempt, arguing how there is more character development in shitty B movies that in the tripe I'd been assigned to watch. The other was somewhat more in the curriculum, and was about how LITTLE character development had occurred in the movie, despite the main character constantly being mashed headfirst into ridiculously unlikely and blunt situations that would have given any real person plenty of new perspective on life. Though I don't think I'm overly grammatically correct at this point in my life, nor am I an overly good speller anymore, I know both essays were pretty well written in comparison to those of the rest of my "slow class" peers.

I turned in the second and got nothing but a comment that it was not the assignment. Yay.

Another good example of this that comes to mind is an assignment from the same class, but a different teacher. At the start of the year, to assess our skills, we were asked to read an article on a homeless woman, and then write about what difficulties she might face, or how to help homeless people on a larger scale, or how one's life decisions affect you, etc. etc.

I frankly came up with a blank on most of that shit. Every homeless person I've ever known, not met, but actually known anything about, has ended up in their situation as the result of what were either really, really unfortunate fucking circumstances, mental illness, or because of some really obviously terrible choices, like selling all of their shit for crack. How the fuck do you help someone who lost their life because they were convicted of a crime they were later proven innocent for and have now lost it and can't cope with life, or someone who ran away when they were ten and have lived such a rough life they are now this nearly instinctual, feral creature? Or someone who willingly sold all their shit for crack, and would do so again in three point five seconds flat?

Now that I am older, I could maybe come up with something to say on that.

Unfortunately, at the time I had nothing. So, I tried to write about the difficulties she faced.

Even more unfortunately, no matter how many times I reread the article, I just could not see any sort of indication that this lady actually was all that unhappy with life. Granted, it is not easy being homeless and I'm sure it's a shitty way to live, but for what it was worth, she seemed pretty content with how things were. She had some friends, she could make money delivering papers, and she had a nice little shack to shelter her. Food was usually available at banks if she was broke, and she considered a whole wack of critters that hung around her shack to be her loving pets. The winters were really hard, she stated, and she didn't know how many more of them she could survive, but she figured she could always move to the south end of Ontario and things wouldn't be too bad.

All in all, this left me with nothing. So, once again, two essays.

One, certainly rushed through. Winters suck for homeless people. Not having houses or food sucks for homeless people, though our lucky lady seemed ok on that front. Things in general are harder for homeless people, etc. It was admittedly a piss poor show as there was nothing really to quote from the article besides the two lines about winter.

The second was about how the lady in the article seemed pretty happy considering. The general theme was that here we have a lady with pals, food, and shelter. It's a step above rock bottom, sure, but it's still the same things that all people need, and it's still present. On top of that, she spent the whole article referring to herself by a title used by the pre-Revolutionary French nobility, which makes it pretty clear that she's maybe just a little fucking whacked and may not really perceive herself or her situation the same way we do. She has no major drug problems, and is capable of caring for herself. On top of it all, nowhere does she say she's unhappy or worried, and sounds much more like someone describing their lifestyle to someone else leading a completely different lifestyle than someone in distress. While it might not be the kind of life most people would be happy in, she obviously was, and isn't the whole point of life to just be happy?

I turned in the second essay, because the first was dull and wretched, and got it back with a big note asking where I got the idea she thought she was a French noblewoman (art/"planning" teachers are not usually overly well educated, nor apparently motivated enough to look up terms like "Marquess") from and to come see the teacher.

Who then called me insensitive, that I should lighten up and give life a chance because not everyone is so jaded, and said that life gets better when you get to college and meet other gay people.

Which was certainly much better than the school psychoanalyst/career guidance type person I was later forced to go see asking me in the middle of a battery of job placement questions why I hated the Jews. I'd imagine that even if I did, that would be a really fucking hard question for a 16 or 17 year old to answer when put on the spot like that.

And far better than getting locked out of class for a week because I had to go to the bathroom pretty damn bad, and regardless of how many other people were already in the hall, it was going to happen very shortly, either here, or on the toilet.

So yeah, that's how most of my classes went, and eventually, "went" was something I no longer did in respect to them.

Don't get me wrong, though, I was certainly a problem kid in some ways, and felt I was as mature as any of the teachers. I tended to talk to them as though we were both on the same level, something which most teachers I had did not like, and certainly did not respect any of them, even those who meant well - pretty hard to respect someone who knows nothing about you and still thinks they know best about your sexuality. I can remember many meetings with parents, teachers, and principals where I "won" any argument against the lot of them (teachers side with teachers, not their kids), and left with a mutual apology. Once I was in highschool and the parents had stopped bothering to come, I remember a few great meetings with an angry teacher, the vice principal or some other witness, and the principal, in which I could hear Maurer ripping whomever a new asshole through the door for a good few minutes after the meeting had ended. I am totally sending my kids to school with tape recorders - it pays off eventually.

I was not always so contrary about everything simply because I just fucking love being different and constantly argumentative. I did it because I truly felt that there was no real thought behind those types of assignments and so long as what I wrote or said had good substance, a reasonably valid point, and was well written, then everything the teacher really wanted to see was still there, and maybe it would give them something more interesting to read. Also, I do just fucking love constantly being argumentative.

As it turns out, teachers fucking hate actually having to really read things, something which I can confirm firsthand based on the fact that everyone in my direct family, besides my father's siblings and their kids, are teachers. This includes all my aunts and uncles, barring one aunt who is not only completely worthless to humanity, but is also unemployed, and all my cousins, barring two who have become so fucked up from living in our extended family that they have mentally regressed to the point that one cannot leave their room without a crane and can no longer speak, and the other cannot leave the care center because, now, he will forever be an eight year old. I can safely say that teachers hate reading, because none of these fine folks know anything that you can only learn from a book, and because I got to help grade French papers as a kid.

Anyway, so long as these fancy new college teachers have something a little more interesting to throw at me, things should go smoothly.

Maybe I should become a teacher. It's not in my blood, but it's in my heritage, and I think I could do a better job of it than anyone I had growing up. Plus, I love people to respecting me, forced or not, and always being smarter than everyone else. I don't think I admit that too much, but I certainly have a great personality for it.