(This is best read out loud)

Conversation with the School Board

            Ladies and Gentlemen of the Board, the people who stand before you today are not teachers, they are not even educators, they are superheroes.  They have a superhuman power, one which shows its head every day in their line of work.  What is this great power you ask?  I’ll tell you.  When everything around them descends into chaos, when a person enters their life every day for the sole purpose of causing its ruin, when bills are not paid, lights go out and they sit on tacks in their chairs, the people who stand before you here today keep their cool.  When anyone else in society has a problem with another person at 2 in the morning at a bar (a place which the people behind me are prohibited from) they begin to shout, perhaps punch, sometimes even aim a weapon at them and then might get charged with a misdemeanor.  But these people behind me, they are not allowed to hit the person ruining their life with an insult, let alone a punch, or else they will lose what little they have left and become nothing more than the average Joe who ruined their own life.  All because they deal with people who have not, as of yet, completed the American right of passage. 

            The American right of passage began when a boy, AGE TWELVE, strode into the woods for 1, maybe 2, weeks living off what they could catch and find, and IF they survived, they would return a man.  But what that now has dwindled down to in America is that a child ascends 3, maybe 4, steps to a stage, crosses that stage and shakes hands with a man who spent 40 years of his life and hundreds of thousands of his dollars for 3 little letters and a punctuation mark behind his name, gets a little piece of paper from this man and descends from the stage an adult.  They then head off toward the sunset and go off to college and join what you understand to be a classroom.

            For a classroom is not what you remember.  It is not a perfect square room with solid beige walls and a PowerPoint on the screen while an old, gray haired man drones on reading the PowerPoint to the students who miraculously and unquestioningly turn pixels into penmanship.  No, a classroom is the true American melting pot, the last real place where smart and dumb, girl and boy, black, white, green and orange all come together in one place.  It is a room with colorful posters lining the walls which only the teacher really ever looks at and where whom is going out with whom is far more important than what some dead white man said or wrote in centuries past.  That is a real classroom, and it is the home of the greatest of all superheroes. 

            No, not the people who stand before you, I am speaking of Jr. High and High School Students.  For they are able to do what none of us are able to do.  They are able to sit behind wooden tables on chairs that broke 5 years go, trying to cautiously balance on 2 legs so as to not disturb the teacher, and they are able to do it for 7 break less hours without speaking; all the while attempting to decipher how they possible lived for 13,14,15,18 years without knowing how to convert centimeters to meters and how much better their life is going to be now that they know.  They then leave their place of work, for that is what the school really is, and go home in order to do 2-3 more hours of work, after which they accompany their mother to Wal-Mart and are promptly told to buy 3 YARDS of fabric.  And then they complete their extra ordinary status by doing it all over again tomorrow.

            So I now humbly offer a solution to their problem, our problem and your problem all at once.  Recess.  You see, recess appears miraculously, and then goes away as quickly as it came only to reappear after that blissful right of passage rechristened “smoke breaks;” so in reality the only people who are not allowed to defuse their minds privately are those going through puberty; those who perhaps need it most.  We tell these children that they do not need the luxury that we hold so near and dear to our hearts and then wonder why they rebel or choose to take them anyway.  Therefore it is my humble suggestion to introduce recess into all levels of school and then see if your discipline problem clears up.