What I Learned In High School
I learned to enjoy beating the Richies academically. One day, a crowd of them was waiting for me outside of my “jock” chemistry class to see who always got the highest score on exams. The same was true in mathematics.
I learned that I had no future in sports. The football and basketball teams I played on lost every game; the swimming team lost every meet. The word “team” was a euphemism.
I learned to play soccer with at least a hundred other players on the field at the same time (several gym classes combined) and one ball, being taught nothing about the game, resulting is mass chaos.
I learned that I had most in common with Jewish students, who seemed smarter. Several became friends. The other students seemed to be from an alien planet, or I was. High points were streaking naked in a group around the block at an overnight stay and getting thoroughly drunk for the first time after graduation.
I learned many things that weren’t taught in school: the Beats by visiting coffee houses and bookstores in Hollywood; reading books by Jack Kerouac and French authors like Flaubert, Maupassant, Hugo, Voltaire, and a lot of Aldous Huxley; music appreciation by going alone to classical concerts at the Hollywood Bowl; the teachings and yoga practice of Paramahansa Yogananda.
I learned Differential Calculus on my own since it wasn’t taught in my high school. Neither was world history and literature. I started to sense that real learning was not the purpose of so-called education, seen in the narrow, assembly-line, almost religious approach to teaching, regardless of special awards and scholarships.
I learned, or rather became aware of, an intense desperation in my senior year, as I came closer to escaping from home and school, at being completely alone in the world and totally unprepared for what was to come, such that my studies suffered and for the first time I began getting in trouble at school. At one disciplinary session with the vice principal I mentioned skipping college to enlist in the military, which became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This poem was written/submitted by Robert M Wilson.
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