The things we choose to care about...

And by "we", I actually mean elementary school teachers. Or really teachers in general.

My mom, who is a kindergarten teacher, was wondering today at what age her students would forget about her. I told her that, at 24, I remember my kindergarten teacher's name, but not much else. I also told her that the best way to ensure that she would be remembered was to traumatize the children in some way. Thinking about this reminded me of my 5th grade teacher who didn't exactly traumatize me, but who did exercise certain rules that were not only beyond logical sense, but that also triggered probably my first protest out of principle.

Now if I were an elementary school teacher, I'm sure that I would come up with incredibly arbitrary rules to govern and discipline my unruly group of students, in the name of character-building. But hopefully these rules would make some ounce of sense. In Mrs. Smith's case (not her real name), I think she was just neurotic or something.

First off, at 10 years old, she had decided that we were too old to be coloring with crayons. I think she had personally decided that they were too messy. In addition, we were not allowed to use markers, because although the thick ones could cover a surface quickly, they were uneven in hue and thus, unacceptable to what I can only imagine were her finely-honed artistic tastes. However, she did allow that as 10 year olds, coloring did still offer some scholastic merit (honestly, I'm not sure what), and so we were forced to use colored pencils when we were forced to color. This, in itself, would not be a particularly grievous offense, although I was not happy about this at all; I was quite fond of my Crayola crayons, and found that colored pencils, while admittedly more sophisticated, made the task of coloring all the more tedious. But what truly troubled my 10-year-old mind was the rule that we must color in only one direction. Try as I might to understand the relevancy of this rule, I simply could not understand it, and so mistakenly, I thought that it was perhaps more flexible than it initially seemed. But I was soon set straight on this misconception.

Mrs. Smith gave us a map of the United States. We were to color it using 4 colors (which isn't an easy task for a fifth grader, actually. The 3-color map problem is an NP-Complete problem that I revisited some years later in an Algorithms class in Graduate school) such that no two neighboring states were the same color. I colored my heart away, taking care to stay within the lines, and also to color in One Direction. Well actually, I didn't quite color in One Direction. As best as I could figure, the point of the One Direction rule was to keep the drawing looking neat. Because it was quite tiring for my hand to color the entire picture in one direction, I decided to color each state in One Direction to maintain the neatness, but each state could be colored in a different direction from all the other states. But when I turned this masterpiece in, I got a zero. Mrs. Smith failed a 10-year-old for not strictly interpreting the One Direction rule.

But in her "generosity", she gave me the opportunity to redo it. For every day that the new map was late, I would lose 10 points and I would have to sit out at recess. I was outraged. In fact, on the matter of principle, I refused to redo it. So every day, I sat out at recess. And every day, I lost another 10 points. I remember about 5 days into my protest that Mrs. Smith felt sorry for me and let me play during recess. I was outraged at that too. She thought of this leniency as a grand gesture of kindness, but if she hadn't had such ridiculous rules to begin with, then I wouldn't be sitting out at recess at all. But I did go out and play that day. I was only 10, you know, my resolve couldn't quite stand the temptation of a tetherball game. Anyway, after more than 10 days, I caved and turned in a new map. At that point, out of the "kindness of her heart" she gave me 50 points, which is still a failing grade, but according to her rules, she didn't owe me any points at all.

I thought as I got older, perhaps I would understand the importance of the One Direction rule. But I have yet to be enlightened. That isn't to say that I didn't learn an important lesson. And that lesson is that, in their classrooms, teachers run a totalitarian dictatorship. And if you don't follow the word of the law, then you'll feel the sting of a whip. And with it, you'll lose your dignity.