Dear Miss Eliza
Dear Miss Eliza,I’m 15 years old, and do you have any idea how dumb my classes are? Your classes must have been the same way, right? How did you amnage to cope with them?
Bored in Bali
Dear Bored,
I know exactly what you’re talking about. Coping with tedium is one of the most essential skills you will take away from high school. It’s right up there with math and getting your license. So whatever you do, you’re going to want to pay attention (if not to your teachers then to your bordom coping method). Here are a couple ideas.
1. Antagonize your teachers. Not all of them, mind you, but the more liberal ones definitely. Find out how often your teacher uses phrases like "thinking outside the box" or "critical thinking." These are the ones you can mess with. If your teacher has issues with say, you wearing a hat in class, you might want to stay away from button pushing.
But you have to remember to be very careful about where you focus your negativity. You’ll want to avoid personal attacks on your teacher. Don’t call him stupid or a jackass. Instead, attack what he’s saying. What is he teaching you? If you don’t really see the relevance of a book like 1984 or Crime and Punishment, if you think Walt Whitman was a pompous windbag, if you think calculus is overrated or the Constitution is tedious, that's the kind of thing you'll want to bring up. Teachers (especially those liberal ones) like to reward this behavior for some reason. And I must say whenever I wrote a paper denouncing whatever book I was supposed to have read, I always got a kickass grade on it.
This is an excellent outlet, and it will make you feel better. My senior year in high school, I used this approach on my (completely retarded) English teacher and for some reason he fell in love with me. I got the highest grade in the class and numbers of other students wrote in my yearbook how they were going to miss my daily lunching on the teacher. So you see, this is good not only for you, but nice entertainment for classmates as well.
2. Play games in class. My particular favorite was the dot game. You know the one where each person takes turns drawing lines, and if your line closes in a square you get to keep going? Always a big hit. Then there was the composite picture, where you draw something, pass it along to the next person and they draw something and so on until the bell rings. This got me through half a year of biology after they replaced our super-good teacher with this dope who had a comb over. It did help that he was a firm believer (or at least I’m pretty sure he was) that kids should be allowed to do whatever they want in the classroom. Because I know we never tried to hide our little rays of sunshine. He must have noticed.
3. (and this is probably the one that your teachers are hoping for) Find the class interesting. Though how to cultivate interest if it doesn't exist is one of those weird concepts like infinity or wave particle duality that everyone claims exists, but no one really understands.
4. Finish this saying, "Dude, I could teach this so much better than her. I would…" And if your teacher is REALLY bad and no one is learning anything, then get a study group together and try out your theory. Or even better, get her to ask "Do you want to teach this class?" and answer yes. Class grades will rise, and when the superintendent finds out that you are responsible, she’ll fire your fuddy duddy teacher and hire you instead and all will be right with the world.
5. Are you more of a daydreamer? Put that to good use. Today’s television is running low on innovative and intelligent tv shows. So come up with one. (I’ll give you a hint. Please let it not be a reality show. I couldn’t bear it if someone read this column and went out and invented a new reality show. I would feel personally responsible. Do not put that on my conscience.) Write a pilot. Or try a screenplay. But either way you go, you’re going to need these two key words. INNOVATIVE and INTELLIGENT. Witty is a very nice way to go. The world could always use some extra wit.
Well, I hope these examples have been of some use. Please contact me again when you graduate, and we’ll see if I helped at all.
Once again,
--Miss Eliza
TO MY READERS: If you have a question for Miss Eliza, please don’t be shy. Send it to me. Either post it in a comment, or e-mail it to selizawalden@yahoo.com it would be my pleasure to print it. Look at it this way. This could be the question that makes YOU famous.
posted by Sarah Eliza @ 2:42 PM
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