Time Heals Most Wounds
Sep. 14th, 2008 08:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skywaterblueIn the 8th Grade, I had turned down the chance to go to the Art Magnet School in Las Vegas because I wanted to finish out my last year of junior high with my friends. Ironically, that was the year I got bumped from the track I was in with my friends, and put into the one that didn't have advanced art. Instead I had to take multicultural lit with Mrs. Mingleton, who I had the previous year for English and loathed like burning.
Except, you see, I had written this short story based on The Banjo Lesson by Henry O Tanner in the previous year which she had thought amazing. So she really liked me.
But I couldn't stand her; I couldn't stand how she'd fall asleep and take phone calls about her ailing mother and how we never did anything and when we did, it was always about black folk and never about the other cultures the school board required her to teach.
I started to draw some fucking hate cartoons in the middle of class because I was full up on resentment that I had to be there. And then I left them for her to find. I wanted out.
Of course, she did, and this being the year of Columbine, I got promptly sent to 'in house suspension' to be watched for anti-social tendencies. (In house, is where you go to school every day but similar to solitary confinement, you're assigned to a room with two or three other students with a security guard and/or substitute teacher periodically hands you the work the kids in your real classroom are doing.)
But before that happened, I had to have the brutal confrontation outside my proper English class where she pulled a copy of THAT STORY out of her purse and told me how it made her cry, in front of my full angry temper tantrum.
We silently passed each other in the halls after that until I graduated and went to LVA. Of course, my hate cartoons (and subsequent punishment) made me the hero of the 8th grade track I was in -- and up until I left Las Vegas the first time, every six months or so someone would stop me, ask if I was 'that girl who made the wicked hate comics on Mrs. Mingleton in the 8th grade' and then say I was their hero because she truly was an awful teacher.
So. You know where this story is going, right?
Obviously: I canvassed her house today and she came to my door, with her proud Barack Obama sign out. At first I didn't really recognize her, until I turned around and saw her husband's name on a pile of stuff -- right as I'd finished collecting the data and she'd shut the door.
I was going to slink off into the silent night in my mixture of 'oh shit' and mortification, but of course we bumped into each other not ten minutes later. She was all: don't I know you? And I was like, "Are you a Mingleton?" ETC ETC.
Thank God, she didn't mention that shit that went down. No, instead she gave me some punch and printed out some article she read on Ebony.com about Obama and said some line about how proud she was of me fighting the good fight, like she'd done some good in the world. And I told her that I lived in Chicago now (because I do, this is just temporary) and that I came back to help with this.
I probably should also have mentioned that I wrote my Freshmen essay on Henry O. Tanner at SAIC.
Mostly, though: dude. Las Vegans. This is the smallest big city in the damn world.
Except, you see, I had written this short story based on The Banjo Lesson by Henry O Tanner in the previous year which she had thought amazing. So she really liked me.
But I couldn't stand her; I couldn't stand how she'd fall asleep and take phone calls about her ailing mother and how we never did anything and when we did, it was always about black folk and never about the other cultures the school board required her to teach.
I started to draw some fucking hate cartoons in the middle of class because I was full up on resentment that I had to be there. And then I left them for her to find. I wanted out.
Of course, she did, and this being the year of Columbine, I got promptly sent to 'in house suspension' to be watched for anti-social tendencies. (In house, is where you go to school every day but similar to solitary confinement, you're assigned to a room with two or three other students with a security guard and/or substitute teacher periodically hands you the work the kids in your real classroom are doing.)
But before that happened, I had to have the brutal confrontation outside my proper English class where she pulled a copy of THAT STORY out of her purse and told me how it made her cry, in front of my full angry temper tantrum.
We silently passed each other in the halls after that until I graduated and went to LVA. Of course, my hate cartoons (and subsequent punishment) made me the hero of the 8th grade track I was in -- and up until I left Las Vegas the first time, every six months or so someone would stop me, ask if I was 'that girl who made the wicked hate comics on Mrs. Mingleton in the 8th grade' and then say I was their hero because she truly was an awful teacher.
So. You know where this story is going, right?
Obviously: I canvassed her house today and she came to my door, with her proud Barack Obama sign out. At first I didn't really recognize her, until I turned around and saw her husband's name on a pile of stuff -- right as I'd finished collecting the data and she'd shut the door.
I was going to slink off into the silent night in my mixture of 'oh shit' and mortification, but of course we bumped into each other not ten minutes later. She was all: don't I know you? And I was like, "Are you a Mingleton?" ETC ETC.
Thank God, she didn't mention that shit that went down. No, instead she gave me some punch and printed out some article she read on Ebony.com about Obama and said some line about how proud she was of me fighting the good fight, like she'd done some good in the world. And I told her that I lived in Chicago now (because I do, this is just temporary) and that I came back to help with this.
I probably should also have mentioned that I wrote my Freshmen essay on Henry O. Tanner at SAIC.
Mostly, though: dude. Las Vegans. This is the smallest big city in the damn world.
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no subject
Date: 2008-09-15 03:10 pm (UTC)We USED to also have auto manufacturing, but, well, eggs and baskets people. Eggs and baskets.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-15 03:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-15 08:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-16 04:20 am (UTC)-and I attribute this to it being too late and me being too tired-
-Las Vegans suddenly sounded to me like a Chicano animal rights folk band.
(It should probably be Los Vegans, but Spanish was never my strongest language so I may have the conjugation wrong)