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Throughout my pre-collegiate years of education, I often found various classroom situations to be quite ridiculous. So many assignments that we are given in the first 12 years of our lives are both useless and ridiculous. I feel that enough time has passed for me to talk about elementary and middle school without risking possible repercussions (high school is probably something I won't touch on for a while.).
But anyway, now with years between myself and some of these incidents, I am supposedly wiser, and am able to confirm that yes - those incidents were as heinous as I thought they were at the time.
So we will begin with one that takes place in 7th grade. In 7th grade, all students in my middle school had to take a Family and Consumer Education class. We learned about nutrition, cooking, domestic abuse, and sex (vaguely), among other things.
For this class, one assignment was that of giving birth to a flour baby. Each student was to carry around a 5-lb sack of flour for a week (I think?!). Carrying this sack of flour was supposed to make us think twice about having sex, because it was irritating and cumbersome, as were babies. At the end of the week, our teacher told us she would check our flour babies for "abuse" - make sure there were no torn edges or significant dents. I swaddled my flour baby in an old doll blanket and hoped for the best, although I found the situation quite amusing because my sister was preparing to give birth to her first child, and I knew that having a baby was much more involved than toting a bag of flour.
I haven't even gotten to the ridiculous part yet.
Our teacher informed us that, as these flour babies represented real children, we should be free to name them and love them. When I got home from school that day, I pulled down a book of saints off of the shelf, and began leafing through it. I was obsessed with Redwall and Dragonlance novels at the time, and I wanted my flour baby (a boy; sexes were assigned by the teacher) to have a noble name. I found Tarcisius, a boy from the 3rd century who died protecting the Eucharist from an angry mob. I thought that Tarcisius sounded pretty cool, too.
The next, we had to tell our teacher what the names of our flour babies were.
TEACHER: Jackie, what did you name your flour baby?
ME: Tarcisius.
(Some people laugh.)
TEACHER:....You can't name your flour baby that.
ME (indignant): Why not? You said we could name them whatever we wanted to.
TEACHER: ......If you name your baby that, then all of the other flour babies will make fun of it.
ME: ..... (taking a minute for the absurdity of that statement to sink in.) Maybe the other flour babies can get over it!
TEACHER: You will have to come up with a nickname for your flour baby.
ME: (hostile glaring)
I think this is one of those times in which I felt severely wronged, went home and told my mom, and she was all, "Oh for God's sakes, Jacqueline, who cares?!"
I CARED, and I still do today! It was a pretty stupid conversation. Especially looking at celebrities, naming their children after Dragon Tales characters, fruit, or that one guy from My Name is Earl, who named his kid "Pilot Instructor." TARCISIUS WAS A BAD-ASS NAME.
I continued my defiance when I became confirmed in the Catholic church, choosing not a saint's name for myself, but "Aila," a name that means "light-bearer" in Finnish.
But anyway, now with years between myself and some of these incidents, I am supposedly wiser, and am able to confirm that yes - those incidents were as heinous as I thought they were at the time.
So we will begin with one that takes place in 7th grade. In 7th grade, all students in my middle school had to take a Family and Consumer Education class. We learned about nutrition, cooking, domestic abuse, and sex (vaguely), among other things.
For this class, one assignment was that of giving birth to a flour baby. Each student was to carry around a 5-lb sack of flour for a week (I think?!). Carrying this sack of flour was supposed to make us think twice about having sex, because it was irritating and cumbersome, as were babies. At the end of the week, our teacher told us she would check our flour babies for "abuse" - make sure there were no torn edges or significant dents. I swaddled my flour baby in an old doll blanket and hoped for the best, although I found the situation quite amusing because my sister was preparing to give birth to her first child, and I knew that having a baby was much more involved than toting a bag of flour.
I haven't even gotten to the ridiculous part yet.
Our teacher informed us that, as these flour babies represented real children, we should be free to name them and love them. When I got home from school that day, I pulled down a book of saints off of the shelf, and began leafing through it. I was obsessed with Redwall and Dragonlance novels at the time, and I wanted my flour baby (a boy; sexes were assigned by the teacher) to have a noble name. I found Tarcisius, a boy from the 3rd century who died protecting the Eucharist from an angry mob. I thought that Tarcisius sounded pretty cool, too.
The next, we had to tell our teacher what the names of our flour babies were.
TEACHER: Jackie, what did you name your flour baby?
ME: Tarcisius.
(Some people laugh.)
TEACHER:....You can't name your flour baby that.
ME (indignant): Why not? You said we could name them whatever we wanted to.
TEACHER: ......If you name your baby that, then all of the other flour babies will make fun of it.
ME: ..... (taking a minute for the absurdity of that statement to sink in.) Maybe the other flour babies can get over it!
TEACHER: You will have to come up with a nickname for your flour baby.
ME: (hostile glaring)
I think this is one of those times in which I felt severely wronged, went home and told my mom, and she was all, "Oh for God's sakes, Jacqueline, who cares?!"
I CARED, and I still do today! It was a pretty stupid conversation. Especially looking at celebrities, naming their children after Dragon Tales characters, fruit, or that one guy from My Name is Earl, who named his kid "Pilot Instructor." TARCISIUS WAS A BAD-ASS NAME.
I continued my defiance when I became confirmed in the Catholic church, choosing not a saint's name for myself, but "Aila," a name that means "light-bearer" in Finnish.
