Manitou is special. And weird. And random. But mostly just...great. When I find myself talking to a student from another district, I pity them for not experiencing what we have here at Manitou. Walking through our memories of this middle school one might see the following:
- Crazy masks, creative, original, amusing love songs, and boys awkwardly smoothing their skirts as a sixth grade class attempted to recreate, in hilarious uproar, Italian Renaissance skits.
- A group of not-so-fearless eighth graders attempting to light their Bunson burners...from two arms length away.
- One might hear a book club arguing in vain with their teacher to PLEASE give them more homework.
- That same book club making ridiculous hats out of Capri Sun boxes (actually, maybe that was just me).
- A class debating the fairness of negative labels about our generation, and some people arguing that, no (in fact), we really are terrible people...
- People walking into walls, falling out of chairs, and knocking trash cans over....
- Turning around in band class to see the baritone player chillin’ out in his chair...with both feet behind his head.
- The sound of a math class belting out some random jingle, and listening to their teacher attempt to imitate a fog horn on a piece of PVC.
- Or shouts of “Flying popcorn!” coming from an open science lab door.
- One might walk in on an impromptu bout of patty cake or a ninja fight. (especially if you’re around me)
- A French class learning about food...and asking how to say “small children.”
- Looking around the classroom during the writing section of the CSAP’s and seeing people alternating between giving their booklet a death stare and glancing blankly off into space, practically drooling in boredom.
This is all randomly relevant because we live in Manitou...and also because these memories illustrate how much the happenings between these walls have taught us tolerance and love and our teachers showed us passion for learning. We didn’t just slide though those crowded hallways and get dumped at the steps of the high school. We learned and grew. We didn’t just learn math, no, we also lived parallel lives in personal economics complete with dud relationships, kids, bucket lists, and attempting to fill out our own tax forms (ugh).. We didn’t just learn about WWII, no, we invited a dozen people who lived through it to come talk to us.We didn’t just learn about the chemistry of fireworks, no, we lit things on fire. We didn’t just learn about the ancient Egyptians, no, we became them and invited our parents to come watch our acting struggles. Along the way, we learned to laugh at ourselves and not to take ourselves too seriously; after all, no one gets out of life alive.
When I first sat down to outline this speech, at 10 PM the night before the outline check, I jotted down a few incoherent thoughts, and started complaining about how every stage of our lives is just practice for the next. We having been preparing for high school. And then we will be in college (gasp!) and then there’s real life. And if that’s so, then we aren’t even real yet. And and utter confusion. My dad then offered up a rare piece wisdom, “Life is a balance of living in the present, while preparing for the next chapter of our life.” As I started to thank him, he characteristically continued his monologue. “It’s not the getting there.....it’s the getting there.” He promptly jumped up and began the hokey pokey, “That’s what it’s all about!” By this time I had sorta spaced out and come up with my own characteristically unrelated metaphor: life is like a timed writing prompt.....
Of course, none of my classmates can relate to this and this comparison had NOTHING to do with 8th grade language arts class. As I was schlepping through one of these assignments, I found myself planning the next paragraph before I finished the current one, setting up for a transition. But then I remembered that each paragraph is its own entity, and should be written as such. I see life in much the same way. We must balance each paragraph of our lives in the time given for that section. Thinking of what could have made that moment in our lives afterwards is like coming up with the word you were looking for in that essay after you’ve already turned it in. At the moment, we are sitting on this stage, about to enter high school. Middle school was preparing us for this, but was definitely a stage in its own right. We must treasure each rich sentence in the paragraph that has been middle school. These weird, random, and great memories have been the really cool sentences that don’t belong in our persuasive essays, but we include them anyways, because it makes our writing more colorful and enriches our lives.
Copyright 2011 Abigail Chapman
No comments:
Post a Comment