Smithereens!

It had to have bothered the teachers.
I’m talking about high school here, now.
It had to!
It had to bother them.
It’s graduation season. Rented tuxes have just been returned. Cummerbunds are being examined, and bright young lads are pleading with the rental place, “No, honestly, that bit of puke-stain was there when I rented the thing!”
Prom dresses have just recently been put into closets, and thousands of girls are asking themselves… “When will I be able to ever wear a dress that looks like spray-painted golden macaroni, again?”
But beyond all of these issues, I am wondering… I am thinking back to a ritual that used to go on in my own high school, the front entrance of which is shown above, in the photo.
Thom Collegiate.
Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada.
I myself, graduated from there in 1982.
I lived right across from the place. In fact, I could run to school as the bell was ringing, and still, I would make it to class on time. Sometimes my beagle pup [named “Bags” and all the kids knew him, because he was cute as hell, and he was actually enrolled at Thom]… he would run over with me, and I would have to take him back.
Anyway… fast forward to the last day of school. Exams are over.
It’s the day that you return, only to receive your report cards.
At Thom Collegiate, here is what would happen… everyone would immediately go to their hallway locker and haul out every single thing they had “learned” that year, and tear it to smithereens!
Scatter it in the hallway.
Notebooks in tatters!
If you ran down the hallway afterwards, on any of the three floors, you would have been knee-deep in Biology, History, English, Algebra, Chemistry…. kick it as you go [screaming is good, too]…. garbage….. ALL GARBAGE…. we are done with it. We have written the exam!
Hmmm…

What did the teachers think, of this annual mess?
Now, in my middle-aged dotage, I wonder.
Sweet Lord…. they poured themselves into us.
Regaling us with years of accrued wisdom, as though their very lives depended on the outcome [our final grade]…. upon the glories of Beowulf, upon Macbeth, the wanderings of Chaucer’s pilgrims…. my God….. to see it kicked around and torn to shreds as so much refuse, on this last day of it all!
Perhaps they were hardened to it?
You know?
You literally pour yourself out one afternoon….. spending yourself upon the glories of Harper Lee for this group of hopeless recalcitrants, only to hear some dolty, half-sleeping kid in the back row raise his hand at the end of it all and ask…. “Umm. Yeah. And like. Is this going to be on the exam?”
Maybe the teachers are savvy to it all. Maybe they are on the next page! Maybe they are emotionally prepared for the hallway mayhem, on report-card day.

All I can say, teachers of the world…. of North America, [or at least Thom Collegiate] is… may I offer a collective “I’m sorry?”
You always deserved better than I was, back then.
I saved my own notebooks for only one reason.
Because of the wonderful extra-curricular marijuana-induced artwork I had done in the pages where notes were supposed to appear!

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