Why Education is important...continued.

The teacher directed himself to his dull grey desk, sat carefully in his time-worn chair and pushed one cowboy boot along the floor until his left leg was straight and the heel of the boot rocked back at an angle to linoleum. He raised his hand to the tip of his nose, slid the fingers down across his mustache and goatee and, finally, raked his fingernails across the dry skin at his throat. Rather suddenly he jumped up and clomped to the side of the room opposite me.

“You all know this a Denver Public School,” he began, “As such you will need to follow the rules of a Denver Public School.” As he spoke he made his way from the yonder reaches of the classroom, to my side, moving like a satellite across the front. “My name is Brad, and here is my number when you need to call me.” He scribbled some numbers in faded marker along the whiteboard. “If you don’t call me when you aren’t coming to class, you have an unexcused absence. Three unexcused absences and you have failed and are out of here, no money back, no nothing. In order to pass the class you need to get a seventy percent or higher. Every day that you miss, I take off five percent from your grade unless you have a valid excuse. What does that mean?”

The class was still. We could hear the traffic on the street below.
“What does that mean?” Brad repeated.

“It means if we miss six or something classes, even if they’re excused, we fail the class,” a bushy-sideburned heavy-metaler piped up.

Brad didn’t say anything, only pointed a calloused his finger at the black-shirted teen and pumped his arm as if directing an airplane to land and nodded his head. He seemed to be doing a calculation in his head, unsure of whether the answer was correct or not. Collectively, we all did the math in our heads, but no one said another word. I was too entranced by Brad’s hair to think about paltry numbers.

“Now, when you are here,” he continued after the pause, gliding back to the room’s far side, “there will be no drug use. If I suspect that someone is using drugs while in class or if someone comes to class high, they are automatically out of the program, no questions asked, no nothing.”

There was a grunt of disapproval behind me and the class shuffled excitedly in their seats, warming up to a discussion about drug use. I glanced back and confirmed that the disapproving noise had been emitted by a youth who already look high.

“You mean we just can’t smoke dope while we’re here,” the heavy-metaler clarified.

“You shouldn’t be smoking it at all!” Brad said.

“It isn’t like it is that bad for you. There’s lots of other things that are way worse for you than Marijuana. Like drinking. Alcohol is way worse.”

“Alcohol is not worse than Marijuana,” Brett contended.

“Oh come on, Brad. Think about it,” Bushy Sideburns looked around the room for support that he knew was coming, “Weed is natural. Alcohol isn’t. How many people do you hear of that die from Marijuana overdose and how many from drinking alcohol.”

“That’s not the point.”

“Brad, I can bring in articles that compare the two,” offered Bushy and followed it up with a laugh that made his belly jiggle like the Pilsbury Dough Boy.

“It’s true,” the stoned kid piped up.

Brad looked to the rest of the class, focusing intently on the older members of the class who would empathize with his plight. “You see, this is what happens when you smoke too much Marijuana, you start to get your facts mixed up,” he said. He seemed to have lost his original train of thought. “But, regardless of your oponions on the subject, it isn’t allowed in this school.”

“That’s fine, I can just do it when I go home,” Bushy finished, upturning his words in a way that indicated he was anything but finished.

“So,” Brad had begun to pace again, “no drugs, no alcohol. We got any smokers here?” Many in the class raised their hands. “OK. I’ll give you breaks about every hour and a half. So you’ll get about two or three breaks during the afternoon. You can only smoke out in front of the building. If I catch you smoking in the shop, we’re gonna have issues. Now, back to the grades. Like I said before, your grade is built on percentages. If you show up every day, just show up, you automatically get forty percent. Thirty percent of your grade is based on your turning in of papers and completing the labs. Ten percent is quizzes and the other twenty percent is the final exam. You’re also going to want to bring clothes to get dirty in. Believe it or not you actually get dirty in this class.”

“So is this okay?” asked Bushy, whose name was Darryl, pointing to his black t-shirt.

“Yeah, it’s fine. One thing…”

“But Brad, what about that kid you kicked out last year for wearing that one shirt?”

Brad’s words seemed to flow like a river over Darryl's pronouncements as he did his best to keep the monologue going. “You can’t have lude statements on your shirts. No profanity or naked ladies or anything like that.”

“What was he wearing on his shirt again?” asked Darryl. Brad eyed him somewhat warily, and then with resignation, fed into his trap. What ensued was a ten-minute discussion about what was on the shirt. Darryl did most of the talking, his narrative punctuated by Brad’s brief acceptation of the facts. The blight of this ADD-prone attention-hog began to register on me and I knew that he could only be stopped by someone, anyone, forthright enough to tell him to shut the hell up. I waited for a hero, but as not interjection was forthcoming I resigned myself to the doom being laid out by the exuberant outbursts of our gum-flapping classmate.

Despite an eventual return to the original topic of class rules, Darryl's ceaseless opinions multiplied, and my head buzzed with annoyance. He was the only one speaking besides Brad, and he obviously felt the need to issue commentary on each point, as if specific illustration were needed to make the rules sink in.

“You’re all going to need eye protection,” Brad said.

“Oh yeah, tell them about that one student,” Darryl chanted.

“Yep. Had a student last year who didn’t want to wear the eye protection. He was working on the cooling system of a car and the hot radiator fluid came streaming out of it. Pretty much burned his eye right out of his head.”

“It was f*&$% crazy.”

“Oh yeah, and about the profanity in here. If you drop tire on your hand or slam it with a sledgehammer that’s one thing, but…”

“Tell them about the kid who dropped the car off the lift. That was f*&^% crazy too.”

Two hours into the class, we were still reviewing the rules and a smoke break was finally offered, easing the pain of the various puffers whose legs twitched back and forth and burnt yellow fingers flexed spasmodically as the need for their fix grew.

We had made it through the first roman numeral and first letter of a syllabus that contained fifteen roman numerals and uncountable letters. I wondered if I should take up smoking.