Almost anyone you talk to will say how much better college is then high school,and how many more unique experiences there are in college, I usually agree. One of the few cases that I disagree with this notion is with finding unique experiences. The construction class at Decatur High School offered no knowledge in the subject matter, but did offer many exciting and truley unique experiences unlike any I will ever have again.
Construction pushed the limits of the typical "bad" class. In this class the teacher and students frequently got into wrestling matches throughout the day, the doors were nailed shut with three pieces of wood, the desks were stacked to the ceiling for no reason at all, every light in the room would be turned off multiple times a day purely to cause utter chaos, and the list just keeps going on with more ridiculous acts. The reason all of this was so much fun is because you could feel a since of freedom by rebelling against the strict guidelines of high school. Honestly I feel bad for Coach Shep(the teacher) he was innocently not a talented disciplinary. Coach Shep was supposed to teach the class construction, but the most construction the class ever did was nail the door shut to lock Coach Shep out of the room. When Coach Shep finally did gain entry to the rowdy class room the students would physically wrestle him to the ground, and then cause more chaos. An example of the chaos in coach Shep's class was boom ball. A game invented to destroy and disrupt. It involved punching a large rubber ball found in the class room any where as long as it stayed in the air. The game does not sound destructive but when the lights were out in a small classroom full of breakable objects, Boom ball made the class look like it was hit by a bomb (hence the onomatopoeia BOOM ball ).
Thinking back to this class is all I will have in the future, because I will never have an experience as close to anarchy as I did in construction. Also I do not know if many people will ever have an experience quite like this one either, or at least not at Decatur High school. Coach Sheppard was fired and the construction program is now gone leaving just the stories from the graduating class of 2008. My memories of high school will always incorporate this wild class because it is a once in a life time experience.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
I have memories of high school, and very breakable things. In one of my classes a guy wanted to play baseball with a PVC pipe and tennis ball. I never knew that those school windows could shatter so quickly. Another time people were playing hacky sack and a shoe went through a ceiling light.
While these memories might seem just funny little stories, for me at least, they serve to show a certain base playfulness that has disappeared. Maybe that is not a bad thing. I do not know.
I do know that people will probably not be locking a professor out of a classroom, or playing baseball in the room instead of studying for a test.
Maybe this is all just part of our (hopefully) growing maturity. And maybe it is a sign of fully leaving our childhoods behind.
I had teacher an English teacher in high school that was the most gullible and most easily manipulated teacher I've ever encountered. He had a giant Scrabble board that, at one point or another, was always missing letters because students took them for fun. One class convinced him to put on fairy wings and sing (he did it - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXPRK735ySI - sorry about the quality- not my class).
Another fun teacher: one of my French teachers was this senile old man who's favorite joke was "I was walking out of the store when a young man asked me 'Sir, can I help you carry your bags?' and I said 'No she can walk...' HAHAHA". We still make fun of him to this day.
Post a Comment