Reflections on Education

In kindergarten, my class had a tradition that I didn’t realize was categorically nuts until I told people about it as a young adult. When it was your birthday, after gathering on the carpet for story time - sitting criss-cross applesauce (a rhyme I always hated for some reason) - you would get called up to the teacher for your Birthday Spanking. “Your what now?” I imagine you all saying as you pause with the coffee mug half raised to your mouth for a sip. Don’t worry, whatever you think this is, it’s stranger.

When it was time for my birthday spanking, I hopped to my feet with a shit-eating grin on my face, wiggled my little fanny in excitement, and proudly strode to the front for my moment in the spotlight. As was standard procedure, Mrs. Ridgebury (name changed for obvious reasons) informed the class that it was my birthday and, since I was turning 5, I was to receive the customary 5 spanks. Bending me over her knee, my kindly, elderly teacher flailed her arm as though to strike my backside, stopping her hand before actually making contact. I mugged to my classmates as they giggled, the conceit of the joke being that our teacher thought she was wailing on me but didn’t realize that I was totally unscathed. She paused only to shout “WHAT ARE YOU LAUGHING AT? CAN’T YOU SEE HE’S IN PAIN?” It was like a vaudeville act in which we were both audience and performer. Laughs aplenty, a good time was had by all.

Mrs. Ridgebury’s Birthday Spanking was merely a fond memory for me for years until I actually described the bizarre charade to someone as a teenager. It’s batshit on every level - setting aside the inappropriate details of the proceedings, conceptually it was an exercise in demonstrating that the lady in charge who we were supposed to respect and whose instruction we were supposed to heed was actually someone who dispensed arbitrary violence with the intent to humiliate, but was too much of a dope to do so effectively. How were we supposed to take her seriously?

Kindergarten was my one year of public school; I was to matriculate through to the end of Senior Year under the auspices of the Catholic Diocese of Cleveland and their schools. I’ve been asked what Religion class was like by people who grew up with fully secular education, and honestly it was as much of a grab bag as any other subject for the most part. Some teachers were good, some weren’t, sometimes you learned about the holy sites of the Abrahamic faiths, sometimes you “meditated” in the chapel because the teacher was hung over. However, I’d say the main point of differentiation between Religion classes and other classes, based on my experience and the experience of others I know who grew up in Catholic school is the sheer volume of movies you would watch. There was the obvious faith-based entertainment that they would show us in elementary school when we needed to kill some time, of course, but watching movies formed the bedrock of enough secondary school classes to make Roger Ebert raise an eyebrow. Apparently you or I or any hack could program an entire curriculum of high school Religion classes by picking a handful of movies at random and discussing how they relate to the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. And let me tell you what, hoss, that connection can be razor thin if you need it to be.

Here are a list of some movies I watched in high school Religion classes:

1. The Fugitive (1993) - I cannot figure out what the angle was here, but this movie rocks all day and night and honestly pulls it’s own weight in an educational setting. All students should be shown this as an example of “Good Movie”.

2. Meet the Parents (2000) - I watched Meet the Parents in no less than TWO (2) separate classes, I believe both times under the guise of demonstrating the importance of honesty. I know I watched it twice because the first time I really didn’t enjoy the film; I kept getting frustrated by how easily Ben Stiller could get out of trouble by simply explaining himself. So when I was informed I would have to endure a second compulsory viewing, I decided to instead root for Robert DeNiro to wash out this little worm who is dating his daughter and I had a much better time. Twice I have seen DeNiro deliver the line “I have nipples Greg, could you milk me?” within the halls of academia.

3. Pay It Forward (2000) - This one is pretty obvious, a treacly sweet story about the power of kindness. But YEEEOWCH we’ve got Spacey in here aging like yesterday’s milk.

4. Joan of Arc (1999) - This also makes sense for a Religion class, but anybody who was in my class who watched this only remembers Joan of Arc because of an argument my friend Michael got into with our teacher. Peter O’Toole plays a bishop in the film and our teacher pointed out that he also played Professor Dumbledore in the Harry Potter movies, which were still in production at that time. We all murmured disagreement, knowing full well that it was Richard Harris in the first two films until he kicked the bucket, and then Michael Gambon took over. Michael was the Spartacus that stepped forward to assert that she was wrong and she straight up yelled at him that it was Peter O’Toole. The next day, Michael brought in printouts of the IMDB credits to prove her ass wrong and it was a victory for kids everywhere.

5. Loose Change (2005) - If you don’t know what Loose Change is, consider yourself lucky. It’s basically the Ur-text for conspiracy theories that 9/11 was an inside job and a totally buck wild piece of media to show in an educational institution. This was presented to one of my Religion classes by the aforementioned hung over teacher, and when it was over we were like “Ok… so what the fuck was that?” and his logic was “I just want you guys to question things.” Well, it worked - I’ve spent a lot of time questioning how that guy got a job teaching kids.

6. Transformers (2007) - Would you believe this was also in a class taught by the hungover 9/11 truther? I had this teacher as a Freshman, and even though I was pretty well behaved, I immediately identified that this fellow was such a moron that there could be wide latitude for mischief in his class. So, at some point I started telling him daily that I was going to bring in my DVD of the movie Transformers and we were going to watch it in class until he eventually caved and we watched Transformers in class. I, a mild-mannered young fellow, gaslit a grown man into letting us watch a Michael Bay masterpiece where Bumblebee pisses motor oil. There wasn’t even a pretense of educational framing.

7. Spotlight (2015) - LOL, joking, joking. I graduated high school long before that movie came out.

All of that said, there was a positive inverse to this phenomena in another school subject, much like the yin and yang (so I did actually at some point Learn Something). After we took the Advanced Placement US History test and our work for the year was functionally over, we filled the remaining three weeks of class periods with watching Forrest Gump (1994) and Saving Private Ryan (1998). We re-christened the class AP Tom Hanks and it was great.