Memories from My High School Years, Part 2

In high school, I often found myself quietly disappointed.

It was not that I was deeply hurt. It was not that anyone openly denied me.
But whenever I sat in that atmosphere, I began to understand, little by little,
that what mattered there was not what a person thought,
but how smoothly they could obey.

One teacher once said something like this.

"The students who make it into good universities are the ones who can keep facing right
for as long as the teacher tells them to face right."

I think the classroom received it as a practical lesson for life.
But inside, all I could think was: huh.
What, exactly, was supposed to be good about that?

What rose from the bottom of my chest then was not really rebellion.
It was a simpler refusal.
I do not want that, I thought.
That is slavery, isn't it.

Of course, I did not say any of this out loud.
High school was also the kind of place where you learned how to get through things
without exposing too much of what you felt.
So I stayed silent.
And in that silence, I grew gradually disappointed by the fact
that values like that could circulate as something normal.

It was probably not intense enough to call despair.
It was a drier thing, a quieter disappointment.
Not the feeling of being struck down every day,
but of finding yourself less and less able to trust what surrounded you.
That is what it felt like.

And that feeling did not come only from the classroom.
There were adults in the school who pushed situations through
with nothing but the size of their voices and the force of their manner,
people who seemed more accustomed to making others comply
than to actually teaching anything.

Whenever I was met with words that hurried people along without enough thought behind them,
or made to accept odd policies dressed up as tradition,
I felt I was seeing the same thing again:
in this place, human beings mattered less than how easily they could be moved.

And yet, the physics teacher was different.

There was something in the way he spoke
that felt as though he was trying to look at the world with his own eyes.
He was not only explaining formulas.
He spoke, in his own words, about why things appeared the way they did,
and where the fascination was.
At least, that is how it seemed to me.

So when I look back on those years now,
the memory as a whole is wrapped in a quiet disappointment,
and yet that one person remains with a slightly different kind of brightness.

If I was not completely absorbed into that world of obedience,
maybe it was because there was at least one person there
who offered a different way of seeing.
Or maybe that resistance had already existed in me long before.

I do not really know.
I only know that I thought it clearly, even then:
if excellence means continuing to face the direction you are told to face,
then I want no part of that kind of excellence.