The program I am in at school is extremely intense with a higher than average drop-out rate. I am halfway through now and no way will I become a statistic. I need you to remember I said that so you can throw it back in my face when I start whining so bad you get tired of listening and call me a waaaaambulance.
The way the program is set up is that we have to pass a series of tests, administered daily, the completion of which enables us to advance to the next room. I know I just described speed-dating but it’s actually different. The tests are timed, they involve implementation of the new language we learned this past year, and they demand enormous concentration. Unlike dating, they don’t require that you dress appealingly or even shower. What they do require is for everyone to remain absolutely still and focus.
It’s yak-yak-city until the instructor walks in with the day’s tests and a stopwatch and then it’s like we’re on a field trip to the morgue. Silence. The day I’m telling you about here is the last day before Thanksgiving break which happened to be the day I had to pass a test that was keeping me in that particular room a great deal longer than I wanted to be.
The test began and I was humming along like a classic Mustang on a country road. At the precise moment I began silently celebrating that the door might finally be opening for me into the next room, the door to the room I was in burst open and in charged one of the school’s directors looking agitated. “We have a medical emergency!” he announced and we all looked at him like yeah, we know, you’re about to be fed your own spleen.
The EMS hadn’t arrived yet so he started ransacking the room looking for a blanket to put under a student in the next class who had collapsed with some kind of seizure. Since our school is as prepared for this as the White House is for bungee jumping, the best he could find was a closetful of graduation gowns which would actually be an amusing mental picture were it not such a serious situation.
The way it played out is that the student rallied, the gowns went back in the closet, and the teacher started the test all over again. I don’t know if my rally was as successful as the fallen student’s but I sucked it up and did my best.
Son, a recent college grad who loves the fact that I’m a student now and he isn’t, called that evening to see when he was expected the next day for Thanksgiving.
SON: What’s wrong? You don’t sound happy.
OSV: I had a really miserable day at school.
SON: Awww. Were the other kids being mean to you?
God, I needed that laugh.
Daughter’s Featured Fotos fuse Nature and Art with images from exclusive Gramercy Park and the edgy Open Studios at Hunter College
past the locked gate. shhh! don’t tell
metal wrap masks
really big leaf
living inside a drawer