School

An audio-video book I put together of Barthelme's "The School" short story. The process gave birth to a poem in me.

I made this video story over the weekend. My education channel occupies a lot of my time and creativity these days - a number of gems when you have time to check it out. Right now working on completing the whole book - The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz. A book, an allegory that hides so much intelligence under its simple cover story.

The School by Donald Barthelme works well as a short story. It has pace, foreboding doom, humor. You can read it on so many levels. I enjoy its “dead pan”, matter of fact style and its absurdist claims. You have to love literature, works of art like this that crosses over into communication - allowing the reader to arrive at, suck on, their own connections and conclusions. A story when done well, is always a good conversation.

I did make my own connections and the poem below, fresh off my keyboard reflects that. Not my best but speaks to the story and what it stroked inside me. For a curriculum geek like myself, it hit the spot. Enjoy.

School

It was so exciting, school -
but alas,
you forget most of it
eventually,
even the fact
you’d thought it would never end.

You forget the quadratic equation.
You forget the year of the Battle of Hastings
or who it was that discovered oxygen.

You forget the name of the
first one you kissed or the taste
of those creme pies you so loved.

You forget one by one
the names of
all your teachers
and all the lines of poetry,
all the definitions and details
they tried to
stuff inside you.

You forget what grades you got
and even what subjects you took,
faint now the smell of the smoking hall
where you’d hang out and look cool.

You forget it all, just
odd memories coming back
at the news of so and so
passing away or a building
being demolished.

The only thing you don’t
forget about school
are the tragedies and drama
the overdoses, the suicides,
the girl who disappeared and
was never found or
the time Mr. Breault threw the bat
and knocked out
all of Doug Brubaker’s teeth.

We remember tragedy so well.
Maybe school should
add that to the curriculum
so we’d remember
all that stuff
much more?