Trouble In A Bubble.

Bringing the Schoolhouse Down

When I was in year 8, I did a speech for English about electronic masturbation, based on information I read on Cult of the Dead Cow. You hook up a low voltage musical keyboard through your gonads and your perineum. Playing different notes gives a different frequency, and a different vibration through your thing. It was probably all bullshit. The class all laughed and I got about 85%.

When I was in year 9, I did a speech for English that started off “Well, I am here today to discuss with you a problem… this problem is very problematic and may be problematicised by the problems that occur until they are problemmed out…” and continued on pretty much the same way for the entire thing.

When I was in year 11, I read the assessment sheet. It said I should use language that’s appropriate to my audience. I thought cool, I’m doing the speech before a bunch of 16 and 17 year olds. If I swore in the speech, that would really communicate to them. Actually, I don’t think I even thought that. What I thought was, it’s the night before this shit is due, I’d better write something.

So I sat down in front of the Pentium 100 in my room and hit the typer. I started typing, and after a while it starts flowing… I don’t know where it came from. When I finished I thought… gee, will this do? Will this make the people laugh? Then I thought doesn’t matter, this is it. This is my shit. And even if it is terrible, I have to get up in 6 hours.

You know, I remember this one story my friend Gretel told me. She went to All Saints College… The English teacher hated her because she would never read the text nor do her homework. The teacher would call on her every lesson to ask her about question 3 or whatever. Gretel would just make up a bunch of crap on the spot and the teacher would get infuriated every time, and call her stupid.

Once she had to submit a story for her major work… Her brother was at uni and just got a high distinction for a story he’d written. For an experiment, or just out of laziness, she copied the story the story out and submitted it.

She got about 30% and the teacher had a million reasons why the story was stupid, it had no plot, nothing happened, why is this guy doing that, and then it finishes?

Anyway, English was like second period, double lesson. We had a different teacher than our regular one to mark the speeches – I supposed it was to give a less biased opinion. I don’t think it worked… 99% of English teachers have their heads stuck up their arses, yoga style.

Frenchie got up and did her speech… for six minutes I listened about how much she loves Australia, kangaroos and koalas.

Exchange student rules say that no exchange student shall have a boyfriend or girlfriend while they’re in their boarding country. She had about three throughout the year, two went to our school, one didn’t. She was cute though… Big blue eyes, short blonde hair to chin level. I’d never heard a real French accent before her.

One lesson, I heard Phlegman giggling behind me. I realised later he was pointing at Frenchie at the front of the class, picking her nose for like five minutes… She was still cute though.

Frenchie got to about seven or eight minutes. I held the assessment guidelines in my hand. “A speech from two minutes to three minutes. You will be stopped after four minutes.”

Finally Frenchie wrapped up and Mrs Heidenberg said “Oh, I know I was supposed to stop you, but it was just so fascinating.” Come to think of it, I think Mrs Heidenberg was a lesbian. She was very masculine.

Gracia did her speech about underaged drinking. She stared at the page reading off her card the whole time, with the odd look up to try to make eye contact with the audience. I tuned out. I thought, this is why I should never be nervous to do a speech – no one is listening anyway. And if they were, that just meant you knew what you were doing.

Mrs. Heidenberg called on me.

I think the speech went something like:

So. You wake up in the morning, parents screaming at you that you’re going to miss the bus or some shit. You get to school and the bully shoves your head in the toilet and you get piss on your face. Second period the teacher gets you to do a speech and you get all nervous.

After that you’re feeling pretty frustrated. How are you supposed to relieve all this tension? There’s always wacking off in the toilets, but there’s the possibility of getting caught. Then again there are some that say the ghost of Lawrence Cladstock still lives around here.

(Cladstock was a dude who went to our school. Rumour has it that he got caught masturbating in the toilets. And even if he didn’t… he still seemed like the type.)

So you wack off in the toilets…

And so on and so forth.

I noticed vaguely a couple of things… The shocked expression on Mrs. Heidelberg’s face… the general look of amusement in the class. Lissa Strickland giving me a look that I would later learn to describe as “pre-orgasmic”.

The teachers didn’t like it. I got the assessment sheet back a few weeks later.

It said some crap like:

“Content: 1/5” (which is the lowest mark) “Relevance: 1/5… Engagement of audience 1/5. Audience response 2/5”

I spit on it and screwed it up.

Really. I never liked the English department but I didn’t think they would just straight out lie like that…  For all the rest of the speeches, the audience was off daydreaming of the Caribbean – and they gave me two out of five?  Though, why wouldn’t they lie, because the whole department was about talking shit anyway. My teacher Mr. Curador once started a lesson by talking for 15 minutes about his car and his girlfriend… He was a personal trainer outside of school. I think he only became an English teacher rather than a PE teacher because it meant there were less classes for him at uni… He was good for a laugh.

Of course I must have anticipated that they wouldn’t like my speech it I used cuss words in it. Probably felt I had to prove a point like some bleeding heart. Tristan said to me sardonically “Yeah! Fight the power!”

Anyway, I went to see the head teacher Mrs. Fletcher that I wanted to appeal the mark. I said I’d used language appropriate to the audience, just like the assessment. She said there are certain social standards that people must follow. For example, it’s not particularly cold today – we could go naked, but instead we wear clothes. I considered reaching for my shoe to start to undress. Of course, we read texts that had swearing in them sometimes. The teachers would even read them out loud. As a matter of fact, Mr. Curador swore all throughout our lessons… something was not quite right about it really. Pretty fucking stupid. I didn’t know that I wasn’t being marked on my speech, but my conforming to social standards. But hey, I guess that’s what it’s like to be a genius before your time.

Or a 16 year old with a chip on your shoulder.

Mrs. Fletcher said that if I wrote an essay about why they should amend my mark, they would consider it. I guess she thought I’d never do it… I wrote about 1500 words, in the only language they understood – no, not English… I mean Shameless-bullshit-ese.

“My mention of masturbation was not a cheap plea for laughs but instead a subtle metaphor for…” and so on.

They got back to me about a week later, with a note saying: “Naturally, you’ve read the student HSC manual and you understand that under section 5, paragraph 12, no assessment mark can be amended without re-assessing the entire grade, which would prove impractical.”

No I hadn’t read the student manual… Of course, they hadn’t either until that point, otherwise they wouldn’t have told me to write the essay.

I wrote a note on the back of the letter saying “Then why’d you tell me to write the essay, you stupid arseholes.” and slipped it under the English staffroom door while no one was looking.

I was suspended for three days.

When I got back, Mrs. Weathers said to me she read my essay, and that I should push to get into the top English class. I didn’t.

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