fucked-upbringing

this building is made of lanyards, t-shirts and tie-dye.
this building is made of wonderful women.

within it, a monument; several hundred pounds of crayons, wet wipes, cabinets and bins. too many printables, laminated wall hangings, velcroed calendar widgets, fidgets for gidgets and pictures of schoolteachers' husbands.

i can't say that i understand public schools, that the intuition of the mechanism doth speak to me. i do occasionally catch a parallel, in the exploration of manipulatives and the copying of a homework list, in the reading aloud of a story or text.

(i read a story, once. i was really fucking good at it.)

but i didn't learn about in-classroom bathrooms, for instance, until this year. think of the plumbing! not just sinks, but septic! think of a thousand separate clogs!

what a complete organism. what a gorgeous, floculating little cell.

this building is made of fifteen, twenty-five, thirty-five colonies of staff and stackulty. the front office, by all means, protect their own. the custodian has a name, but only barely. a polo shirt resplendent with lanyard sits parked aside in a closet.

three buildings in the same district, all constructed in a shape just the same. all full of wings and flags and curtains and courtesy. all designed to be navigable by little bodies, little hands and feet, little eyes, little heads.

an elementary school is full of so much fucking junk, is what i'm getting at. the proliferation of parent-provided school supplies is welcome and wonderful, to be i'm sure, and it gives a great context to all those worries and woes i'd once heard about.

the teacher has enough to do costuming the classroom and putting her prettiest baccalaureate-brunette smile (teeth whitened) on. the bonkers bureaucracy of switch classes and break times and snack cleaning and block types...how many slides and sheets of paper must be thoughtlessly filled out, every single day.

i don't know how anyone could ever think to fathom the lot. children are taught to do it from nigh infancy.

they know it better than i do. oh, they're so much better than me.