Never Walked In High Heels

Jefferson’s promise was scrawled across the board in half dead dry erase marker. Circled were the words all men. Our first day back for junior year of high school, the man in a sports coat at the front wasted no time in making us think. He demanded to know,  who was classified under the term “all men?” Did that include women, minorities, every age, creed? What about the fact that when these men wrote the Constitution, they clearly didn’t mean slaves, or women, or for that matter any white male who didn’t have the good fortune to own land? I looked out of the window at the rain pelting down, as it did every August to discourage us from even wanting to be outside. Summer was, without a doubt, over.

I didn’t know it then, but that was the first time I realized that I was entitled to certain rights, even if society refused to grant them.

Speed ahead six years and I’m in the so called “real world”. And I have discovered that certain bus drivers refuse to let me on their buses, in public there is a very vocal, albeit small, amount of people who don’t think I’m educated enough to go shopping on my own, and I am constantly plagued by experts telling me that they know more about my life than I do. A concerned teacher is continuously calling me and insisting, not suggesting, that I move out of my newly unpacked flat on the fourteenth floor of a high rise I love and into one that’s on the ground floor for “health and safety reasons.” When I try to tell her that I couldn’t find a ground floor flat which suited my needs, she told me I “don’t know how to go about looking properly.”

At twenty three, I’m wondering how to go about declaring my independence from the people out there who can’t stand the thought of me being independent.

Being a disabled woman these day is like living in your own private American Revolution without the petticoats and bayonets. It means starting from square one and having to convince every person you meet that you are, indeed intelligent, capable of making your own decisions, and deserving of being listened to. It means finding subtle ways to display your capacities. There are numerous daily examples of this. Calling a waitress by their name on the tag alludes to the fact you can read. You bring up current events and dare to debate where disagreement is uncommon (citing your sources of course). And if you can see from the onset that a person is going to be over bearing, you avoid them at all possible costs, even at the expense of being slightly aloof.

Not that I knew any of this my first day of junior year. Sitting, listening to the bald man at the front, I thought the idea that God made all men equal was just a given to Americans, excluding the bigoted idiots of course. We had the Civil Rights movement, women’s rights marches, and every amended law in between so that America was the land of opportunity for all people. I never thought that I would be one of the ones still having to fight for Jefferson’s promise to be fulfilled.

              Missy unpacked her book bag in front of me. School hadn’t even been going on for two weeks and there were already crumpled bits of paper at the bottom of her bag, even a permission slip she had forgotten about. It was easy to see why her mom hired me as a temporary math tutor. She then pulled out her math text book, dropped it in front of me, flipped it open to the answer pages in the back, and started copying down the answers. I quickly asked her what she was doing.

              “If I don’t have the answers, how do I know if I’ve done it right?” I can’t help but smile at this honest and yet completely practical answer. Its a question I’ve wondered at often in my own life, now that I’m older. If I don’t know where I am supposed to end up, how am I ever going to get there?

              I want to look in the back of the book all the time. What flat should I move into? Will I be fortunate enough to get married? To whom? How can I make my dreams come true? Will I ever have to bare the pain of being abandoned? The list of questions keep me up at night as I see the worst possible epitaph engraved on my tombstone: Athena Stevens – reached her zenith at eighteen. Died at age ninety nine.

              I would have thought that by my age, all of my insecurities and questions would have disappeared or at least I would know how to answer them as I would an algebra problem. I thought that was the entire point of education, to learn how to solve for Z when all you have is X and Y. Problem is, once you have Z, who’s to say you wouldn’t be better of with Z+1 or Z+3? In truth, a person in real life rarely has all the variables needed to solve the equation by the time a decision is needed. You don’t know how many children you’ll end up with when you buy the three bedroom rather than the four bedroom house. You can’t know Cancer wasn’t included when she said “in sickness and in health.” And there’s never a guarantee that something better won’t come along after we’ve made a commitment… or that it will after we’ve rejected one. You can’t skip steps. All you can do is work with the variables in front of you.

              If I had all the answers from the back of some book, I would set out to complete life rather than live it. I guess I’m hoping that I would be able to save time by making all the right choices the first go round. I can’t figure out why else I’d want to do get to the last page without taking in the whole book. Maybe I see it as running into the supermarket just to buy milk. If I get in and go straight to the back, I will get home faster. Or maybe I see life like homework, if I get all the answers right the first time around, I can go outside and play sooner. Then again, being “done” with life rarely gets equated with a sunny afternoon on a swing set.

              At the end of Our Town Emily cries out, “oh World, you are too beautiful for anyone to ever notice you!” Leave it to Wilder to make us notice what we should’ve known all along. If life was about reaching some finish line as quickly and as flawlessly as possible, why do we dread death? Life is about living in the moment, and doing what that time calls upon you to do. Its about waiting to see the final product, while taking all the steps needed to get there. Because any good Algebra 1 student can tell you, you need to cover all the steps, even the counter intuitive ones, if you ever hope to understand how to do the problem correctly.

One of my best friends and I have been following a Supreme Court case which has recently completely engrossed our dinner time conversation. Last month they reached a verdict, but we still can’t let it go. A middle school-aged girl, suspected of hiding painkillers, was strip searched in front of the school nurse and another female teacher after no prescription drugs were found found in her locker. The US Supreme Court fortunately has ruled that the search was unconstitutional and went against an individual’s right to privacy. The student, and if I might say victim, in this situation is now in college and although the decision brings closure, it cannot begin to undo the damage brought on by the incident.

There’s something about being in a school setting, which forces individuals, who are otherwise quite pleasant, to come under the false assumption that there is no governing body higher than there own and nothing any parent or student can do to complain will ever have ramifications on an administrative career. The situation that invoked the Supreme Court case was of course every parent’s worst nightmare. You send your child to school to educate them in  reason and logic. You expect faculty and staff to treat your student with decency, showing them how a moral upright person is to behave in a larger society. Students are taught that they should trust their teachers, and I think the relationship with those in front of the classroom can often prove to be as important or as detrimental as a relationship with a parent. What happened was of course a breech of power, but it was so much more than that as well. What the students learned is that there is no law, and in this particular situation, that might makes right. Is a classroom full of young people where we want to call this into question? Forced to strip down to her underwear and shift her breasts to prove that there was nothing in her bra, the teachers who observed the strip search actually advocated for her to turn off her mind, her conscience, and her self-respect for their own suspicions.

What disturbs me about this case is that I know this abuse of power and manipulation of students happens on a daily basis. I have seen it happen in my own education, which is why I find the case so angering. If our teachers are responsible for educating and molding the next generation, what does it mean to teach children that there is no right to privacy and that any official can demand a strip search and must immediately be complied with? How can we ever teach that a woman has a right to choose what happens to her own body when this occurs? Such is a recipe for a rampant abuse of power particularly when brought upon a student who has no prior history of using any harmful substances. What is obvious about this situation is the fact that the faculty who administered the search were used to living in fear and thought that such mandatory complacency was perfectly acceptable. I wish more parents were involved in their children’s education to the extent of being willing to take the school administration to court when they are severely in the wrong. I am fortunate enough to have parents who were willing to do so and who taught me to do likewise. The greatest education that can be received often comes from the mistakes of the teachers who are supposed to be offering it freely. Battles with school administration are unfortunately an everyday occurrence if you are a student with a disability and critiquing though they might be, they teach you never to turn of your mind, always to question authority, and how to really be an aware individual, even if it means always being suspicious of those in charge.

In the list of the few teachers I didn’t get along with, there has been one name that has come back to my mind in recent months. He was loud, obnoxious, and arrogant, always interrupting students the second we got off course. He used to strut, yes strut, in front of a classroom full of seventeen year-olds, waiting to write the next discussion point on the board. Looking back, he was the only teacher I remember from high school who dared to grade papers in red pen. I’m sure I had more teachers like him, but this Economics teacher was fiercely Capitalist, supremely self-righteous, and made Ayn Rand look like a soccer mom. 

These days, I wish he taught kindergarden. 

Why do we insist on not teaching our children the basics of Economics? In between the Maths, Sciences, and Phonics, all the building blocks which are supposed lead to a full functioning member of society, there is no time to learn about the basic bedrock of what holds society together: money. The word problems in arithmetic class aren’t enough. “Sally sells seashells at seventy cents” only serves to teach young people the value of numbers, not the value of money. We give them no concept about how taxes work or how money stabilizes a society until they a practically full fledged members themselves, and even then the value of money is rarely discussed. In the affluent public schools we teach that charity is done by giving money away, not by acting on the problem. We teach to give to the poor without question, rather than teaching that even alms can be an investment. And in doing all this we teach that the best way to solve a problem is by throwing more money at it, rather than seeing where the money is already going.

This form of financial education only serves to create a bigger schism between classes. We divide the world into haves and have nots, keeping the latter dependent on the former. Resentment naturally becomes a two way street.

There is a common thought, I suppose, that often leads young people astray in the first place: “Let kids be kids,” we say, rightfully protecting the innocence of youth.  But there comes a point where a chick has to battle with his own strength against the reality of the shell protecting him. If you break the egg for him, the chick never develops his own strength and dies in a relatively short  time. To intentionally keep a child ignorant about the basics of life represents a grave failure as a parent.

If you think I’m overreacting, I’ll make it concrete. I recently spoke with a young woman who is currently getting her masters. She graduated from one of the top liberal arts colleges a few years ago at the top of her class. And she was horrified to learn that when she makes a deposit in the bank, the actual cash doesn’t just sit there until she is ready to take it out. She didn’t understand what it meant to be FDIC insured and had never heard of some stocks going up in a recession.

How is it this student went to some of the best schools in the world and managed to miss this information not only in Economics class but also in History, Math, Government, Art History…

We should be teaching the basic principals of saving, credit, and interest from the day children are able to understand that money exists. We should be teaching teenagers how to follow investments in a mock stock exchange competition. And nobody should be allowed to graduate high school without knowing how to do taxes, set up a long term savings account, and handle APR. Failure to do so creates a system that combines two of the most crippling elements in the world: fear and guilt. Fear, from not knowing how to handle money, and guilt from having it in the first place. 

My teacher was a man who, sadly, didn’t have many of the qualities a good teacher has. I’m sure he drove the school administration nuts. (More power to him for that!) But he understood the fact that if people didn’t appreciate and even respect the value of money from a young age, economic chaos was certain. 

As I remember this teacher’s behavior whenever a student finally conceded that he was right, I hope we don’t give him a chance to strut during this modern economic period.