From “The Human Condition: A User’s Manual,” by Arnold Kunst
9 February
I used to teach in a girls’ Catholic high school. It was quite simply
the best girls’ college prep school in all of northern California. A number of
our girls took Advanced Placement classes in everything from Chemistry to
French; a good grade in one of these classes represented college credit. When
the end of the year came around and it was time to take the all-important AP
exams boys from the near-by Jesuit high school would come by to study with our
girls. [Note: ours didn’t go to them, theirs came to us.] In fact, one of my former students went to
Stanford with 24 units as a graduating high school senior.
As a natural corollary we also a first-rate basketball team – you know,
All-City, All-Conference, etc. And every year at one of the rallies in the gym
we’d stage a game between the varsity team and a “team” made up of faculty
members. We needed 25 to 30 members of the team just to stay fresh. Each of us
would play flat out – for a good two minutes. Then our coach – the head of the
math department was 6’ 4” – would rotate individuals out as we became deflated
and rotate others in. The girls, of course, played consistently, and smoothly.
I remember like it was yesterday how I needed to concentrate big time on just
bouncing that damned ball. The girls, though, would weave between us like we
were statues – and never once look down at the ball they handled with
consummate ease. The experience of getting trounced by our students was quite a
switch from teaching them to write essays. Trying to put an essay together over
a three-week period was, for them, like pushing a soggy noodle in a straight
trajectory.
Ain’t life a bitch?!?
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