Hayrabolu Two fifth grade students finished their tests later than the rest of the class and as a result their tests ended up in a different pile from everyone else’s, and when I got to grading them I figured I would skip the scantron – it was only two tests – and grade them by hand. On the thirteenth question of the test – “what is the Latin for ‘friendship'” – one of the students circled the correct answer (“d. amicitia”) and then drew the torso, head, and tail of a cat looking at the correct answer. It was gratuitous – she knew that we teachers did not normally look at the test booklet for scantron tests – and it took away from her time on the exam. But it was wonderfully dear. If we had found something like this in an inscription two thousand years old, it would be almost unbearably precious and human. But it is precisely the kind of thing that tends to perish – the silly work of a childish hand, which adults pass over to get to graver concerns.
Litoměřice Since some students were done with their test early, I told them that I wanted to write a book about a javelina who visits ancient Rome. I needed an illustrator, so if they wanted to try out for the post they could do so. Having them illustrate a story about a javelina in Rome is a pretty good way to get a partial inventory of the some of the stranger areas of their minds. I got pictures of gladiators and fishmongers and the Colosseum and reclining emperors and “poisoness water” and men chanting “Hail Neptune! Hail Mars” in the recesses of temples.
We put so much effort into showing none but the rational parts of our mind: always giving the answer to the question asked and nothing more, being relevant and coherent and organized. I wanted the kids to put answers on their tests, not drawings. But I felt that the richer and more important side was left neglected and unexplored, a casualty of efficient and well-run society, which has other things to do than look at children’s projections about time-traveling javelinas.
So it is with my time in Arizona, which is coming to a close. I was loyal to the system: I taught, I did my work, I paid my bills and I paid attention to all the things which could be construed as my professional responsibilities. I had little time for anything else. But I feel a richness in the human and animal lives around me which I do not routinely come into meaningful contact with by being professional or dutiful. I know this is what I want – life and reality as opposed to all our politeness, which is always a form of partiality and incompleteness – and yet I don’t really know how to get it. And when I get in that car and leave Tucson I will be leaving behind a white-collar job and returning to poverty and uncertainty.
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