My Teachers Knew I Was a Bad Student

Every year when the school season starts I remember that I was a lousy student in school until I got to college and was finally able to study what I wanted. The fundamental reason was disinterest and my youthful eagerness to fight against injustice. I considered most subjects too unappealing by my standards of fun — essentially, soccer, rock, and poetry — and it seemed unfair that teachers should make a boy in love with the Humanities learn mathematical formulas, so I exercised my right to strike academically.

In other words, I got bad grades in mathematics out of pure activism, not just lack of ability; my professor, an old hound, did not share this opinion. But the truth is that I was offended if I ever managed to pass a science exam, just as much as I was unable to avoid getting the best grades in the class in philosophy, literature and the like. Maybe these confessions of a bad student will help some misunderstood kid today.

In spite of everything, I never cheated, except once. One of the lessons I considered stupid, having Atlases and world maps at home, was memorizing the cities of my country, as well as the countries and capitals of places you will never go to, unless you are on the run from justice.

Since, besides, God did not bless me with a good memory, when I got to the final exam I copied all the answers from my deskmate’s exam, who was a guy who had looked like he wanted to become a geographer or something, because if not, one cannot understand his determination to hold to memory the fact that the capital of Mozambique is Maputo, that of Botswana, Gaborone, and that of Tajikistan, Dushanbe.

I was a great student of Latin, perhaps because I longed to read the classics in their language, and a lousy learner of all other languages. The only thing I liked about natural sciences was that the teacher let us smoke in the lab (in those days we were so free!), and that we attended class under the defiant gaze of a stuffed lynx presiding over the bookshelf. When I felt fed up with enduring my hour of science class, I would look at the lynx and think: “poor thing, it suffers through eight hours of class a day and can’t even protest.” That made me feel better.

I was more interested in the poetry of the Spanish Golden Age than in the very boring morphological analysis, which sounded to me like trying to apply something as tedious as mathematics to the beautiful tool of written language, in order to spoil it. (READ MORE from Itxu Diaz: Cheney’s Change of Vote Means Nothing)

Technical drawing and I were incompatible: it brought together the worst of mathematics and the worst of drawing. You had to apply absurd formulas, it was forbidden to sketch freehand, which is the only exciting thing about drawing, and you had to help yourself with more tools than you need in able to perform open-heart surgery.

Especially odious was the compass, besides being extremely dangerous, it is incredible that of all the things that Ancient Greece bequeathed us, the teachers chose to force us to buy that horrible contraption, instead of, I don’t know, Homer’s Odyssey. As for the rest of it, my drawing teacher didn’t like me crossing things out, and honestly, I’m a writer, my life consists of crossing things out all the time.

I never got nervous in an exam, because nerves, like sweating, seemed to me ever so mundane. I never arrive punctual to class, unless I liked the subject, and in a somewhat incomprehensible way I won the affection of most of my professors, perhaps because they knew that I was not born for academic discipline, and that my time in those classrooms was something temporary, something like a bureaucratic formality, before giving free rein to my true vocation: rum taster. 

Not long ago I returned to my school and found that most of the things that used to amuse us are now forbidden: you can no longer smoke on the sly, there is no longer the bar where we used to go to buy candy, and, during recess, you can no longer move the secretary’s tiny car from its parking space (sometimes I wonder how the hell we could lift it between six kids to place it twenty parking spaces further along).

Now the teachers can’t throw the eraser at your head (the Literature teacher held the world record for accuracy in the Eraser category and in the bloodier Key chain category), you’re no longer allowed to sneak into the school to play soccer when it’s closed, and you need more signed documents to leave during school hours than you do to take a transatlantic trip with a backpack full of plutonium. (READ MORE: The Second Coming of Ronald Reagan)

I had a Spanish language teacher who told me, when I was 10 years old, “you will go far,” and I had a Physics and Chemistry teacher who told me “you will never go anywhere.” The amazing thing is that, in the end, they were both right. 

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