(not) hostile

Sometimes, it takes all my effort at restraint to refrain from throwing my textbooks at my classmates and storming from the room in fury at their idiocy.  Or, alternatively, throwing my book at the professor for pandering to the lowest achieving students in the room.

This is the story of American education, though.  You might think after 20 years, I would have grown accustomed to it.  Apparently not.

When I got to kindergarten, I already knew how to read.  This made both kindergarten and first grade pointless.  Instead of skipping me, though, my mom decided it would be for the best if I stayed with the other kids my age.  For social reasons, you know.

At the end of third grade, I was almost skipped to 5th grade, but my mom again declined, citing my social development.

In a way, I suppose she was right to be concerned about it.  My sister didn’t go to preschool, but I did.  My social skills were…lacking, pretty much from birth if you listen to my mother.  Interestingly, remaining in my age-group did absolutely nothing to help with this shortcoming. 

Fortunately, I was never antisocial, just asocial, and so it was largely irrelevant.  I didn’t torment animals, and I didn’t mercilessly use the other children to do my bidding, so it was not a particularly troubling issue.

“Asocial” suggests indifference to or separation from society, whereas “antisocial” more often suggests active hostility toward society” they say.

And I am not hostile.

Anyway, I managed to get through the 12 years of state-funded education largely without learning a thing.  Well, that’s not quite true.  I learned exactly the elementary, inane drivel that everyone else learned.  The difference was that I did it in about 1/10 of the time, which meant I spent a large portion of those 12 years bored out of my mind.  And at the end of those 12 years, I had learned to slack off, put forth my most pathetic effort, and utterly disregard the praise (and criticism) of authority figures.  “Oh, Alex, that research paper was wonderful!  The best work I’ve ever seen!”  That’s interesting, because it took me 3 hours to write last night.  So sad.  Why would I take praise seriously?

But I was always polite about it.  I have always been polite about it.  Sure, I sometimes get frustrated when my calculus professor needs to explain a bit of algebra, like distributing a – through an equation, but my frustration is “elitist,” and furthermore, it’s “rude,” so I just smile and doodle in the margins, or engage my mind in one of a stunning variety of “what if” scenarios.

Sometimes, though, I really want to start throwing things.  I remind myself, though, that I am not hostile.  I am, in fact, completely oblivious to the fact that morons surround me on every side.  An island of polite non-hostility, that’s me.