Back to School

Today I went back to school for the first time in about.... gee, what's it been? Twelve years? Graduated from law school in 1995 -- yeah, 12 years. Wow. There were no school buses today though. No lockers or spitballs. No Trapper Keepers. Just me and a couple of notepads and pens. Clean and simple. After many false starts and unfulfilled promises to myself, I finally enrolled in a creative writing class with the Gotham Writer's Workshop. I hope that this is a first step towards creating a decent piece of fiction one day.

It was exciting to be back in a school setting again. It's totally liberating to be taking a class at this point in my life, when I already have an established career and source of income and no concerns about grades, class rank, or competition with my classmates. Now, it's all about learning and developing a skill. Now, I'm taking a class because I'm actually interested in the subject and WANT to learn about it. I'm not stuck taking "Ceramics in Prehistorical Kenya" because I need the elective in order to graduate. Not having to deal with the traditional competitive bullshit makes a huge difference in the experience of learning, but it was also a bit disorienting to be back in a classroom again.

What made the day truly surreal was the fact that our class was held in an elementary school classroom in the far West Village (one of my favorite parts of the city, by the way). The room we were in looked like a prototypical third or fourth grade classroom: acrylic paint, construction paper, a map of New Zealand, toy pet lizards, colored and laminated "book cards" with students' drawings of scenes from books they had read, notebook binders and books for each student stacked in little wooden cubicle boxes, and yellow flash cards translating English words like "July," "hello," "when," and "what" into Spanish. I was having flashbacks.

One of our first lessons was on "observation," paying attention to the details of our surroundings so that we can learn to write about them in a descriptive way. Our instructor made us get up, walk around and closely examine the small room, noting as many details as possible. Right away, I noticed a cartoon map of Manhattan on one of the walls that was peppered with red, raised thumbtacks at different city locations. Extending outward from the thumbtacks, like thin tentacles, were short lines of red yarn, which reached out to other red thumbtacks attached to short essays that had been drafted by the students. The one-page essays described notable events that had occurred at each thumbtacked location in the city. To really capture the moment, underneath each essay was a handdrawn picture depicting the event in colorful crayon.

One of the essays quickly caught my eye. It was entitled "Martin Luther King Jr. Gets Stabbed in the Back." Apparently, ten years before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. was stabbed with a letter opener by a mentally disturbed woman at a book signing in Harlem. As the essay noted, the letter opener nearly pierced his aorta vein, and if MLK had coughed or sneezed even once before his surgery to remove the letter opener from his chest, it likely would have killed him.

The fact that I didn't know this historical fact and it took an 8 year-old's essay to educate me about it was kind of funny. But what really made me laugh was the picture underneath. On the left side of the page was a picture of MLK carrying a small briefcase. Walking menacingly right behind him was a white woman with blond hair who was carrying what looked to be a small green knife. Above her head, there was a little thought bubble, like you see in comic books, which conveyed her crazy, nonsensical thoughts, utter gibberish. Above MLK's head another thought bubble exclaimed: "I really hope that no one stabs me in the back with a letter opener today!"

Hilarious. Not the actual event of course, but the precognitive nature of MLK's thoughts. It reminded me of the drawings I used to do as a kid, some of which had a similar predictive quality. Why do kids do this? Maybe it's an attempt to mitigate the chaotic scariness of the world. Maybe they are trying to exercise some control over the inevitable. (Editor's note: I have since learned that MLK was actually stabbed in the chest at a book signing by a black woman who did not have blond hair. In the student's defense, maybe he or she did not have access to the appropriate crayons that day and was exercising artistic license.)

It's really cool to be in a classroom setting again. It made me realize how much I really miss learning. I can't believe that I have lived in New York this long and have never taken advantage of the incredible learning opportunities that exist in this city. Now that the dam has broken, I plan to continue doing this for a long time. I might even pick up a Trapper Keeper and a Six Million Dollar Man lunchbox. Do they still make those?