Weekly News Archive

March 23 (’03) – March 29 (’03)

Dancing on Strings

There are a great many injustices one puts up with attending this school.

Small ones on a daily basis. Large ones that you don’t notice until someone points them out to you. And occasionally, something truly outrageous that makes you wonder what the hell planet you’re living on.

Today at lunch, I headed for one of the informational meetings being held for AP Biology, which I’ll probably be taking next year. I missed lunch, of course, but I figured it was for a worthy cause.

The meeting was standard fare: a description of the class, some current students gving testimonials, and as much gloom and doom as can be fit. This always happens, whether it’s for Honors or AP; my assumption is that they want to keep as many students from applying as humanly possible, since there are a very limited number of spots.

Then things got good.

You see, we were given homework. Homework for a class we’re not taking yet and might not take at all? Well, yes. Again with the best guess: Apparently it has been decided that AP classes will no longer require an entrance exam — or more accurately, may not require one. It’s part of the initiative to keep “tracked” courses like AP open to anyone and everyone who wants to take them. Therefore, if AP Bio cannot administer a test… they will administer a homework.

And what is it?

It’s reading. But not just any reading. It’s twelve pages of surprisingly dense reading, full textbook pages, and numerous questions to answer. Sure, we say, it will take a little effort. It’s AP, after all.

Except…

... that these twelve pages have sustained a magical transformation into one. One. A single, ordinary double-sided sheet of paper.

How is this miracle accomplished? It’s quite simple. Step One: Press book to photocopy machine. Step Two: Push “Smaller” button far too many times. Step Three: There is no step three!

This all sounds rather funny and entertaining to listen to, but if you look at the sheet, you’ll see the grim truth. Each “page” is literally 3 inches by 4 inches. Each line of text is one millimeter tall. Go grab a ruler and look at how much a millimeter is.

Beyond this, not only was it done stupidly, it was done badly. Most of the “pages” are missing an inch or two from their edges, making dozens of words disappear into oblivion. The marvelous photocopier employed by the school has left splotches of text as unintelligible smudges. As it tried despereately to print text almost as small as the brain of whoever conceived this, letters turn into blocks of ink. Section headers and important words are in bold, making them even less readable. Half of the illustrations are impressionist art make of black squares. Virtually every “page” features an outer edge (where it met the binding of the book) that curves upward and away, rapidly runningtogetherthewords.

Of the text that’s actually legible, it brings new meaning to the words “pain in the ass.” Again, the text is approximately one millimeter high, and correspondingly thin; the ink disappears at random points, creating a kind of cuneiform. I spent fifteen minutes reading one paragraph. It wasn’t hard to understand; it was hard to keep my fucking brain from leaking out my ear. I was in physical pain.

A friend suggested using a jeweler’s loupe. Someone else plans to try a low-magnification microscope. A third idea was to scan it into the computer and enlarge it.

Take a minute to think about all of this before you read on.

In almost two years at the school, day in and day out of idiocies, mistakes, and general insanity, I have for the most part been able to ignore the most truly obscene. Sometimes it’s hard. When the administration called the fire alarm pranks last semester an “act of terrorism,” I got annoyed.

Yet so far, with my best efforts, I have been able to look past a certain underlying truth of our school: Nobody cares about you.

I have been trying, very hard, to justify this. I spent most of the afternoon thinking about it, and trying to imagine how anyone could do this.

Were they trying to save paper? Were they hoping to get rid of anyone who didn’t care enough to make themselves bleed in order to get into the class? Or did they simply not care?

I think that they had some reason to justify this to themselves. Some explanation why one goddamned piece of paper was better than two, or three, or six, or twelve. However, what’s important is not that they had a reason — it’s that their reason was ultimately, without a doubt, more important than us.

I’m not whining about doing work. I’m realizing, perhaps for the first time, that students are not people.

If I printed out this sheet of paper, I would never in my life dream of giving it to a friend to read. I would certainly not give it to them and say (very clearly), “If you turn this in, you’re getting in the class. If you don’t turn it in, you aren’t.”

In fact, the only way I could imagine making someone read this is if I didn’t think of them as a person, didn’t think of them as a human being — then even something as as mundane as saving ink could prompt me to print 12 pages on 1 at the bare limit of comprehensibility. After all, if there’s absolutely no reason to care about the people reading it, then I can do anything at all to them… and it won’t matter.

In my afternoon today after I received this paper, as my mood slowly went from bad to worse, I have had three thoughts:

1. Berkeley High is full of shit.
2. These people know full well that there are only two AP Bio classes, that “driven” students must take it, and they can do whatever the hell they please to us, because we need it.
3. Whoever’s idea this was is a bitch-ass motherfucking piece of shit, and you may quote me on that.

— Brandon