«School Stuff»

My own school years weren't particularly bad. 
So I tell myself, at least. 
The bitter episodes of that school-march owed less to the school stuff than to the school staff. 
That is, to the people who prowled the playground and the classroom. 

There was this malicious, sadistic caretaker who always wore lace-up boots with steel toecaps. 
And those very caps of steel landed too often in some pupil's backside. 

Or that one teacher with the little hunch and the big ego, who scanned the room with Argus eyes for his next victim. 
His favourite pastime, alongside teaching, was corporal punishment. 
No, not the rhetorical kind — it came bamboo-armed, and painfully found its target on bare buttocks. 
Once, in front of the assembled class, I was granted this public showing: ten well-seasoned strokes across both cheeks. Yes, the lower ones.

Looking back today on that time of curious, often unsure growing-up, it was rarely the school material itself that made me uneasy. 
It was the way a school atmosphere was shaped. 
Joy of learning rarely had a seat at the table. 
Not among the teachers, nor among the pupils. 

Naturally, some subjects repelled me — algebra, geometry, mathematics. Simply too dull, and too strict when it came to results. 
Every misrecorded number was instant drama, pilloried without mercy in deep-red pen: «WRONG». 
Relaxed flexibility had no place in math class.

In German class, things were different. 
Well — not when it came to grammar; there the same iron rules held — but in the imaginative, renewable rhetoric, I always felt at home. 

As a teenager, I hadn't yet grasped how powerful words strung together in whole sentences can be. 
I mean, really powerful. 
After a schoolyard scuffle, the body hurts for a while. 
A few days later, the pain has vanished, gone from life and flesh. 
But a sentence brutally hurled with the intent to wound another's psyche — that has a half-life comparable to the decay of spent fuel rods in a nuclear plant.

There were subjects of my schooling I would gladly have done without. 
The compulsive funnelling of stuff — school stuff, that is — struck me as wilful squandering of my lifetime. 

Granted, I wouldn't have phrased it that way back then, but the sentence holds. 

But back to the enthusiastic listening, the joining in, when language was on the table. 

In my case, the German language. 
Books were my treasure chamber, my consolation, my inspiration for coming to terms with life. 

When I stumbled upon that author from Berlin, Kurt Tucholsky, peace of mind was over — and the passionate dream of writing stood at the starting line, engine roaring. 
How could a man like Tucholsky describe life in 1930s Berlin with words so mighty, so compassionate, so direct that they got under the skin? Tucholsky had only a short life ahead of him, yet he left masterworks behind for which your run-of-the-mill scribbler would have needed a century.

Back then, «AI» stood for «Author's Intelligence» — Kurt's kind, at least. 
So I tell myself. 

Where was I? Aah, back to the mostly grey routine of school. 

How might I have enjoyed schooldays if I'd been allowed to lean into my own gifts and interests — language, philosophy? 

Geometry and math? I'd have asked the experts. 

It still seems a little foolish today to force a crowd of utterly different girls and boys to sit in school benches and then feed them with standardized fare. 
How many talents have walked away from their passion because school, teachers, and perhaps parents talked those so-called fancies out of them — or drove them out altogether?

«Find yourself a safe apprenticeship. Become a commercial clerk.» That was the most hated catchphrase of my youth, flung in my face again and again.

And what happened to me? 

Well, first, a young man who spent his three-year apprentice-ship — or was it, more honestly, an absentee-ship? — bored to death, day in, day out. I cannot recall a single task at that crane factory offering the slightest fun.

Because once again, I was wrestling with the norm. «We don't do this that way!» or «We've always done it this way.» — those still set off the standardized alarm clock in my head today.

So. That had to come out.

And what did this late bloomer still manage to pull off?
I live off writing. And for writing.
So there!