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I had a peculiar experience last night: I went to work as a nude life-drawing model at a friend's new studio, located in one of the classrooms of my former elementary school, which has been shut down these last seven years.
I attended the school K-5, and then my parents liberated me and let me homeschool for a few years in blessed independence. The last straw was related to art class, as a matter of fact; we had a good art teacher, one of the few good educators in that forsaken building, and my homeroom teacher had kept us all back from art class as punishment for the rowdy behavior of the usual-suspect boys; we were to sit with our heads down on our desks for the period instead. Mother hit the ceiling when she found out; and then one day at breakfast they asked me if I would like to never go back, and it was the best morning of my life.
The building is actually worse than I'd expected it to be, going from memory. It's so tiny; one story, two narrow low cinderblock hallways with ghastly exposed fluorescent lighting down the center. Like something out of a soviet dystopia, or a submarine movie. What a place to pack little children in! It's sort of horrifying to think about.
It wasn't a bad school; I was neglected there, but it was generally benignly, because I was a good clever student and a quiet child by nature. They did say, when they closed the school, that the playground might have been contaminated by industrial waste from a nearby cleaning facility.
It's all arts and community studios now. The classroom where I was made to sit with my head down, missing art, is going to be a yoga studio. It's kind of great; but for me at least there are a lot of ghosts of little children there who, I now realize, were sadder and poorer than I could understand at the time.
I attended the school K-5, and then my parents liberated me and let me homeschool for a few years in blessed independence. The last straw was related to art class, as a matter of fact; we had a good art teacher, one of the few good educators in that forsaken building, and my homeroom teacher had kept us all back from art class as punishment for the rowdy behavior of the usual-suspect boys; we were to sit with our heads down on our desks for the period instead. Mother hit the ceiling when she found out; and then one day at breakfast they asked me if I would like to never go back, and it was the best morning of my life.
The building is actually worse than I'd expected it to be, going from memory. It's so tiny; one story, two narrow low cinderblock hallways with ghastly exposed fluorescent lighting down the center. Like something out of a soviet dystopia, or a submarine movie. What a place to pack little children in! It's sort of horrifying to think about.
It wasn't a bad school; I was neglected there, but it was generally benignly, because I was a good clever student and a quiet child by nature. They did say, when they closed the school, that the playground might have been contaminated by industrial waste from a nearby cleaning facility.
It's all arts and community studios now. The classroom where I was made to sit with my head down, missing art, is going to be a yoga studio. It's kind of great; but for me at least there are a lot of ghosts of little children there who, I now realize, were sadder and poorer than I could understand at the time.