Her lecture that day was on the role of Southern abolitionists in the beginnings of the drive towards the Civil War. She portrayed them as saintly people, dedicated to the cause of abolishing the evil institution of slavery. She implied to the class that they were right up there with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln in American History. About halfway through I could take no more. I raised my hand.
She ignored it for quite some time but finally was forced to call on me.
"Yes Billy?" She said. "Do you have a question?"
"Yes. " I nodded. "I'm just curious about something. You just told us that the abolitionists used to use protests to influence those southern slaveholders. Exactly what kind of protests are you talking about?"
She gave me THE LOOK for a moment and then said, "Well, they used a variety of methods. Boycotts of services and that sort of thing. "
"That sort of thing?" I said. "Isn't it true that they used to attack slave holders and their families in the middle of the night? Burning down their houses and hacking the men and even the women and children to death?"
She nearly choked but she composed herself quickly. "Well, there were some cases of the more fanatical elements doing things like that of course. But that was rare. Usually they used the other measures I talked about. You have to understand that these people felt very strongly about anti-slavery. About it's wrongness. It's only natural that some of them went off the deep end as it were. "
"Really?" I pressed further. "I actually read that grotesque violence was more the rule than the exception. I guess I must have read wrong. But to answer your other point about them feeling that it was wrong. Don't you think that these abolitionists were motivated more by economic factors than religious or moralistic ones?"
She was now speechless.
"I mean think about it. Who were the southern abolitionists? Poor whites for the most part, right?"
"Well yes," She nodded, "But… "
"Poor whites without jobs. How could they compete with slave labor? They couldn't. Isn't it true they also used to kill the slaves when they would attack a plantation? Hardly sounds like people that are just interested in freeing the slaves now, does it?"
"Well again Billy," She said firmly. "What you are talking about was the exception, not the rule. There were SOME incidents as you described but usually they used economic measures like boycotts to achieve their ends. And many of them were imprisoned or killed by the corrupt southern system for their efforts. "
"Well of course they were. " I snorted. "They were destroying valuable property and threatening a near-perfect economic system. The plantation owners ran the law after all. I imagine they came down rather hard on them when they caught them. "
She was actually flustered by what I'd said. "Well that's a very interesting point of view Billy. " She told me. "But I think we've discussed it enough now. If you don't mind, I'll get back to the lecture now. "
"Sure. " I smiled.
"Okay," She said, "Now back in 1858 there was a group called… "
Though I had no homework for Mrs. Crookshank either, she did not ignore me in class as she usually did. She remembered my dissertation on the blood cell the previous day and began probing at me to see if it was simply a well-studied joke on my part or not. Her lecture was on the major arteries of the body and she fired her first shot less than two minutes into it.
"Now can anyone tell me the name of the arteries that feed the kidneys?" She asked and then, without waiting for anyone to put up his or her hand, turned to me. "Billy, maybe you can tell us?"
She thought she had me I'm sure. I'd been doing what I usually did in her class; watching her alluring form move back and forth and not looking as if I was paying the least bit of attention to her words.
"Mesenteric. " I said in a bored voice, causing her to give me THE LOOK.
"Yes. " She nodded, obviously taken aback a bit, and then went on.
She called on me multiple other times during the lecture, making the questions harder and harder. We covered the carotids, the circle of Willis, and all of the coronary arteries. Some of the questions I knew were not even part of her lecture, were not even part of high school curriculum. I came up with the answers every time, spouting them out in a monotone voice with an expressionless face. It quickly became clear to the entire class that some sort of battle was going on between Mrs. Crookshank and I. Finally, bored, I conceded the battle, telling her I did not know the answer to a question she asked. The look on her face was of weak triumph and more than a little relief.
She wrapped up her lecture just before the bell rang and assigned us our homework for the next day. As the class filed out she called, "Billy?"
I turned to her questioningly.
"Do you mind if I speak to you for a moment?"
"Sure. " I said, walking over.
Her eyes looked me up and down as I stood before her desk. "You seem to have quite a bit of knowledge of anatomy and physiology. " She almost accused.
I shrugged. "I like to read. " I said.
"Really?" She said. "What books have you read?"
"Oh the usual. " I told her. "Gray's Anatomy, A Physician's Guide to A amp;P, stuff like that. "
"You've read them?" She found this hard to believe.
"Yep. " I nodded. "Fascinating reading. I've even read your textbook a little. It's not bad but it oversimplifies things a little, wouldn't you say?"
She swallowed deeply, took a deep breathe, and then said, "Billy, I majored in Biology in college and I have an extensive background in A amp;P. I asked you questions today that are well beyond high school level knowledge and you answered every one correctly except one. "
"I only pretended I didn't know that one. " I told her. "I felt you were, shall we say, singling me out, and I wanted you to stop. " I smiled cynically. "Kind of unprofessional for a teacher wouldn't you say?"
She dismissed the subject of her professionalism, or lack thereof, with a shake of her head. "I see. So you're telling me that you've known the answers to my questions all of this time, but that you haven't answered any of them, either in class or on your tests or in your homework until yesterday?"
I shrugged again. "What can I say?"
"What can you say?" She asked, getting a little angry now. "This makes no sense. Why would you do such a thing?"
"Well Mrs. Crookshank," I told her. "I'm what's known as a classic underachiever. That means I have above average intelligence and good reasoning ability but that I am bored to death by high school because the curriculum is so scaled-down that the work is not challenging to me. This sets up a vicious cycle in which I stop listening and doing the work and therefore get far behind and fail many classes. It's mostly my fault of course, but the system itself is also partially to blame since it sets such absurdly low standards in the first place in an attempt to pad the statistics. I mean, when regional test scores are low, what do you people in the education business do? Do you beef up the learning or reevaluate your teaching methods? No. What you do is scale down the curriculum and lower the standards for passing, therefore making it easier for those "struggling" students to pass, but boring the crap out of those of us who would probably benefit from harder, more challenging classes. What then happens is that many of what could potentially be your best students simply don't give a damn while many of the less intelligent and less worthy ones have their good grades spoon fed to them by teaching them with Dick and Jane methods. "
She gaped at me. I knew I'd hit upon the very subject that line teachers like her had bitched about for years to their administration. In a few years, after several lawsuits about people graduating at a functionally illiterate level while promising students were actually dropping out, education reform would hit the State of Washington like a sledgehammer, improving things remarkably. I almost wished I could tell her that. She would still be teaching when it occurred. But I didn't.