Expelled from School

 
I loved grammar class. I wasn't as huge of a fan of literature class. It was the dissecting and diagramming that did it. It was math.

I've always viewed math and grammar as essentially the same thing. You are balancing equations. You are looking for patterns. You see connections.

That is what I do: I lay bare connections. It gets me in trouble sometimes. Like the time I worked for Minneapolis Unified School District on their out-of-school youth empowerment program.
I was 20 and still naïve about how systems worked. I produced an anti-violence skit with high school youth that was performed at an elementary school. At lunch, the adults were screaming at the elementary students and calling them "stupid" and monkeys".

The high school youth were pissed. I calmed them down, and then we went to ask the adults, politely, to stop screaming and calling the students names. It went against what we had just been trying to teach. How could they not see the connections between violent speech and disruptive youth?

It ended with me being expelled permanently from that campus and the loss of my job. I still make the same mistakes. I just cannot not connect the dots and question authority.

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