Folly Gorge

Every child of the American public school system come to a point in their educational career when they are selected wither or not they are considered "gifted." For me, it apparently happened sometime during first grade, though nothing would really come of it for three years when I reached the fourth grade. From that point on, I was looked upon as slightly more clever than the majority of the children New Braunfels had to offer. The majority of the time, I was still in the regular classes and did not special treatment because of my "condition" as it was.

But by the time I was in eighth grade, it was ousted as being somewhat exceptional, though frankly I still have a bit of a hard time believing that I was smarter than most of the kids. Then again, looking back most of the students didn't even know where Argentina was on a map of South America, so it wasn't much competition wise. I was still in classes with the regular herd, but in some classes me, and the smarter kids were given different assignments from the lesser humans. This primarily happened in history, and science courses.

Anyhow, the assignments were usually just a variation of what the rest of the class did, only with a few more questions than normal. So, being smarter wasn't providing a much greater amount of work for the most part, but it did lead to some bullying, and being picked on. Emotional trauma aside, it wasn't particularly hard. Though on some occasions, we were given a completely different assignment from the rest of the class, making us feel even more separated than we already were.

The most notable occurrence of this was during in my United States history class, where those of us who were set aside were given a completely different assignment than the rest of the class. At that point in the school year we were studying the American Revolution (Brittan's whoopsy) and it's battles. The handful of us who were stupidly challenged, were assigned to write four pages on the events of Valley Forge.

For those who are uninformed, Valley Forge was a military encampment in Pennsylvania where the Colonial forces resided during the winter of 1777, during the war. Before this point in time, the public educational system did not let me know that his happened during the war. In my then eight years of education mainly told me that the events of the war was that we wrote the Decoration of Independence, then some years passed, then we won. They failed to let us know that thousands of soldiers froze to death, or severely suffered frostbite while waiting for the weather to lighten up.

After a month or so, the paper as due. I somehow filled out four or so pages, and turned it in, happy to have that thing over and done with. But, it was not two weeks later that we got the assignments back. I was given a fifty. Why you ask? Apparently it was meant to be a letter written from the point of view of a soldier with a solid black foot during the winter. The teacher never made this explicitly clear, but did not feel any sympathy for me, and did not give me a chance to fix the grade, what a rabble-rouser. Though after recieveing that grade, I would have likely given him something like this:



While not entirely educational, it was in letter form, so by his rules, I would have gotten a better grade.

As if this wasn't enough of an insult enough, I was enraged when I learned of what the other half of class did instead of a multipage research paper. Instead of taking weeks to write a paper, those muttonheads simply got to draw a picture depicting a battle between the colonials and the British. And despite how grossly inaccurate the picture may have been, they still received a 100, what a scandal. So, not only did I receive a bad grade, but kids who don't even understand how to use perspective in art received perfect scores for being able to scribble on a piece of printer paper.

Alejandro's Anti-Amazing Athletic Adventures No. 2: Bodgedall!

Like most American students in the nineties and early two-thousands, I was subjugated to the humiliation factory that was dubbed “P.E.” which we all know stands for Philistine Experimentation. In actuality it stands for “physical education,” though it wasn’t particularly educational, it was required as some way of combating the ever-looming threat of becoming a human sausage that wears ill fitting shorts. So, once a day we would be herded into the gym where we would be given some kind of activity that might get the blood pumping and minds focused on our learning of how “simile” is spelled.

Anyhow, the children of my generation were still subject to torture by way of the child killing blood sport known to the world as “dodge ball.” This “sport” has been deemed so vile and savage that, many states now ban it’s use as a way to break children, and train them to become future soldiers in the war against the non-existent flying elephants. The version of the sport I played was fairly standard in it’s rules. The class was divided into two nearly equal teams, now by equal I mean equal in numbers, not in ability. Why it wasn’t uncommon for the gym teachers to place the athletic kids across from the geeky kids and band nerds, just to see them get pummeled into dust just for their own sick entertainment.

Dodging the balls reached it’s zenith during my sixth grade year, which I spent at Oak Run state penitentiary. My three gym teachers would usually find some kind of activity for the class to perform some kind of activity that included some kind of running around. The two most popular activities were indoor base ball (which featured 30 outfielders) and of course dodge ball. So, we would play the now banned sport an average of two times a week, I’m not sure how any of us children survived the horrid onslaught which was known to emotionally ravage most of middle-America.

Unlike in the olden days when the balls used were composed of a thick rubber material which pronounced a rather loud “ffuthummmm!” whenever they made contact with a surface, whether it be a brick wall or a child’s face. Yet, when it came time for me to come of age and step into the arena of death, they had been replaced with a much softer counterpart. The balls we used were comprised of foam, and a rather thin pleather covering, which came in two colors red, and blue. After about a week of use the foam balls were very likely to be skinned through many impacts with young children’s faces and kneecaps, so they became shapeless masses of foam flying about the gymnasium.

Seeing as I wasn’t the most athletic of students, it was more often than not that I wasn’t the most effective player of the game. The foam balls were apparently manufactured in a way that only children who played baseball professionally could throw them with any accuracy or strength. Try as I might, my noodley arms were unable to project the ball in a straight line, or at a speed faster than a moseying panda bear. The rules of the game state that if a ball is thrown and caught by an opposing player before it hits the ground, the person who through the ball is out. Following this guideline, I found it much more productive to leave the throwing to the fit kids. Where as I would go on to become the world’s fifth most important Star Wars fan, they would just become regional sales managers. Chumps.

Over the course of the school year, we were bound to play dodge ball more often than a southern state feels the need succeed, the coaches felt the need to spice things up a bit. So, there would be variations of the game, where the allotted lines of moment for players was changed up, or we were all required to wear Tibetan hats while playing. The main name I remember for a variation on the game was called “Queen Bee,” wherein we would have the standard separation, but one kid on each side would be required to wear a florescent vest. As if the vest wasn’t punishment enough, it was a rule that the opposing side could only win if they hit that person with the ball.

As a whole I usually lasted fairly far into the game, as I didn’t usually throw the balls, and rarely attempted to catch them. This came to become a fairly interesting point when in that particular sixth grade class it came time to play a game of Queen Bee, where Danielle (the girl of my interest) was the queen and I was on her side of the court. The game went underway and slowly the rest of the team was eliminated and only I and Danielle were left, any twelve year olds dream come true.

The coaches decided to try and finish the game quicker by allowing the opposing side to move up to a distance were she and I were only a meter away. As we moved around trying to catch the balls being hurled at us, I had to stand in front of her so that I would absorb any accurate throw. Yet, alas! After months of being quite clumsy, I at long last was able to have a proper reflex reaction to an object being thrust at me. So I heroically dodge a ball, which whizzed past me and smacked Danielle right in the face. Super-smooth wasn’t I?

Alejandro's Anti-Amazing Atheltic Adventures No. 1

During my time spent in the New Braunfels Independent School District, I was usually given a yellow sheet of paper at the end of a school year, so I could decide what classes to take the following semester. The golden rod paper would usually list the classes you were required to take, i.e. English, Science, Math, and so on. But starting at the end of fifth grade, the paper had included a new item: electives. So, when the end of sixth grade came along, and we were to decide what two electives we would take in seventh grade. NBISD requires you to take at least one class that requires some sort of physical activity, there are three choices: Gym, Marching Band, and Athletics.
Unfortunately for me the legendary Basket Weaving class that all teachers threaten you with did not exist. So for some reason I chose Athletics.
Athletics was different than gym in that, if you wanted to even attempt to join one of the school’s sports team, you had to be in this specific class of sweat mongers and jock-brocks. For some reason I felt that I was going to be able to make it onto the basketball team, despite my inability to play, or even know what a point guard was. So, there I was, a very unfit, and slightly overweight early teen stuck in a room of jocks and preps, who were already much more desirable to girls than I ever was, or likely will be, except maybe in Canada.

As we were forced to work out fairly rigorously every day, we had to have our own set of workout clothes. I had a shirt, and a pair of basketball shorts, but apparently this wasn’t enough for the coaches who felt the need to assign each of a set of school issued workout clothes. They had us line up, and they would look at us and guess what size we wore, and even if they were horribly off, they wouldn’t give us a correct size. Rather like the portal of uniform assignment at concentration camps in World War II movies. When my turn came, and Jones; the grossly obese football defense coordinator looked at me and assigned me an extra large. Now, I wasn’t the skinniest kid around, but I was far and away not going to fit into a pair of extra large pair of gray shorts, and a half shirt. So, as time rolled on, I found a way of getting rid of jumbo clown short pants, and quash my homoerotic half shirt that revealed my chunky mid-drift.

Sometime during the middle of the semester, we were taken out of the mat room, and forced to run around for a few miles. As the actual running track consisted of mud, and was normally used by the girl’s athletics class, we were forced to run the streets around the school, while the coaches piled into a pickup truck and drove around like hillbillies on a gay-witch hunt. I was one of the most unfit in the class, so I was always trailing behind with the other fatties who signed up for the class by mistake.

The coaches usually paid more attention to the real athletes to make sure they were always running, so they were off far ahead and us in the back could slack off by walking, or collapsing from heat exhaustion. Yet, every so often that truck would drive down around the corner, and we would have to start running again, just in case they decided to hunt us down in a manner described by Richard Connell.