Joel felt that school was a gigantic joke played by someone who had not yet shown his or her face. To him, it was clear that what teachers were saying and what students were tested on was of secondary importance, a red herring--but you were supposed to go along pretending it was primary. He felt that all the while his third grade teacher went on about conglomerate rocks, while his sixth grade teacher explained sentence diagramming, while Miss Hart made them rewrite their spelling tests if the words were too high above the pale blue line and Mrs. Salvatore read excerpts from Heart of Darkness, they did it all with a wink. “Here is what I’m saying,” he heard, “but listen to what I am not saying. Everyone knows today’s spoken lesson is useless and boring, and you’ll forget it after the test. But I dare you to remember something.” He had seen patterns in the eraser swipes on chalkboards and heard them in the pauses of the Pledge of Allegiance. He watched his teachers rearrange the children’s desks and sit and stare, almost defeated, at their own desks after dismissal. He had been both friendless and outrageously popular. He went along with the joke and learned to follow arbitrary rules in order to accumulate arbitrary rewards. He observed how his name looked at the top of every page he handed in and understood that the formation of identity is ongoing, flexible, a choice you repeatedly make that no one else pays that much attention to, as long as it’s there. He learned mental liberation in physical captivity, that by being forced to study something so mind-numbingly dull in such an unnecessarily uncomfortable setting, one was being trained to look inward, to explore the recesses of the universe. One would not learn the nature of reality by being told to think about the nature of reality. No, Joel’s teachers were smart enough to know that one will only begin to think about that while suffering--so, to inspire thought (that is, to teach) the nature of reality, they must incite suffering, preferably of the mildest sort. Joel thought that his grade school was really stellar.