Fascism, part II.

For some reason, 6th grade was a turning point for me. It was the year I developed an awareness of myself as being a part of a larger community and citizenry. It’s the year I began to understand that each of us is developing a persona with every decision and encounter with the other. That our behaviors are the “coming to life” of our beliefs and values. Discernment about what matters to me and what doesn’t begins to surface, and what’s left is what’s expressed. Sixth grade was that liminal, prepubescent space between childhood and adolescence. It was also the year we studied penmanship – the art of linking our letters together in slanted script. We gathered around Mrs. Ellis as she introduced this lesson – a craft, really – that she felt was an essential building block to how we represented ourselves in civilized society. I loved Mrs. Ellis because she cared about the whole of who we were, not just our performance, but I hated penmanship. I felt like it was a tool to erase my identity and preclude my individuality, so I resisted. Consciously. I pretended like my hands just would not follow the precise angles and heights of the ruled samples. I made it a giant struggle. I refused to fit my script into an arbitrary box of rules to make me (or at least my penmanship) indistinguishable from everyone else’s. If I succumbed to programming my letters to be like everyone else, where would it end? The day Mrs. Ellis handed out our certificates, we gathered around her on the floor. She was so proud of the work my classmates did, that she would read their name and state their grade then turn the certificate around so we could all see and applaud and ceremoniously hand it to them. When she got to mine, she lowered her voice, didn’t say the grade out loud, stating that she wanted to keep this between us, then she slipped my certificate to me face down. Somehwere in me I held out hope that I, too, got an “A,” even though I broke all the rules. I was her “A” student, after all. But Mrs. Ellis had integrity. She gave me a C, and I loved her even more for that. She let me be me.