Suffering School Drop Out

Photo by Lacie Slezak on Unsplash

Recently I did something brave, I dropped out of Suffering School.

I know, I know-- one cannot really drop out of Suffering School, but one can choose to not attend the classes. The reason for this was Suffering School’s pedagogical method was getting on my nerves and I wanted out. I was tired of the “lesson learning” Suffering School offered at every opportunity. Why did I need to learn stupid lessons and why did it always have to be the hard way? I decided I would take a leave of absence from the classroom setting and manage the pain my way, which was not going to be under the tutelage of the Suffering School teachers, who, although helpful and severe and beautiful, were too much for me to take.

Plus the holidays are coming and I want to cut loose a little.

The first thing I did was block all communication with the faculty and the school. This meant, since I am in the Humanities program, that I would not be reading what was on the syllabus which was—no surprise, the writings of my teachers. Talk about conflict of interest. How can a teacher be objective if we, the students, are compelled to read what they wrote in order to benefit from the class? What if I have a problem with the material?

I could direct my complaint at the teachers like Grendel’s mom did years ago but the teachers, used to strong reactions are not at all disturbed by the occasional monster outburst. They treat these episodes as one would treat a toddler, patting the student on the head and directing them to go outside and play in nature.

But I’m done with all that. Not because of the material—I always read it anyway without being compelled to, but because the teachers never do what I want them to do, what I need them to do, they will not TAKE. THE. PAIN. AWAY.

“Pain instructs” is what our instructor Ben Franklin likes to say.

“Shut it,” is what I’d like to say, but I won’t because I’m not in class. I’m home, and I am homeschooling myself, which is a big trend right now, by the way.

Today I made my own syllabus and guess what? not one of my former teachers’ books are on there. Ha-ha. At my new school I decide what material we cover. I am the one who will hand select the teachers. And the first thing I did was snag a principal. The one I chose was available since she no longer hosts her wildly popular talk show from the 80’s and 90’s. Now she’s running this show—my big fat homeschooling show, which I plan to download on a streaming device or a platform or some other computer thing.

Not surprisingly, I know nothing about computers because Suffering School is so ancient and stuck in its ways that it doesn’t think it necessary to offer even one tech class to its students. It doesn’t even use the word tech, instead, anything tech related is referred to as “The Machine.” According to the Suffering School teachers, “The Machine” is not new, our mistake is thinking that it is. This idea is preposterous, of course, but it goes even further, the Suffering School faculty refuses to use the special language that goes along with new technology, instead, our teachers refer to it derisively as pseudoneo, which in modern English translates to fake new, not to be confused fake news or with neologisms which are the new expressions that writers come up with. Our teachers are fine with neologisms because, well, they are writers so of course they like them. Pseudoneos, our teachers don’t like because they are created by techies who also created Artificial Intelligence, so Suffering School chooses to ignore them the same way it chooses to ignores AI.

But who cares? I don’t. And neither do the teachers at my new school. In fact, they are the opposite. They love, love, love, the new lingo.

The language studies class I am in now involves translating these fun new expressions. This allows me to keep up with the trends, something sorely missing in my Suffering School education. I am promised that I will come out of this course, not bi-lingual, but translingual-- a word which describes perfectly the way we “transcend” the normal confines of language by being all meta.

But this is not the main difference between Suffering School and my homeschool. The main difference is the teachers who, unlike my old teachers, are alive right now. So they know what Starbucks is, and they don’t confuse it with a character from Moby Dick. And they also know that Homer has a last name-- Simpson.

In addition, they are excellent at marketing their ideas, which is the main reason I selected them. This faculty dream team really knows how to “crush it” – something I’ll be doing once I order their books and subscribe to their channels.

Helpfully, all of my new teacher’s books are found on Amazon. There were so many!

I ended up just ordering the ones that had four star reviews and above.

And so my self-help journey began, starting with the basics. First, I needed to learn the secret to getting what I want by using only my thoughts, this is called manifesting. Once I get that part down, I will learn how to win friends and influence people while working only a couple days a week. Then I will go on a hacking spree, not like Lizzie Borden, but like a bio engineer, hacking a short-cut through the cluttered and messy old way of doing things. All I have to do is read and then do the things the books tell me to do and my life will be pain free and easy, just like I want. This is not the truth, my teachers promise, it is their truth, which is even better because now there’s a name and a brand behind it.

About halfway through reading the books on the syllabus I noticed that the “narrators” in these books sounded very different than the narrators in the books I had read in Suffering School. My new teachers’ literary style was more about telling rather than showing—in fact, it was only telling, the showing part--the stories, characters, dialogue, poems, and songs, were refreshingly absent from these texts. Instead, the new texts were mostly lists and techniques.

Even more shocking, these books sometimes proposed the opposite of what the Suffering School books taught. Like, for instance, one teacher proposed that I stand before a mirror each day and list off affirmations to myself so I could live my best life, which I obediently did, but the whole time, instead of seeing myself in the mirror, I saw King Richard II in his jail cell looking at me, reminding me in his very Suffering School-style soliloquy:

Thus I play in one person many people,

And none contented. Sometimes am I king.

Then treasons make me wish myself a begger,

And so I am; then crushing penury

Persuades me I was better when king.

Then I am kinged again, and by and by

Think that I am unkinged by Bolingbroke,

And straight am nothing. But whate’er I be,

Nor I nor any man that but man is

With nothing shall be pleased till he be eased

With being nothing.

Why the heck does Shakespeare have the king affirm he will never be happy having nothing until he admits that he is nothing?

What kind of life goal is that?

Frankly, this whole idea is horrifying and flies in the face of what my homeschool teachers tell us. Those of us who follow them know that we are supposed to think more about ourselves. We are to become self-thinking maximalists!

I really should-- if I want to, think about myself all day. And I do want to, but then part of me remembers something from a song we used to sing in Suffering School Music class called Perfect Day:

Just a perfect day

You made me forget myself

I thought I was someone else

Someone good

Oh, it’s such a perfect day

I’m glad I spent it with you

Oh, such a perfect day

Seriously?

Forgetting myself doesn’t sound like a perfect day at all, whereas thinking of myself is the most natural thing in the world for me, in fact, I find that I exceed at this activity the most. That’s why I made it an integral part of my homeschool curriculum, which, speaking of curriculum, is a mixed-media based system.

Some of my new teachers don’t write books, they don’t need to because they are “influencers” which means they make videos.

Sadly, they often cry in the videos because they want us influence-ees to know how hard it is for them because everyone assumes that they are perfect and have a perfect lives. They do have perfect lives! The crying is just to show us how mean comments affect them.

I cry too when I watch them sometimes. Not because of their difficulties living a perfect life in an imperfect world, but because often their self-help tips involve tons of products for me to purchase and tons of steps I have to follow, especially when it comes to applying make-up.

But I follow them nonetheless because they do have a way of looking straight into my heavily made up, kohl-lined, smoky eyes, and, speaking right to my heart, tell me to like, subscribe and follow.

Click, click, and click! I answer right back.

Another striking difference between the teaching style of Suffering School teachers and my homeschool teachers is the work load. Believe it or not, I have more homework in the homeschool than I ever did in Suffering School. Suffering School, for all it’s old fashioned ways, is not into homework, in fact, it’s very against it.

The teachers believe that there should be free time for staring out windows, or sitting in a bath, or walking dully along, because, according to them, that is the best way to contemplate something we’ve read, or a song we’ve listened to or, as in W.H. Auden’s case, a painting we’ve viewed.

“That is when the learning happens!” I could almost hear them say if I hadn’t blocked them all when I switched to the new school.

My new teachers have a totally different approach that would undoubtedly confuse my old teachers. For one, none of the old teachers call themselves influencers, and they seldom, actually never, have offered help with make-up tips or diet plans. I’m also pretty sure they don’t know how to properly bio-hack anything. And last, their suggested affirmations are at the very least, unnecessarily harsh.

Yet, in the starkness of their insights—there is a strange comfort.

“Art is not a handicraft; it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced, ” Tolstoy reminds his Suffering School Russian Lit students.

Glad I’m not in that class anymore! No way do I want to feel Anna Karenina’s insecurities—I have enough of my own.

Thankfully, my new teachers are not at all austere like the old teachers, but they are relentless when it gets to assigning homework. We are expected to actively engage with their content which means that we like, share and give a thumbs ups, and comment in the comment sections. This is only one part of our homework, the other is making vision boards, drinking coffee, journaling, staying present, getting after it, and making lists. We also share content and share ideas about goals and strategies, which takes up a large chunk of free time too.

It’s funny, I never did any of that with my Suffering School readings. I just read them and then, in some mysterious way, they got incorporated into my life.

Maybe it’s because the texts used by my homeschool are not at all like the texts used in Suffering School. In my homeschool we use textbooks. Meanwhile, textbooks are never used in Suffering School. “Es ist verboten!” Goethe would say, for two reasons, one, they are a relatively recent innovation, and two, they have a way of taking everything out of context and discombobulating it which is frowned upon by my old teachers because all of them, for some reason, want their work left alone and left intact.

“ In contextu always and in situ when possible,” is another antiquated phrase we won’t be saying in my new school. Our method is quite the opposite, here we take all of our writing out of the narrative form and put it instead into an actionable series of techniques.

Then we get after it.

And that is new and exciting direction I am heading in on my journey to self-improvement and self-discovery.

I will let you know how it goes, once I crush it. In the meantime, if you are in Suffering School, say hi to the other students. I miss them, and their stories, and their company. If you go out with them after school hours, please, please let me know, I’d love to join you.

They really are the best, those suffering students. They sure know how to tell a good story and a good joke. We don’t have students, or teachers like that in my homeschool, because there’s only me here, alone, with my thoughts, about me.

Photo by Nuno Alberto on Unsplash