(February 23, 2004) — Years ago in Miss Horton’s fourth grade dungeon, we had to do reports on famous cities. I chose San Francisco. In that report, I pasted in little pictures of major landmarks like the Golden Gate Bridge and that crooked street whose name escapes me at the moment. Upon receiving the graded paper, I was appalled to see a large ‘C’ emblazoned on that stack of creative genius. “…Miss Horton, why?!” “Pictures were not to be included in this report,” she replied coolly. “It was written in the instructions.” Well, I’ll be. I recently experienced an echo of this injustice, and there lies on my report card an ugly blemish. Granted, more classes than I’d like to admit haven’t been given the effort exerted so often from the younger and wider-eyed, and the severity of this sucker isn’t as terrible as the aforesaid tragedy. Simply put, my last semester in high school stretches on into a slacker’s horizon…But it’s the principle behind this injustice that counts! So basically I was given a zero on an assignment because I overlooked a detail in the instructions saying that I had to staple the prompt to the back of the in-class essay. I would hope that students in an English class would receive their grades based primarily on how they write, not for such trivial details. But that didn’t stop my percentage from plummeting faster than the babbling of a child who just learned the alphabet, and the similarly-situated fumed with me. This was the rationale given: the real world rapidly presents instructions upon instructions and following them like good obedient robots of America is what will lead to success. Since school day one, it’s all been in preparation for something else. Elementary school prepares us for junior high, which leads us into high school, which readies us for college, which then introduces us to the real world. There’s always that talk of the real world, the place where we all stumble into head first, spat out from whatever school we attended. Becoming an adult doesn’t seem like an attractive prospect right now. Clad in tweed and bearing briefcases, they go forth to their jobs until old age gives way to retirement’s Floridian beaches. There are dress codes, time restraints, an hour or so for lunch, and a boss who is attached to something big and round that the ones without shame will routinely polish and kiss for rewards. Sounds a lot like school to me! What’s with all the austerity? Be it an office lined with cubicles or a classroom lined with desks, productivity doesn’t come with punishments. If every mistake, completely unrelated to the meat of a task, is met with such an insulting slap on the wrist in the name of preparation for the real world, then I guess all that’s left to say is that the real world sucks. Working in such an environment must be what puts the dull in adult. How about we stop killing spirits so early? That’s what the real world is for.