Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Slack Ass Mo-Fos.
I am of the opinion that the Summer Reading List is a fabulous idea. I'm sure that, when I was a student, I would have balked at the idea of squandering my three cherished months of freedom to read anything I wanted choking down some ancient tome. With a few years of perspective, I see the wisdom of trying to keep at least the vestige of critical thinking percolating in the minds of teenagers being bombarded by a summer's worth of MTV and Jerry Bruckheimer movies. When I was in high school back in the Cretaceous, we didn't have a Summer Reading List. I was lucky enough that my parents instilled an interest in reading in me from an early age, so my I.Q. only descended into the realm of advanced apes, rather than to the depths of gelatin. For those students who don't read for pleasure, however, it certainly can't hurt to have something that will coerce them into at least minimal cogitation.
I maintain my endorsement of The List despite the fact that it provides an annual source of aggravation at my day job. As a bookseller, it's my job to provide the books that the schools assign to their students. Some of the schools will occassionally assign an obscure or out of print title, which is annoying, but not ultimately too traumatic. No, the real rabid badger in my oatmeal are the parents who come in to buy their kids' summer reading books the day before school starts.
I encountered a lighthouse-glaring example of this problem today. (It will help to keep in mind that today is September 1st. The child in question has known about this assignment for almost three months.) A woman (who I will heretofor refer to as Mrs. "Your-Kid-Should-Fucking-Fail," or Mrs. YKSFF) came in with a crude, handwritten list of nine books which were her son's options for his summer reading. He was required to read two of the selected books, and write a report on each for the first day of school. Mrs. YKSFF wanted three (3) questions answered about each book. 1) Was it shorter than the other books on the list? 2) Was there a junior adaptation available, which would preserve the plot and characters, but would probably be easier to read and (in a sneaky reference to item one) be shorter? 3) Was there a movie based on the book that he could watch?
By now, you're probably wondering why, if he didn't have his books at 3 o'clock in the afternoon on the day before school started, why he didn't come to the mall himself to get them. That's what you would have done, right? You might have started reading them in the car on the way home, in order to avoid wasting any more time. I was wondering the very same thing. In fact, I was close to leaping onto her back and whacking her on the head with the Junior Classics version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, while screaming "Why are you helping your lazy slacker spawn?" over and over. Luckily for me, she provided an explanation. Apparently, Junior YKSFF was still "at the shore."
There are times when it takes a physical effort to squelch the bitter retort forming on my lips. When I have to clench my jaw and not tell Mrs. YKSFF to her face that she's a craven, callow cow (alliteration always awesome) who is too stupid to understand that her indulgence is just reinforcing her son's irresponsible behavior. It was a struggle, which I finally won by pointing out to myself that the odds were Mrs. YKSFF wouldn't even know what callow meant, and that if she did, I was just about guaranteed to lose my job. So I swallowed my caustic comment, and instead hooked her up with both the regular and apdapted 20,000 Leagues, and the novelization of the screenplay for West Side Story. I felt vaguely dirty helping Mrs. YKSFF, knowing that I was an accomplice in her son's slacktitude, but I was able to comfort myself with the knowledge that his report was destined to be a pile of rancid goat cheese, and he was likely about to pull an all-nighter, only to write two papers barely worth using to wipe the ass of his school's mascot. Of course, he'll probably go to college on an athletic scholarship...
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