“Time is not a straight line, it’s more of a labyrinth, and if you press close to the wall at the right place you can hear the hurrying steps and the voices, you can hear yourself walking past on the other side.”
— Tomas Tranströmer (1931-2015), from “Answers to Letters”, in: “The Great Enigma”, translated from the Swedish by Robin Fulton
So. 10th grade English class. We all come in one morning to find a balloon and a perfectly sharpened pencil on each of our desks. No instructions, no explanation, which is strange, because our teacher is meticulous about that sort of thing. A couple of people try to ask her and she says we’ll get to it. She takes role and then announces that she needs to go to the copy room and she’ll be back in a couple of minutes
Kinda unorthodox, but no one is complaining because this is advanced English and the teacher usually goes kinda hard. So, y’know. Brief respite. We all sit and chat; one of the boys teasingly steals a girl’s balloon, but gives it back to her easily enough; it’s quiet and kind of a nice break. Then the teacher comes back, stops in the doorway, and just stares at us
After a long moment, she says, confused, “You didn’t pop the balloons.”
To which one of the guys about two rows over exclaims, “We’re allowed to pop them?” and immediately turns around and stabs his friend’s balloon with the pencil
There is a vicious revenge balloon-stabbing, and a few more people pop seatmates’ balloons or their own, and the whole time the teacher is just shaking her head. “I can’t believe you didn’t pop your balloons.”
Apparently we were starting Lord of the Flies that day and she wanted to demonstrate the basic concept of kids turning on each other when there are no authority figures present and it was basically my favorite failed social experiment ever
Back in my 10th grade we did a similar things around Lord of the Flies, where we had a test scheduled for that day, and when we walked in, the teacher took role by looking through the window of the door and never entered the classroom. On the board were three tasks written and the teacher had brought in donuts. At first we all sat around and waited for the teacher to come in, but eventually we just started tackling the list of tasks. Task 1- the test. Everybody took it silently, no one cheated, everyone turned it in and we went on to Task Two: tidy up the room. So we did, we split into a couple groups and each one cleaned an area of the room. Task Three: Hand out the donuts. There were 12 donuts, and 30 of us. So we split the donuts into thirds, each took a third, and left the extras for the teacher. After this, the teacher came in absolutely FUMING. She was so upset we had followed all the rules and completed the tasks. Apparently she had been texting kids telling them to start some chaos but they all ignored it because they were too nice. She tried to dock our grades for not going absolutely wild because it meant her class didn’t get the point across
That’s because lord of the flies isn’t representative of humanity it’s representative of rich white male shitheads
