HYPOCRITE!

I am such a hypocrite. I have just called two girls puerile for having minds at exactly the level mine is at.

I’m doing tactile sculpture with year ten. We’re making things out of modroc but we’re talking about what things feel like and linking it with modern day sculpture so I brought in one of my pieces…one of my ‘roses’. Hey if Georgia O’Keefe can get away with it! 🙂 So some of year ten loved my sculpture, some of them hated it, some of them told me very loudly in put out voices that it wasn’t art…and then two of them explained to me why it wasn’t art!!!!They thought about it! Actual thought has been sighted! And guess what? Not one of them didn’t have a reaction to it!

Anyway, we had put away the ‘rose’ and were doing some planning drawings for their sculpture when one of them, MiniDart, gets up and starts to play with the sculpture. So one of my puerile girls shouts across ‘MiniDart get your head out of Miss’s rose!’ at which the whole class (and not quite me which I think was pretty good, considering I know that I never intended that sculpture to be a rose!) collapses into giggles. Anyway, MiniDart goes back to his desk pretty sharpish and order is restored. However these two, who I quite like though they’d never know it after this lesson, are sat in the corner doing nothing apart from giggling together about ‘petals’, ‘lips’ and ‘holes’. I give them a couple of minutes but they’re still not letting it go.

So over I go.

And I tell two girls who are ‘messing’ that my ‘rose’ sculpture could look a bit like a vagina in a certain light, that their minds are puerile and it is not appropriate for in school And all the while in the middle of the class is a sculpture that I made for The Vagina Monologues using flowers as symbolism for sexual pleasure. A Vagina sculpture and I criticise two of my students for even thinking it’s of a vagina. I’m reinforcing the repression, the idea that it’s your rude bits, your bits that you don’t talk about. I’m worse than any repressed person in the fifties telling boys they’d go blind if they masturbate. I have ful knowledge that it’s better to be open and I’m here telling girls they’re being puerile when in reality my intent was puerile.

I hate being a hypocrite. I’m being a hypocrite to get another smegging bit of paper, I have such a collection of those things. Another piece of paper, another piece of paper, ooh look some written proof that I can say the right words, act the right way. Did I suggest that some of the people I meet were on a conveyor belt and pretend that I wasn’t? Bollocks we’re all on one, we’re travelling on this fucking caterpillar track and it’s turning us around and around and grinding us into little people who parrot whatever we’re told to say. Even if I do go off and travel what am I doing? I’m conforming to stereotype, I’m living on my own conveyor belt and theres nothing that I can do or say thats remotely off track or original.

Hypocrite.

3 thoughts on “HYPOCRITE!

  1. Mish: that’s actually quite funny. 🙂

    But there really wasn’t any other way you could reasonably have acted, piece of paper or no piece of paper. They were being disruptive of a classroom session that had moved on to something else; even the hint of an admission would have made you lose credibility in that class, and every other class you take in that school. there are times and places for sharing your views about sex and our attitudes to it, and an art class of teenagers possibly wasn’t it…

    Life as a path metaphor has been used many a time… And we’re not so much on conveyor belts as journeys; very seldom do we travel on ground that has not been trodden on, and very often we walk side-by-side with other people on our paths, which is joyful, even if after a while, our paths diverge in different directions. At no point does that make our journeys less unique, less joyous… Just because someone else walked this way, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t experience it for ourselves, and learn the lessons that lie down that path…

    Enjoy the trip!

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