Stu Time ck

It’s crazy how one person or place or situation can affect your entire trajectory.

And you don’t often realize until later the massive impact.

Sometimes our favorite things or even our entire worldview is determined by a moment.

For me, that period of time was in junior high. I had a teacher who truly enlightened me. I wish more people got this opportunity.

Most of us float through the school system like cattle. Whether it’s on purpose or happenstance, it is undoubtedly true that in the good ol’ USA we’ve never been that great at education at scale.

This was the first teacher I felt truly cared about us, about the content, and about educating us. He didn’t need to follow the exact format. He made it fun and switched it up. There were games and models and simulations. It really felt like he wrote the rules too. Other teachers just seemed to be following a syllabus made by someone three paces removed from them. It’s easy to get hyped when someone is buying the Koolaid they're selling.

And I was additionally lucky that I got this teacher multiple times and for long blocks of time. I’ve often said my favorite book is The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury (affiliate) and this is where I first encountered it.

So we’ve said the nice stuff. Let’s inevitably transfer this into a dark place. This is a poem I made back then.

I was proud of a lot of what I wrote during those years. At the end of our final year, my teacher created a collection where each student could contribute one or two pieces of writing to it to come back to. And I’ve come back many times nostalgically.

My class was incredibly disturbing and dark. Our perspectives were informed by things like 9/11 and never having really felt safe to begin with.

Everyone else shared these deep pieces of themselves.

I shared this fucking clock.

In some ways, I’m impressed by my foresight. Most of the writing is pretty terrible and mediocre. We were kids! This seems deep and stands up tbh.

On the other hand, I feel like my mentality was clearly corrupted by the need to hide myself. I was scared to share my real writing. It was one thing to do it in the safety of the classroom, it was another to stick it in a permanent collection, forever.

Young me found a lot of poetic resonance in poking fun at the idea of permanence and the concept of time. I mean, I still do. I was shitposting even back then.

I wonder if any of the other sad sacks from that time are as sentimental as I am, and I feel the answer is no.

I reached out to my former teacher a few years back to let him know I was extremely grateful for him changing the trajectory of my life and showing me the value in being a little offbeat. The value of writing and communication. And maybe even for giving me some empathy and trying to understand other perspectives. For giving me my favorite book and my favorite author.

I often wondered what type of person I would be without the internet (I’m a goddamn software engineer and I spend endless time in front of the computer), but I’m sure that’s just an implementation detail. I truly have no idea who I would have been without this class at that moment in my life.

Lucas

p.s. bonus point if you get the title hehehehehe