Remotely interesting

Top of the mornin' to ya, gentle readers. And how is everyone doing today? Good, I'm really glad to hear that. I know you were having a bit of a rough patch there, but I'm happy that's behind you now. (I'm stopping myself here before I turn this whole thing into a strange and ill-conceived one-sided conversation. Trust me, I'm making the right decision here.)

So check it out, yo. I've spent some time in this space talking about the way boredom led me and my friends to play little games in high school. I'm feeling comfortable in that category right now, so I'm going to continue unless there are any objections. Anyone? Sweet.

My junior year of high school, I took an Advanced Placement course in American History. For those of you not familiar with AP courses, they're designed to help the students take and pass the AP exam at the end of the year to earn college credits. Makes sense, right? Well, it makes sense if everyone understands that goal. We had a teacher who was a very nice man and was very likeable but had zero idea how to teach the class. It was his first AP experience after teaching the, uh, 'lower-level' courses in previous years, and he didn't really change his lesson plans at all. Other teachers in his position would have had us taking old versions of the test and using those as a basis of what to cover, but he stuck with his game plan. Sadly, I really mean "game plan." Let me explain:

One lesson plan involved us getting into groups and choosing if we wanted to invest fake money into wheat, corn, rice, barley, or a combination of those. He gave us five minutes to decide when we only needed about five seconds. Then, in Seacrest-like tones, he announced that...the price of corn's stock...has gone up! Rice...has fallen drastically! We then had five more minutes to discuss in our groups if we wanted to move our money or keep it where it was. This lasted a whole class period and taught us...nothing!

Another class began with him calling me and a few others up to the front of the room. I was a little scared at first since I had no idea what was going on. "These students, as you know, are a part of an improv group called Comedy Sportz," he said. "Today, though, they're going to be doing...History Sportz!" He was thoroughly pleased with himself, and that in itself was worth the price of admission. We spent the class period doing scenes that started off loosely based on American History but gradually moved into whatever we wanted them to be about. Some of the class paid attention while the others just talked to each other.

At the end of the year, the 80 students in the two AP classes took the test, and a whopping 8 passed. Dusty was one of them because he read the text book cover to cover the night before. I certainly wasn't one of them, but I knew that as soon as I opened the text booklet and realized that I didn't have a frickin' clue about anything on the first page.

As you might imagine, during the class periods in which we weren't playing the teacher's games, we were busy playing our own. The teacher's easy-going nature, the stupid lessons, and general hopelessness of actually learning something made us do it; it was a virtual perfect storm of fooling around and we needed to do it to survive.

During one particularly boring lesson, Dusty and I couldn't stand it any longer. What did we do? Why, play cards in class, naturally. I guess you could call it either "Extreme Card-Playing" or "High Degree of Difficulty Gaming" because there were certainly obstacles. Here were the main ones: we couldn't be seen playing cards for the obvious reasons, we couldn't talk loudly, our gestures had to be small and smooth to avoid drawing attention to ourselves, and - oh yeah - there was someone sitting in between us.

Our friend Margot, realizing that she really didn't have any choice but to play along, reluctantly agreed to be our intermediary. Here's how the game went:

Peter: Hey, ask Dusty if he has any fours.

Margot: Dusty, Peter wants to know if you have any fours.

Dusty: Tell him to go fish.

Margot: He said to go fish.

Peter: Damn, ok. Can you hand me a card?

Good times, good times. The greatest move in the history of our History antics came later though. Dusty, who had the power to become invisible to teachers, "permanently borrowed" the vcr remote control from the teacher's desk. The next time we watched a video, the highest of high comedy ensued. The teacher bent down and pushed play, and Dusty immediately hit the fast forward button on the remote hidden in his jacket sleeve. The teacher looked up at the screen, and confused, hit play again. Dusty hit pause. The teacher hit play. Dusty hit pause. He hit play again, then stood up, only to have Dusty fast forward again. The teacher pressed stop, and Dusty pressed the power button. This went on for a while until Dusty let it play correctly for several minutes. At the end of class, just as the teacher started to bend down to press stop, Dusty turned the vcr off right before he could get there. That confused the hell out of him, but he never put two and two together. It seriously may have been the highlight of my high school career.

Man, that was fun. Thank you all for letting me relive that moment. I will never forget the look on the teacher's face as he tried to figure out what the hell was going on with the vcr. Ok, gentle readers, I'm stopping now with this good feeling I've got going on. Have a great day, and shoot me an email at ptklein@gmail.com if you think of anything I might want to think about.