kids learn that they fucked up by having adults tell them "you fucked up." part of growing up is learning to figure this out on your own; by the time you hit adulthood, you should be able to infer when you fucked up without help. adults show each other that we fucked up more subtly. our shoulders shrug, we sigh, our faces get sad. we usually don't say "you fucked up," because that's how you talk to children, not other adults.

fucking up at berkeley high often got you talked to like an adult, not a child.

i had the same english teacher - alan miller - for both 11th and 12th grades. my recollection of his educational talent was that he was a great editor, if you were willing to actually seek his advice out. i always felt more satisfied after four rounds of his feedback followed by a "b+, not bad" than i did after receiving last-minute dreck stamped with "a+ wow great job!" from any other yahoo i've encountered.

but i think he assumed that my engagement outside of class with particular writing assignments meant that i was broadly engaged with the curriculum. i guess i'm good at faking it, because holy hell was i not. all i remember from 11th grade english was the punctuation explainer on the wall behind me entitled "OUR FRIEND THE COLON." in the summer before 12th grade AP english we were supposed to read three books; i read one, skimmed one, and read the first two sentences of each chapter of the third.

one of the books on the 11th grade reading list was Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, which is excellent material to give a bunch of snotty high-schoolers. or, you know, i assume. i never opened the thing. i somehow sniffed out that miller would never know if i didn't, so i just...didn't. and it worked! i was able to redirect a bunch of time i might have spent on schoolwork to much more important activities like leaving dozens of plastic traffic cones around my then-girlfriend's house while her family was out of town, or sneaking into my best friend's bedroom and duct-taping all of his things to the ceiling.

but i hadn't counted on having the same english teacher a year later, and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass came up in class during a discusson. miller said: "hey, cody, what do you think of this? we read that book last year."

to which i replied: "well, you did."

and the man just deflated.

i had correctly identified the exchange as materially consequence-free, as so much of life is. but human interaction isn't purely material. and without the distracting kayfabe of teacher "authority," my shittiness hung there like a wet fart. yeah, cody, you can "get away with it." you can publicly undermine this guy who's just trying to educate some kids, simply to prove that nobody can stop you. now what?

this story is less about wronging a man who didn't deserve it (he was a jerk to my younger sister three years later) than it is a recollection of how berkeley high teachers so often treated us like actual people. inexperienced people, but people. and when we were assholes, they didn't say "don't be an asshole." they asked us, non-rhetorically, "why are you such an asshole?" it's a good question to practice answering. hopefully, if you have to answer it enough, you change your behavior so people stop asking it. i'm glad i started early.