The Chocolate War

The funny thing about public school is that once you've taken part in it, the truth is inescapable. Whether or not it's intended to, brutal honesty always finds a way to reach your ears and sometimes it's this same honesty that can substantially change your life. This school-yard game of telephone isn't always negative, sometimes it can actually tell you things about yourself you never knew, like how pretty your eyes are or what a calming voice you have. Nevertheless, of course it can be cruel as well. But sometimes honesty comes from the strangest of people, not those actually in the school yard, but those watching over it. Teachers, it seems, are just as biased as children are, and can sometimes be twice as cruel.

I've had a winding history of ending up with teachers who try very hard to relate. They're usually women, usually young, and are almost always dying for the attention and acclaim of being that "hip teacher" that all the kids can relax around. For some strange reason, every time I end up with a new instructor of this phylum, the same interesting phenomena takes place where this forespoken teacher somehow classifies us into where she sees fit. It doesn't sound too life changing, but I've always taken special interest in this process because I never end up where I expect to be.

In my early days of primary education, I had a science teacher whose forced enthusiasm quite frankly drove me crazy. As near-graduating 8th graders, we were given the privilege of a trip to Bush Gardens for the day, and this over-hyped science guru just so happened to be my class' chaperone. Thanks to this crowning of power, it was her responsibility to split us up into safe little groups so we wouldn't get lost. We were categorized quickly, each group standing at one end of the room talking amongst themselves, and as I watched on as the final groups were formed I remembered having this strange epiphany. Every single group was made up of the same kinds of people.

All of the mall-going future soccer moms were placed in one group, the class clowns of various background descended into another, the rebellious kids who thought that wearing dark clothes and ripped jeans would make them individuals were placed into their very own commune, and the geeky kids who could relate more to their Xbox than real people were pushed to the back. I stared in horror, looking from group to group to group with the same dumbfounded expression on my face. It seemed absolutely stunning to me that this woman, instead of encouraging a new understanding for different kinds of people, simply broke us up into where she thought we would fit in best.

I turned around and faced my small group with wide eyes; an overweight girl with ADD and a knack for shouting very loud, a timid teenybopper who hardly even gave the rest of us a glance, a young boy with, I kid you not, a note pinned to his lapel from his mother, and one final female youngster who tried to take control of the situation by (unintentionally, I hope) insulting us all.

I'm sure that If I was able to go back & look at myself in that very moment that I would have made the most Frankie Muniz like face of stunning unfairness. Was this really where I appeared to fit in? Was I a social outcast in the eyes of everyone else, in the same leagues as the undeniable booger eaters? I was disheartened, whether at my own unknown disposition or this teacher's poor decision making skills I still don't know, but after my grouping I lost a great deal of faith in the views of other people. It was a blessing in disguise, I guess, because after that I dropped the teeny-bopper concept of judging others on first glance.

This incident seemingly faded from my mind until recently when, yet again, almost the exact same event took place. This year I've been graced with one of those "hip young teachers" again, but high school has changed some things and made the moment of judgement far less obvious.

When I stepped into my History class at eight thirty in the morning, I would have never expected to see tiny little name-tags taped to each desk, our names written in a formal script, and the contrast of a Tootsie Pop of varying flavors laying next to each one. Generally, that class was one of tireless rule and strict deadlines; that kind with a "you'll sleep when you're dead" mentality, I suppose. But on a Monday morning, when all we really wanted was an energy boost, who would have thought that it was in this authoritarian classroom that we would find it?

I fell in line as a row of sleepy teenagers searched for their names, and eventually found mine as well, but once the classroom had filled to capacity, a stunning pattern stuck out in my mind. There were four flavors of lollipops scattered around the room; the perky and energetic kids each with an orange ball of sugar on their desk, the quiet and undisturbed ones with a chocolate, the young romantics had the red wrapper of a strawberry at hand, and the few left seemed to get a blueberry. I looked down at my own lollipop, although the repetitiveness of history could have told me the flavor without using my eyes. It was like a cowboy showdown between me and this mass-produced candy. I narrowed my eyes. Blueberry.

Was I really a blueberry in the candy land of sugar and sweets? Was the only thing that I had to offer this bottom-of-the-bag mentality? What really defined a strawberry or an orange? What did it take to avoid being a chocolate, and was being a chocolate really all that bad anyway? Was there a rubric for this sort of thing, or was everything was just chance?

By now, innovations and improvements have made candy labeling automatic, with the strawberries and the chocolates and the blueberries each in their own separate bin. Maybe this is the only way to uphold order in the factory, but don't they all come in one bag anyway? Where in life do the candy-makers decide that we can finally mix, and what took so long in the first place? Maybe some of us never end up mixing, and just go through life surrounded by fellow oranges. We make friends with oranges. We fall in love with oranges. We get together and make a bag of orange-filled kids. Honestly, where's the fun in that?

It's each of our flavors that makes us who we are. They surely don't define us, but they give us a mixing bowl and room to experiment. We're not always one flavor inside; sometimes we're a hybrid of root beer or strawberry banana, but that's ours to decide, not the candy wrappers. This majestic blending of colors and types is what makes candy so appealing in the first place. It's the sweet tooth of the universe that keeps us unwrapping and rewrapping again with something different, and anyone who can revel in the concept of a world with one flavor on a different stick is never going to know the true taste of life.

I'd never call it impossible to reach into that candy bag of life and find yourself a blueberry, but as the disappointment hits you and you pull off that wrapper anyway, you may be pleasantly surprised to find that perhaps there's a strawberry waiting inside.