The Day I Lost Respect For Authority

I was the first kid in my family to go to kindergarten. The first six kids went directly to the Catholic school for first grade, but I was five years old when someone decided that kids should start school at 5 years old instead of 6, so off I went to the public school.

All went well in kindergarten. To this day, I think I was the teacher's pet. I was the only kid who knew that a pound of coal weighs the same as a pound of feathers, and I was also the only kid to realize that Mrs. Friedt had a first name.

But that was kindergarten. Off I went again, this time to the Immaculate Conception School, where I served an eight year sentence. Well, the first four years were okay...I started out as a straight-A student, and when Father Bishop came in to read report cards, I was never worried about being embarrassed by my grades. But then came the fifth grade.

Sister Mary Karen was the teacher. We were in science class when one of the kids asked why it was warmer in the summer than in the winter. Sister Mary Karen explained that it was because the earth is closer to the sun in the summer than in the winter.

I knew better.

I raised my hand, and when she called on me, I explained that the sun is actually closer to the earth in the winter (in the northern hemisphere) than in summer, and that it was the tilt of the earth's axis that gives us more direct sunlight in the summer. She looked at me and said -- in so many words -- you are full of bullshit.

So, being the wise-guy, stubborn German kid that I was, I said, well how do you explain summer in the southern hemisphere? Is the sun closer to them in their summer, when it's winter here?

She didn't take too kindly to my way of explaining this, so I went home that night and pulled out a science book that explained all, complete with a drawing of the earth (relative to the sun) at different times of the year. I took the book to school the next day.

In science class the next day, I raised my hand and told Sister Mary Karen that I had a book that would answer the question that had been asked the day before. She looked at the drawings, read a bit of the text, and shook her head. "The book is wrong," she said.

I must have realized at that moment how Galileo and those poor kids who were raised in the USSR must have felt every day. Here was the truth, but my teacher ...MY TEACHER...denied it. I guess she was even more German and stubborn than me, but truth will eventually prevail, as those kids in the USSR found out. I don't think Galileo lived long enough to get his revenge.

That was the day I lost respect for authority. Might does not make right, and I learned that day that it was possible for me to know more than some people in authority. And I paid dearly for that lesson throughout the remainder of my sentence...I mean, the remaining three years of my education...at ICS.