Colman McCarthy, Connections, and Veganism

I had my second full day of high school. I guess this semester at these two high schools is going to have to suffice for all the time I skipped at Streetsboro High. I woke up at 5:45, and was out of the house at 6:30 and I ran to the Metro. There was a bit of a wait for the train to arrive, and I saw of the alert that said that trains would be delayed and that there was some type of accident between Twinbrook and Shady Grove, and I later found out that there was a fatal accident that two Metro workers were killed by the a piece of equipment falling of them. I feel for their families right now. I can imagine the holes in their hearts right now.
There were several delays on the way to Bethesda, but I expected, and I read my book on the way there, so I was fine, there was a man that was in the Metro that had a little impatient outburst when we stopped for the second minute delay. Once I got out of the Bethesda Station, I remembered where I was, sighting the McDonald's and walked quickly toward the way I knew the school would be. I got there on time, and Colman was right--they had some kind of homeroom first, so because I was a little late I still made it on time, and I waited in the office until Colman got there and then we walked to the first class--on the fourth floor! It was packed full--I sat on a stool behind Colman for the first class. One of his students from the previous semester's class had a free period and came and listened in.
Colman began his first class of the semester just the same as he did every time. He begins by asking the class if they like money, and then some outgoing or late student is addressed and tells him how much they like money--in this class, his name was Jordan, he was both late and outgoing, and he had to sit at the teacher's desk in the back of the room because there was nowhere else for him to sit. Then Colman takes out a $100 bill, and offers to give it to anyone who can identify and say a little bit about each person he names--there were six people that he named. He started out easy--Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, Mike Tyson. Everyone gets into the game, and is excited about this $100 bill at this point. Then he stumps them.
"Who is Barbara Lee?"
"Who is Jeanette Rankin?"
"Who is (and I can't even remember her name)?"
And no one knows the answers to these because, as Colman states, "You are learning the men that break the peace, but not the women who makes the peace. It's not your fault, you weren't taught it."
He teaches his first class by telling students how they are peace illiterate, telling them the math that they have been taking since first grade will be useless, as they can't graduate from high school to be an Algebraist. "Let those who love Algebra take Algebra, but let the rest of us take what we want to take."
He sent the students out in the hall to count the doors in the hallway, and then when they came back in, he asked them why they did that. They replied, "Because you told us to."
"Why did you listen to me?"
"Because you are the teacher."
"That's right, because I have the power. I am the teacher. I want you to learn to question authorities. Ask me 'Why are we going into the halls and counting doors? What's the point of this?'"
Even though Colman is an anarchist, and tends to teach in slightly irrational ways that anyone on the board of Education would frown upon, I find that his teaching methods seem like they may be the only ways that students actually like to learn in. His class is discussion based, asking questions, and going off on tangents.
This is true with connections. Whenever someone walks into the classroom, they have to be careful, because they are about to be the discussion. Whiney, a student from a program at American University showed up about an hour after class started, and Colman had her introduce herself and talk about where she was from, which was California, and then Colman asked the class what four cities in California were.
Later, a guidance counselor walked in with a new student, and Colman started asking her questions. Where'd you go to school? What did you do before you got here? The main discussion when this happened was when Colman asked the class, "Does anyone not want to be here?"
A couple kids raised their hands (this was at Wilson), and also the newest addition to the class, and he said, "I'd rather be in my original class." Colman thanked him for his honesty, and then proceeded to ask other students in the class who raised their hands to see why they didn't want to be there. One girl, Natalie, said that she'd rather be somewhere helping animals, and then Colman told her to go, then--now--and go help with at some Animal Nursery.
The guidance counselor was still there, and Colman was asking her opinion on what students should do if they didn't want to learn the way the high school made them learn. She said that it is the case for a lot of students, and maybe they want to do something like learn to repair cars, but they don't have that option at Wilson. I decided to say what they options were at Streetsboro--it was then I realized that although this was a bigger school with more class options, we had more options for those who wriggle in their seats with boredom because they can't stand math. We had the option of going to the Maplewood Career Center, as well as Post Secondary, or remaining at the high school, and here they had no options. I could tell that no one else had these options and it made me sad that they didn't.
The counselor left eventually, but you could tell that she had a lot to say and enjoyed the conversation that she had with Colman. There was another man that wondered in named Mr. Chase, looking for Ludwin, who wasn't in school. Colman also asked him questions about what he was doing as a job and what he did in college, but this guy seemed rushed, as he was on his job, getting students who were present to sign off. But still the same, he was letting the students see that these people weren't just invisible people in the world. They have homes and jobs and were in the same situation as we are in now five-ten years ago.
Colman also spoke with the substitute teacher that was at Bethesda in the first period. It turns out this guy graduated from Harvard, and taught Lacrosse part-time at a local private school, and was looking to be an English teacher at that school. But he majored in the history of Government, and Arabic at Harvard. And he said that the people weren't as exciting with unique thoughts and ideas as he had hoped. He wrote a book, and gave me the URL--it's called www.tremblethedevil.com . I plan on reading it. The guy seemed legitimate, and hey, he went to Harvard.
Then Whitney,  girl that stopped in and Natalie, the girl who wanted to go help animals, and also some other students in the class were talking about animal rights and what should we feel about that. There were some kids who were talking about how meat is important to eat and that you get nutrients that your body needs from it that you can't get anywhere else. It turns out Whitney is vegan, and she was talking about how she had cookbooks, and it makes it really easy to eat vegan. Natalie stopped eating meat at the beginning of the year, and someone asked Colman if he was vegetarian, and he said he was Vegan.
Some students always object to the idea of being manipulated into changing their diets, and so I was just listening and taking it all in.
Whitney said that meat and animal products are bad for your body, and I was curious about that--I looked it up, and it says that eating meat has some connection to heart disease and other things, and being vegan leads to a cruelty free lifestyle. So part of today I was trying to define what my opinion was on food. I've grown up on milk and dairy products, and I know that I wouldn't be able to eat vegan, but I was trying to figure out how I would eat, because I don't want to be cruel to animals. I have a hard time with animals getting hurt--in fact when I was in sixth or seventh grade, I read this article in a magazine about some kids who tortured a cat to death, and it killed me, and it made me really sad.
So in reference to my diet, I read in Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which was a great reminder, that cows need to be milked, or they are in pain, and chickens will lay eggs--it's inevitable. So why waste these things? So I'm all for drinking milk and eating eggs within reason. But within the case of animal cruelty, I know that some of these animals are tortured and kept in horribly small spaces, and I don't want to support that, but at the same time, if I get something out of the dumpster that has been tortured or encaged in small space, I would rather not waste their by-products than leave it there and declare that because these animals are cruelly treated that I refuse to eat their by-products. So I guess I want to eat vegan, aside things that are dumpster dove.
After work, I rode the bus home, ate soup and a muffin for lunch, and then bummed around on the internet before taking a nap. Now it looks like dinner's almost ready, and then we are going to volleyball,  and I still have a journal to write for the seminar tomorrow.