By Silence Dopoorly, ’56, Contributor
Ever wonder what it’s like to attend the most elite college preparatory institution in Ohio? Well here’s your chance to experience life through the eyes of a “Day boy”—a simulation of life in the CCDS Upper School. To pull this off, you need a lot of friends and a huge budget, but if you do, you’ll know exactly what it means to have been assigned five hours of homework after about seven hours of school and to have four more fun-filled days standing between you and your next break.
(Caution, side effects of this article may include anxiety, mood swings, drowsiness, depression, facial tics, hissy fits, a superiority complex, and the occasional acute mental breakdown.)
1) Invite 250 of your not-so-closest friends over to your house every morning from 8:15 a.m. to 3:15 p.m. for pretty much every working week between September and June. School is now in session.
2) Insist that said 250 friends bring along 41 of their uncles and aunts—you know, the kind everybody else in the family avoids like the plague at reunions. Call them teachers.
3) Give the teachers dispensation to lecture both you and your friends for 50 minutes at a pop about something either extraordinarily difficult or highly tangential to what they might actually be trying to teach you. This is a class.
4) Make sure that you never have any time during the day to do anything other than attend classes. Then have the teachers give you five to seven hours of work relating either directly or indirectly to the things that you may or may not have learned when in class. They can explain it, but the method currently in vogue is known as the just do your best method, which involves no explanation whatsoever of an assignment that might as well have been written in Swahili. You have just been introduced to homework.
5) Make all of your friends buy tablet computers. Instruct them to use the computers for any purpose other than that for which they are intended, which, you should explain to them, is a vaguely educational one. Playing Halo or bidding on EBay during class is perfectly acceptable, as long as your friends’ relatives do not catch them doing it. Also, have them regularly spill coffee or drive nails through their tablets. Then, give them an older tablet that has “Property of the GDR” written across the side and smokes if you plug it in for more than two minutes but dies if you leave it unplugged for more than three minutes. Tell them to use it for the indeterminate time it will take to fix their own tablet. Give them back their tablet—not necessarily repaired—in four to six months but with all of their files erased. This is tech support.
6) If you should awaken to the sight of snow outside, get dressed and walk to your car (which you’ve parked, as always, in the garage). If you can get to your car safely, then you should conclude that your friends can also make it to their cars, and, therefore, to school at your house. Notify Channel 9 that CCDS is “still on for today.” Call this a snow day decision.
7) Send all your friends and their relations home at 3:15 p.m. Divide the time between then and approximately 2:00 a.m. the next morning into quarters. Spend the first quarter watching YouTube. Think to yourself how nice it would be to go outside but continue to watch anyway. Spend the second quarter actually doing some of your work. Swear loudly every ten to twenty minutes. Spend the third quarter watching Hulu or posting on Facebook. The fourth quarter is cook’s choice—spend it either doing work or passed out over said work from sleep deprivation. This is what you do after school.
8) Set your alarm for 7:50 but ensure that you hit the snooze button a minimum of six times before actually rising from your bed—or wherever you happened to drop—anyway. Eat anything for breakfast that doesn’t require microwaving, toasting, grilling, or any preparation beyond extraction from a wrapper or box. Ensure you are caffeinated, however. You’ll need it—250 of your not-so-closest friends and their 41 relations will start coming into your house en masse around 8:00 a.m. or so. This is before school.
9) Establish a schedule. Call this a rotating schedule but ensure that all it does is flop around occasionally like a dying fish. There are seven classes to a day, so order the classes about six different ways and then repeat them ad nauseam for the course of the simulation.
10) Every so often, gather 60 of your 250 friends into a room much too small for 60 people, like your basement or attic. Your friends should wear backpacks stuffed with shredded newspaper and telephone books, plus their tablet bags. Have three people talk about something important for two minutes and then either talk over, heckle, or ignore those same people for 18 minutes. Nobody is allowed to leave the small room in which you’re probably breaking the fire code for that time period. You have just experienced a class meeting.
11) Although your friends might be equipped with state-of-the-art tablets, go out and buy the oldest, most poorly-constructed pencil sharpeners you can find and install them at random—but not convenient—locations around your house. Preferably, you should purchase pencil sharpeners manufactured before the Second World War and used in public schools since. These should be emptied once every other year. Call this being tops in technology.
12) Immediately after school, have all of your friends pile into their cars at once. Half of them should try to park their cars in your garage while the other half attempt to back out of your driveway. This works best if all of the cars are double-parked in front of your house or in your driveway and the driveway itself is narrow and bordered on both sides by cliffs or retaining walls. This is the traffic pattern.
13) Wednesdays, have your mom make the same kind of generic lunch she makes every other day of the week but have her also bake cookies for everyone. Have only a box of chocolate milk and four to six of her cookies that day. Call it a balanced meal.
14) Establish a Latin school motto. (Because Latin’s just that cool.) Ensure nobody knows what it really means by having none of your friends’ relatives teach Latin. It should translate literally as “We cram knowledge down your throats,” but none of your friends should know that.
15) In the same vein, write a school song but teach it to only about 10% of your friends. It doesn’t really matter whether or not you know it, because somebody else will always cover for you and you can kind of mouth the words if you forget it. Besides, you will only sing it once in September, once in December, and twice in June. Nobody should be allowed to sing it in anything above a hoarse whisper anyway. This is your Alma Mater.
16) Give long, two-hour tests every December and June. Throw in a few for the month of May if some friends—read: suckers—happen to be doing particularly well in their classes. Despite the fact that they take these tests in May instead of June, require them to take the tests everybody else takes in June anyway. Also, have your friends’ relatives give them as little time as possible to switch between learning new material and reviewing old material. A relative should be replaced if he or she fails to continue teaching until the Friday before the tests. Require everyone—none of whom have had the time to begin reviewing—to come in that day with “review questions they’ve prepared” in their abundant amount of spare time. Call that day exam review day and the call whole thing the exam period.
If you manage to pull this off, you will have experienced something like no other—a roller-coaster ride of lows and lower lows, punctuated by some moments of semi-consciousness after all-nighters which might easily be mistaken for highs. You will have experienced what a CCDS student goes through in just one year of school. Now imagine doing this for four years straight, knowing that you’re headed for another four years of similar description in college. (Because school rule 123(c) states that every student, regardless of attitude or inclination must attend college and if that student does not, he or she will be taken out behind the North Gym and roughed up by Mr. Dunn and Mr. Brownstein.) Now you get the picture. I’ll close this cheery little article with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you, all of you at the good school. (With deepest apologies to the crew of Apollo 8.)
