“The most important thing a girl wears is her confidence.” - Anonymous

From “The Human Condition: A User’s Manual,” by Arnold Kunst

20 November

I used to teach in a girls’ Catholic high school. It was quite simply the best girls’ college prep school in all of northern California. A number of our girls took Advanced Placement classes in everything from Chemistry to French; a good grade in one of these classes represented college credit. When the end of the year came around and it was time to take the all-important AP exams boys from the near-by Jesuit high school would come by to study with our girls. [Note: ours didn’t go to them, theirs came to us.]  In fact, one of my former students went to Stanford with 24 units as a graduating high school senior. [I used to take credit until I realized she would have achieved that success if, instead of me as her Sophomore English teacher, she instead had Daffy Duck!]

As a natural corollary we also fielded a first-rate basketball team – you know, All-City, All-Conference, etc. And every year at one of the rallies in the gym we’d stage a game between the varsity team and a “team” made up of faculty members. Their team, of course, was composed of the regulation number of players. By contrast we needed every faculty members of the team that could stand upright just to stay “fresh.” Each of us would play flat out – for a good two minutes. Then our coach – the head of the math department was 6’ 4” – would rotate individuals out as we became deflated and rotate others in.

The girls, of course, played consistently, and smoothly. I remember like it was yesterday how I needed to concentrate big time on just getting that damned ball to bounce up and down. The girls, though, would weave between us like we were statues – and never once look down at the ball they handled with consummate ease. The experience of getting trounced by our students was quite a switch from teaching them to write essays. Trying to put an essay together over a three-week period was, for them, like pushing a soggy noodle in a straight trajectory.

Is life unfair, or what?!?