{"id":593,"date":"2009-02-21T22:37:57","date_gmt":"2009-02-22T06:37:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/?p=593"},"modified":"2009-02-22T16:36:58","modified_gmt":"2009-02-23T00:36:58","slug":"the-keisling-clock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/2009\/02\/21\/the-keisling-clock\/","title":{"rendered":"The Keisling Clock"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>In Junior High and High School English classes I was introduced to the work of Ray Bradbury, including his magical summer experience of \u201cDandelion Wine\u201d. But when I participated in a multiple reading of \u201cThe Innocents\u201d as part of a High School district forensic competition, our well received reading was upstaged by a very provocative well wrought reading of Ray Bradbury\u2019s quietly apocalyptic \u201c2026: There Will Come Soft Rains\u201d, about what we would now call \u201csmart house\u201d, which was going through the motions of its daily automated routine even though ironically all the humans were gone due to some sort of unnamed cataclysm.
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\nHigh school English also exposed me to the dystopian novels \u201c1984\u201d and \u201cBrave New World\u201d and their rail against totalitarian liberty-free future societies. Though at much lower levels of magnitude, I was beginning to feel that sense of externally programmed life as I would often sleep-walk through my high school class day, particularly through some of my classes where it seemed we talked about the same boring thing every day. The pinnacle of this zombie thrall was my 11th grade chemistry class taught by Mr. Keisling. He was a tired old man with a slow deadpan delivery trying to teach us the periodic chart of elements in the most uninvolving, uninteresting instructional way, employing the strategy of repetition to burn the key chemical properties implied in the chart\u2019s columns into our young brains, given that 90 percent did not give a flying fuck about it. A recipe for some dark humor perhaps?
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\nIn one of my more irreverent moods, and possibly to satisfy a composition assignment in one of my 11th grade English classes, that chemistry class inspired me to write a short-story piece called \u201cThe Keisling Clock\u201d. My story chronicled me the student walking into my chemistry class, sitting down and preparing to witness the teacher, Mr. Keisling\u2019s lecture on the periodic table of elements. I portrayed Keisling as the humanlike prop of a mechanized clock, like those complex animated clocks on the sides of pastoral Bavarian buildings.
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\nHe would move into class along his guide rail, spin to briefly acknowledge the students and chide them to quiet down, turn 180 degrees to face the blackboard and proceed to reproduce key aspects of the periodic chart on the blackboard while verbally emanating his inane deadpan patter. I went into great detail of the mechanisms of gears and rails that guided and circumcised his every action, with the implication that we the audience for this clock chiming the hour saw the same show every day.
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\nMy story\u2019s final ironic kicker was that, as class ended, I revealed that I was also a mechanism attached to my rail with my gears causing me to rise, rotate and glide out of Keisling\u2019s clock\/class to my next period\u2019s venue for what was now a much larger \u201cclock\u201d. Yeah a teenager\u2019s heavy handed literary ironic sledge hammer perhaps, but at the time I thought I was very cleaver, and I probably got a good grade from my English teacher on the piece.
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\nThat was high school for me. Moments of profoundly provocative discovery, shear anarchic joy, blithe lemming-like ritualism, and mind-numbing d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu. The later two planted seeds in me that would not come to fruition until almost forty years later my son began to bear witness to his \u201cboring and pointless\u201d middle school experience<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Junior High and High School English classes I was introduced to the work of Ray Bradbury, including his magical summer experience of \u201cDandelion Wine\u201d. But when I participated in a multiple reading of \u201cThe Innocents\u201d as part of a High School district forensic competition, our well received reading was upstaged by a very provocative […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5],"tags":[179,178,177],"class_list":["post-593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-context","tag-boring-high-school-classes","tag-distopian-fiction","tag-ray-bradbury"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t