Word of the Day: Play

Ayodele Nzinga walked into our quiet classroom and told us all to play, told us that the ones who had not played in a while are the ones who needed to play the most. The students in the class smiled at the concept and the zeal with which she advertised it. Play was something probably most of us were not too familiar with growing up from grade school to high school. To get into a distinguished university like Cal, we had to work, not play. We had to compete to get into a high school that would put us on the fast track to higher education, and when we got in, we had to compete some more. Although work and play in a school environment is not necessarily mutually exclusive, it often felt so at times as I was force-fed facts I did not care for and crammed for tests in my numerous AP classes. It was during these times that I most wanted to play, to be somewhere other than at my desk. After reading Mike Rose's "I Just Wanna Be Average," I realized what exactly I was feeling then, and still do now: You try to focus on the problem ... but the tension wins and your attention flits elsewhere ... There is no excitement here ... There is, rather, embarassment and frustration and not surprisingly, some anger in being reminded once again of longstanding inadequacies. Although I felt this way at times, I was able to overcome it due to a number of different factors. I was able to overcome an educational system that predetermines a number of students to succeed and a number of students to fail, a system with cracks in the road that we had to step over, but without a safety net to catch those who fall in those cracks. It's easy to understand what leads some to give up and say, "School's not for me."