AP Lit and beyond

This was originally going to be a somewhat longer and ramblier essay thing but I ran an early draft by my parents and I think I can trim it down. :p

I recently got a nice comment on one of my older fanfics, "Everyone In My AP Lit Class Is Dead." It read in part "Thank you so much for writing this!! I'm glad you took the class, idk how your school did class schedules, but whatever. I hope you find happiness with whatever you're doing now!" Which I thought was very sweet.

As I look over the story, I find that it's aged pretty well...considering I wrote it 10 years ago, when I was in high school. (I'm now out of grad school with my PhD in math.)

I—the narrator broke off. I thought I was getting the classics! Easy, light stuff like murder and incest. I thought only the really hard class would have the, the implied rape and the genocide!

 

"No," Michael challenged. "That's not why you took this class. You took this class because you didn't get in to the most advanced class. Your teachers didn't think you had the interpersonal skills to manage it. Isn't that right?"

 

But there was no answer.

 

"I put on my biographical lens," he explained to the gaping crowd.

A lot of criticisms of broad-based plans to cancel student debt boil down to an issue of unfairness. If person A managed their budget prudently and diligently repaid their student loans, is it fair to tax them to waive person B's?

But I think this argument ("I already paid my dues, others should have to as well") applies just as well, if not better, to the issues of "safe spaces"/"trigger warnings" in academia. I was told that I had to suffer through texts/history lessons/whatever that made me deeply uncomfortable or guilty; I didn't want to opt out because that made me feel like a slacker. Autism gave me an advantage at abstract thinking relative to my peers; it wasn't fair to be excused from difficult material if it was necessary and for my own good. And now other people think they can get off the hook?

When I try to explain this to other people (eg my parents), they're sometimes like "often the teachers or whoever who are exposing you to this content come from the same privileged groups you do, do you think they feel guilty and overwhelmed all the time?" And I'm like..."well, yeah? Or else they just have extreme cognitive dissonance, IDK, maybe neurotypicals are just weird like that." For me a lot boils down to "1. I have strong feelings of guilt and shame; 2. I would not have chosen this deliberately; 3. Therefore it came from the outside world; 4. People in the outside world/academia/church/wherever who are like 'well I didn't mean to induce those feelings, can't have been me' are being stupendously naive."

Anyway. I still enjoy reading and writing fiction on occasion, but that's in spite and not because of my teachers.