A Memory from High School: MUN

I took a Model United Nations class mostly for fun, since it would be an easy grade and I've always been interested in politics. That was around the time I was hitting my version of the senior slump, in which I just started taking classes out of fun and interest rather than a sense of obligation, particularly since I had already taken most of the classes I needed to graduate. For years, the MUN class had been taught by the father of a friend of mine, but that year a woman was teaching it who hadn't taught it before.

The overwhelming impression I have in my memory is of her humorous incompetence. It became fairly clear early on that she didn't understand Robert's Rules of Order or even much of modern politics. Being handy with a piece of news trivia or a well-crafted piece of BS would guarantee you a pass. I also remember that we were given entire class sessions with the nebulous instruction of researching the non-government organizations or countries we were meant to represent. Inevitably, those classes turned into sharing fun links with each other and trying to trick each other into going to whitehouse.com. (It was a pretty infamous porn site at the time; I'm not sure what it is now. Those were the days some people still navigated by typing in the name of what they wanted and adding a .com to it. Yes, there was internet before Google.) I remember that my friend Dima would regularly give the teacher trouble by calling her out on her ignorance, but I was particularly impressed when my friend Steve refused to do something she demanded of us since it was so childish and we were high school students. I don't remember what the task was, but that was the first time I had witnessed open rebellion from an excellent student. (Steve was, and I'm sure continues to be, a whiz in the sciences.) I also remember that, when we were told to make up fictional countries for debate, I created an impoverished country run by a theocratic Christian dictatorship. Someone else created a society dominated by robots, where humans were the slaves. Good times.

The memory that brought about this reminiscing is that, when we were getting on the buses to go to an event in another city, we were supposed to have our suits on, and I forgot. It was early in the morning, before the sun was even up, and the teacher gave me a real tongue-lashing outside the idling bus with most of the students already on board. She at first refused to even let me on the bus. It was a real ego shock for me, a reversal of power that my slip had allowed the teacher the class had until then almost completely undermined, and it stayed with me as an illustration of the way a mistake can give someone else power over me--particularly someone I had until then practically dominated.

Nothing in particular brought about this memory. It's just something I remembered.