This reminds me of the days when I used to teach. After working in a couple private schools, I decided I needed more of a challenge and went to teach ex-cons and dropouts at an inner-city school. I was surprised at how posters had changed since I was in school. We had posters of the likes of George Washington and Isaac Newton on the walls. Chemistry and biology class had all kinds of neat phenomena decorating the walls, we saw mesmerizing masterpieces in humanities, and there were lots of pictures of pretty faraway places in geography class. We made timelines of the presidents and bulletin boards and posters of space travel and the solar system in the wee grades. Teachers asked who we wanted to emulate when we grew up. By contrast, at the high school hosting the adult ed program – where a girl gave birth in the bathroom and handed the baby off with instructions not to tell anybody who the father was, where two gangsters once chased a third trying to come clean into my room and bloodied and disfigured his face – the posters were all focused on one thing. Most memorable was the poster that said, “Don’t do durgs.”

My beef with the program was that we had been asked if we wanted to be architects, truck drivers, or nuclear physicists. These kids were getting only two choices, and one, in and of itself, looked a whole lot more boring than the other.