Students Will Be Able To: Prepare for the Preparation

By Emma Sartwell

Okay. Now I want you to read this article as if you were reading an article in a college newspaper.

Pretty soon you may be in college, reading real college news. And because college primes you for what some of us refer to as the “Real World,” it is inherently more serious in its preparation than high school. You need to be thoroughly prepared for such gravity of preparation.

Your job is to gear up for Real Life. Substance is not something present, but something we are going to act like is present, or act like we’re acting like is present (depending which stage you’ve been readied for), because you want to be ready to achieve. If you are not succeeding during the simulation, you will not succeed in actual practice. It’s a trial run. A model bridge. A wind tunnel. A mapping of your life on blue graph paper. You are being monitored and if the weight crushes you, it will be apparent that the prototype has not been thoroughly equipped and tested. In fact, sometimes you are not well enough prepared for the simulation, so the simulation will be simulated for you until you are ready. We can wait.

The problems of preparation arise when you are six years old, heading off to kindergarten with your plastic Power Rangers lunchbox and light-up sneakers, with your unemployability and perpetual need to relieve yourself, with your inability to distinguish a verb from a gerund, a reflection from the object casting it, or that blue square from this red circle. You are just not thoroughly prepared to prepare for this Real World.

Consider this little ditty from a guy named Plato: two prisoners are locked in a cave. On the cave wall appear shadows, and, not having ever seen anything else, the prisoners assume that the shadows are all there is, that the shadows are the live, tangible forms that comprise the real world. Eventually the prisoners emerge from the cave, and realize that all that they believed to be real was merely cast from that which is actually real. You, as these prisoners, will enter something like what Plato refers to as the Realm of Forms, and realize that you have ascended from the world of the flimsy, the imitation, the imitations of the imitation.

In the Real World, you will stop having fire drills for life, for there will be a fire. You will apply your vast conglomeration of preparation and you will survive. Could you have survived had you not been instructed a hundred times before to leave the hypothetical flame-ridden building? Could you have survived had there not been drills for those drills?

In the Real World, you will be removed from the numbing assembly line; you will no longer have to mindlessly screw bolts into the machine of your future which you are told you are not yet ready to approach. You will finally use this machine, assembled warily over the years; you will use it as a whole and be through with it.

But don’t let all these prospects of reality daunt you; you will know how to handle them once you are thoroughly drilled to embark into the existent.

You will have gone to preschool. You will have taken pre-algebra. You will have preboarded for some simulation of the Real World, because you need an environment where you can act as if you are doing something which you are not. The phases of the preparation seem simple enough, and necessary, too. You need to prepare to prepare to prepare for the preparation, or you may find yourself utterly unprepared!

Would what I do be worth doing were it not for the Preparation Factor? you ask. Is anything really worth doing for its own sake, anything truly accomplished? For what purpose am I entrapped in this cave, studying the shadows?

Listen, are you in the eleventh grade? Let’s say you’re in the eleventh grade. Twelfth-graders don’t ask these kinds of questions. You need to prepare yourself to be mature enough for the twelfth grade because pretending to be in twelfth grade is pretending to pretend to be in college, a fancy word for preparing for the Real World.

So start acting like it.


Emma Sartwell is an eleventh-grader at Carver Center for Arts and Technology in Towson

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