Cud-Chewing Callout

I’m going to tell a pretty gross story today.

I was in second grade, or maybe it was third or fourth grade? I’m really not sure, but I was young enough to be naive enough to imagine that adults knew everything.

I was back from lunch, but there was something stuck in my throat. This was one of those little moments where you don’t precisely regurgitate a tiny piece of food into your mouth, but that’s actually kind of exactly what happens.

Maybe I ate a little too fast and didn’t completely chew everything, or maybe there’s some other good scientific explanation, but what I know for sure is that after lunch, I found myself chewing on something that was way, way smaller than a pea, like more like a clump of grains or something.

The gross part is almost over, so hang in there.

As I was finishing chewing my cud, as I more humorously retroactively think of the incident, my teacher noticed my chewing and called me out for it. I don’t remember exactly what she said, but I do remember that it was spicy. It was certainly designed to put me on blast for chewing gum or eating candy during class, which was the only plausible explanation in her mind.

Every fiber of my being was ready to protest, but what exactly could I say? “I’m sorry, Mrs. Zajkowski, but I seem to have done some kind of micro-rumination. You know what? I’m gonna be much better equipped to explain this in about 40 years. Do you mind if I get back to you with my explanation then?”

No such luck. Instead, I tried summarizing the essence of my situation with a little white lie: I told her that something had been stuck in between my teeth.

This lie did not fly, and this cruelest of injustices was inflicted on my psyche—I was falsely accused of crimes I did not commit.

I also learned something that day that changed the way I saw the world forever: my teacher didn’t know everything.

Now, I don’t mean to give the impression that this was the first time this idea occurred to me. I’m sure that memorizing antidisestablishmentarianism and learning other trivial facts from the Guiness Book of World Records gave me a glimpse into the limitations of the knowledge of the people around me, including adults. I’m also sure I annoyed a great many adults with the little game I played to show them how smart I was. I made Transformers out of paper, showed off obscure physics knowledge I had memorized, and generally acted like a ham. I’m not proud of this, but it was a part of who I was through elementary school.

However, this moment stands out as a watershed in my mind, probably because my teacher was confident enough to call me out in front of the entire class, but I knew more about the situation than she did anyway.

This realization hit me like a thunderbolt. Adults were no longer a completely trustworthy source for information, and that included the very adults the system had set me up to learn from.

Was this my first inkling that the system wasn’t all it was cracked up to be? I’m really not sure, but I can still feel the moment of injustice if I try to remember it, so it must have had a profound impact on my thinking.

I’m also very aware of how fortunate I was to have grown up so that this was my introduction to institutional injustice. Many other kids growing up in the late-stage Jim Crow south were not so lucky, and I can only imagine what their introductions were like. I am keenly aware of the fact that just a couple years before I was born, my dad was one of three white teachers willing to teach at the first integrated high school in his particular region of the state.

Even still, injustice stings, and it can open your mind up to a new way of looking at the world. The bubble-bursting moment wasn’t as intense as my introduction to middle school, but it certainly opened the door to defiant behavior.

I’m going to be honest here: I think I needed a little bit of defiant thinking. I needed to have the authoritarian bubble burst—to understand that just because someone in a position of power says something is true, does not necessarily make it so. I also needed to see that I could know things adults didn’t know.

If you put those two revelations together, you can see that I was primed for the likes of Monty Python, punk rock, and a lifetime of stretching my mind by way of challenging the status quo.

Before the cud-chewing callout (CCC), I was rambunctious boundary-tester, but I also had severe limitations on my desire to question things. Some assumptions were simply off limits, like the idea that my teacher knew everything there was to know about a subject they were teaching.

After the CCC incident, barricades began to fall, and I began to feel free to question more and more things. My mind opened up to more and more diverse possibilities, and I began to enjoy experiences that were unlike those I had grown up with.

It was like a slap in the face, but in the end, it made me who I am today, and I’m grateful for this not-so-harrowing incident of injustice.