1 July 2002: Try to Explain the Physics

I’m overdoing it, like I said I wouldn’t. Entries too long. Yielding too much to the temptation to go back and reread and modify them. Must stop. Keep it brief. Send the entry out and let it go, in all its flawed and clumsy glory. This isn’t a resume, this is my journal. The people who read it already know what a fuckup I am, and most of them have already forgiven me for it.

There is a student at the Reading Center where I work who refuses to believe that the Earth revolves around the Sun. He’s nineteen years old. He’s not mentally retarded or otherwise developmentally disabled. He’s just a product of the Oakland Public School System. No one ever taught him before about how the Solar System was put together. We’ve got a big mural of the Solar System painted on a wall at the Reading Center, with white lines showing the orbits of the planets. He asked his teacher about the lines. She explained. He didn’t believe her. He won’t believe any of us about it. Thinks that his teacher enlisted us in playing a joke on him. We can’t show him the info in a book, because he can’t read, which is why he’s coming to the Center. He sees the sun come up, it moves across the sky, it goes down. All his life, he’s watched it move around the Earth.

We try to explain the physics, try to explain what’s really going on, but he’s starting to get angry. He came to us to learn to read, not to have his universe fucked with.