Franklin Elementary School was the place of my second birth—the place where I lost everything that constituted my old self and was forced to gain a new self, where school became school, and where my earliest memories still manifest themselves in reality. I had moved to Franklin from a Texan school whose name I cannot even remember, and I had to throw everything away in the process: a friend with whom I had a bit too many laughs, my elite spy status in a spy game I loved to play at the local children’s museum, and the Minecraft world I had built with another friend every day after school on their Xbox. Like a dreamer waking from a dream, I had awaken from that Texan world—every trace of which was obliterated into nothingness—into the Franklin world of anachronistic classrooms in which everything seemed to be covered with a layer of dust, white and tan school tables with book boxes and tiled floors that have long lost their shimmer, projectors whose projections seemed to never align perfectly with the edges of the Promethean ActivBoards, and teachers among whom the motto of the day would always be “no work no play.”
That was the essence of the school when I matriculated in third grade, where a protestant work ethic shaded into a love for anachronisms. Everything seemed to scream apologetically, “if it works it works.” Indeed, things did work out fine: we managed to learn, fill out the hundreds of worksheets given every week, get good grades, and pass the constantly dreaded Pennsylvania System of School Assessment, which was practically our final exams, but I always felt something off in everything we did. It was a particular undertone of hatred that ran through everything, which I originally thought was hatred for the anachronisms. One anachronism I came to hate particularly vehemently was ActivInspire, the application teachers would use on their ActivBoards to show and annotate documents. With its eye-straining neon-blue background that would underlay every document, user interface that hearkened back to the days of Windows XP, icons that try so desperately but fail to look like real objects—pens, markers, erasers, etc.—and jagged graphics that seemed to stab into my eye, I would have paid handsomely if I had the money to eviscerate from every computer that goddamned application. I desperately wanted the school to embrace modernism, to embrace that new aesthetic of minimalism that pervaded everything that excited me at the time.
My wish was granted in fourth grade, which was the beginning of the Transition Period, where a wave of modernism swept through the school. It was the year we were given iPads and new educational tools with sleek interfaces and gamified learning like Reflex Math, Study Island, Kahoot, and Notability, but that undertone of hatred only perpetuated itself more, only in a different form. Having been practically raised on games, there was no one in the whole world who would have flocked more to such gamified math learning that Reflex Math offered than me, and yet I could not bring myself to like it. There was a tint of inauthenticity to the cartoon-style art and voice overs and bonus-point sound effects, as if the “game” were made by middle-aged men who tried to be “swag like the kids,” that I simply could not shake off, and so I recognized it as a transparent ploy designed to get kids to like the unlikable: learning. And this hatred extended even further to Notability, a modernized and minimalized version of ActivInspire that students could use on their iPads. Every time I saw the cartoon pencil with a microphone in place of its eraser overlaid on a bright blue background, my stomach would turn with unease and dread, for it symbolized more than just an app to annotate documents; it symbolized the hundreds of weekly worksheets recently converted to a digital format and the songs I was forced to sing in chorus and learning. And these were only the beginning of the changes being made to Franklin Elementary School.
I had already graduated from the elementary school when the renovations that began in fifth grade were completed. Now when I revisit the school with friends during sleepovers, I see something that is quite a departure from the past: colors that run the gamut of spectrum and shade—blue, yellow, green, white, black, and gray—arranged in such a way that an unobservant viewer could mistake the interior of the school with an abstract painting of solid blobs of color randomly dispersed, sleek new Promethean ActivPanels with software and hardware that would blow the minds of the developers of ActivInspire if they suddenly time-traveled to the present, and black and gold playgrounds equipped with safety rubber floors, but it was still Franklin Elementary School. It was still the red and brown brick building I had commuted into every weekday, and so I could not help but to imagine in the minds of the students walking around the school, going between their different classes, the same undertone of hatred, merely this time directed at the new rather than the old. So as the reading teacher announces at the end of class on a Friday afternoon, “Don’t forget to complete lesson 2.3 on Study Island this weekend!” there will still be the sighs and whines and groans and moans that were the hallmarks of my experience at the school, because this hatred was never toward the building or the Promethean Boards or the digital educational tools; it was toward that one thing every school universally describes as its mission: learning.