OC HIGH: STUDENT NEWS AND VIEWS : So, What’s to Like About School? : Not much: How can learning go on in an uncomfortable setting? When the behind is numb, can the mind be far behind?

Did you ever wake up in the morning anticipating that school will be so electrifying and exhilarating that you can’t wait to hop in your lowered ragtop and cruise down to the parking lot and start class?

How extremely pleasant it is to squeeze into a desk made for a first-grader and try to write on the desktop while half the paper is falling over the edge, with no arm room, no place to put your legs in front of you.

You get to sit for a full hour, listening to the bleak and monotonous lecture of the teacher, who, as well as half the class, usually doesn’t know what is going on. Gradually, your buttocks begin to lack sensation. The incentive is not to wait until school is over anymore; rather, you hope that the teacher will tell you to deliver a call slip or get some coffee--the movement giving your body the gratification of having done something other than sit.

Then the five-minute bell rings, something I wait for not because I loathe the didactic part of school, but because I can get up and move (although the five minutes eventually truncates to about three minutes from trying to un-plaster your body from the too-small desk).

But that three minutes is all I ask; it satisfies me the way a child given a piece of bread for the first time in four days is satisfied. All I have to do now is pray that we will do a lab in physics or something other than sit for the next hour.