I received an assignment telling me to do nothing, easy enough; I would have probably done that anyway. The catch was, we had to reflect on it after. I had to be me and act like a smart ass, I planed on doing exactly what the project said, nothing. I drew some doodles and in huge print wrote, “nothing” where the reflection was support to be written. I showed some people around me, I though I would get a laugh or two, but I was completely wrong. I was called stupid and people looked at me with disbelief. In a primarily senior elective class, I was actually called stupid and other variations of that for not doing an assignment.
That was when I realized that I was going to do my own study. I was going to show people connected to Stevenson High School my assignment. I started by reading the assignment and then proceeding to show my friends, faculty and my parents my interpretation of the assignment. I sat back and listened to all the comments I got. The only people that actually laughed were my friends who know me and had to think it was a joke.
I continued to do this for the rest of the week. I soon found how interesting Stevenson’s culture is. People care more about grades than anything. In a Zen community, an acceptable response would be mine because their belief is that nothing exists. It’s said that once you can get past the illusions you see, you will be enlightened. Stevenson ain’t very Zen. Not once, did a student ask what class it was for or why I did that. They commonly asked about my saneness and if I cared. The thing that surprised me most was the next day, some people actually asked me what grade I got. Stevenson has taught us to be so competitive that we actually care about someone else’s grades so we can compare them to our ranking. High School may be teaching us book smarts and competiveness, but I wonder how those kids with a perfect GPA and high ACT scores do in real life. 
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