Mother's Day cards

In early May of our senior year, we were given an assignment so pointless, arbitrary, and irrelevant that the entire class still remembers it, all these years later. Not only did it have no connection to theater in any way, it fell outside the realm of high school academics altogether.

For a week, Ms. Mxdxxxs instructed us to make Mother’s Day cards.

That was the entire assignment: to make Mother’s Day cards. There was no educational component to it. The task was simply to make our own personal greeting cards to present to our mothers for the holiday. Like kindergartners, we were given construction paper, markers, scissors, and other supplies, as well as spots on the floor, and left to our own devices.

And we were given six total hours of class that week to do it.

Just... make Mother’s Day cards.

Now, I’ll be the first to say that I think a day spent making Mother’s Day cards in high school could be sweet and charming, in a way. If you plan it for the end of a long week of exams, for instance, it could be an endearing idea to relieve stress and do something nice for someone else. But this wasn’t that. Like most of what took place in our drama education, the assignment was not presented in good faith. It was devised purely as busy work to kill a week.

This activity was certainly a new low, but after four long years enduring bullshit, we weren’t particularly affected. Some of us took the time to create a card or two, others just sat around and talked as usual.

In researching this story, I looked back over the 2009 calendar. It turns out, we were set to open our spring play, Murder in the Knife Room, just three days after Mother’s Day. The play was our big finale and last performance at Coral Reef. Undoubtedly, we’d be in the middle of rehearsal at this time, needing all the extra help we could get. Rather than do anything at all to prepare for our approaching show, we spent a week sprawled out on the floor, coloring.  ❒

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