A Room of 12 Moons

Something that I wrote for my 11th grade English class, the purpose being to compose a piece of persuasion on a topic of our choosing. I have been ranting on this same topic all year lol, and I subconsciously apologize to my teacher, but who am I to limit the frustration I feel with certain things?

A room of twelve moons is a rather interesting thing… what exactly does one have, when one possesses for observation a room of 12 moons? There are twelve beautiful, ghastly reflectors of light, twelve radiating orbs that gravitate amongst themselves, and float amongst the ether; they shake and convulse, as if in the throws of death, by the effects of moonquakes, as if their very soul was trembling. A moon has no tears to shed, nor no exultations to pronounce, so therefore, in their stead, it serves to observe the world, to declare itself, and to cause even the weariest of sun-torched travelers to mystify themselves with its very presence and essence.

So, my fellow sun-torched and sand-blasted travelers of the deserts, we now have an understanding of the ethereality of such a moon, and surely the absurdity of a room being filled with twelve such moons is taking its toll on the schema of your mind, yet I wonder… am I able to more reasonably say that a room full of twelve boulders is existent? For surely, in order to satisfy any conceptual qualms that I may have about such a switch of matter, a boulder, at just the right distance and with perhaps a slightly altered frame of perception, would be very much similar to the façade of the moon, would it not? Why, it must be easily recognized that it is quite possible to mistake the appearance of a well-shaped boulder for the heavenly sphere itself. Such is an example of the ability one has of shaping the hideous in such a manner as to force it to resemble the beauty.

Now, remove the boulders, shatter the moons.

We have a room full of twelve humans; the student mathematician, the student literary genius, the student music savant, the student unknown, and eight more students/people of indeterminate and ultimately unimportant distinctions. Each totally equal in the realm of the universe, each with a passion that defines his own development and procurement of happiness in this free existence. It is important to say this, as all will undoubtedly be in agreement with me when I claim that we all, at the moment our creation, are totally and utterly equal in the immeasurable ability of our ability to love, to learn, to grow, and to ultimately develop outward and inward in a way which may be impeded or helped by other circumstances. So unique and elegant are these people-creations that I hold no shame in making the connection, bridging the gap between the two, and calling the unfettered genius the glazed moon.

We can follow the development of these four humans, these four moons, in an extremely well reasoned manner, as no such great conclusion can be reached by anything except for such reasoning. I can show how these moons, to varying degrees respectively, may be shaped down, chiseled away, and dimmed, so as to ultimately resemble, in both appearance and function, a boulder. A rock. A monumental paperweight being restricted by gravity itself.

Evidenced by the fact that we have come to the conclusion that these four moons have had the most equal of creations, we should have no trouble in realizing that this student mathematician, this Logomoon, has the same amount of ability and positivity/negativity about his nature as any of the other moons. We shan’t be able to assign him any higher or lower degree of perfection – in other words, we can choose no favorites in this game! The only thing that separates him, in the slightest degree, from the nature of his counterparts is that he has an affinity towards the numbers; his mind is a databank, a warehouse ready to receive all shipments of equations. He can crunch the numbers, he can shift the numbers, he can make the numbers obey his iron will!

He excels in his math classes at a young age, at an intermediately young age, and soon the Logomoon enters into High School, where, supposedly, little moons go to become big moons during a transition that is designed to shape said moons towards the professions and careers that they desire and will ultimately benefit their future! So, in this perfect and totally make-believe world of our own transparent hopes of what education should be, the Logomoon (student mathematician) enters into the coach car that will skyrocket him into his dreams.

And sure enough, our great system delivers! We have used our powerful and multitudinous courses in the mathematics and mathematically inclined sciences, both within the realm of standard education and advanced classes for the stalwart of mind, to bolster and build his abilities; used them to further his interest. Even moreso, he has garnered, amongst his fellow students, such a reputation for his analytical prowess! He has been showered down and rained upon with accolades, neverminding their amount or relative weight to each other, for surely such a genius should have none of his pathways blocked! A boulder in the road of the Logomoon is an injustice indeed.

So when the dust has cleared, what do we have so far? A total success! Our system has done its job.

Our world would be so much more perfect if indeed such a cataclysmic success were to be repeated for every moon – if only everyone could be as supported and backed as the Logomoon. But alas… such fairytale happiness is not in store for our fellow moons.

The student literary genius, the Ethomoon, is born.

Like the Logomoon, he surpasses all others, in the fields of literature and English, at the young and intermediately young ages. Sure, our (solar) system supports him well up to this point, though while he reads the books that are assigned to him by his classes, he has such an unquenchable thirst, at such a young age, that he is forced by both necessity and desire to take it upon himself to grab for more books.

This is a very great thing, that the Ethomoon has begun to develop his own desire and, whether it be good or bad, hopefully I will be able to show you how this disparity between him and the Logomoon lead to two entirely different life-conclusions, both having the ability to be argued towards either the negative or the positive.

The Great Schism makes itself known once the Ethomoon begins to fully integrate, or at least when he begins to try to fully integrate himself into the high school system and beyond. Yet sadly, he is the square peg trying to fit into the round hole.

It is obvious that we, as finite and totally materially dependent creatures of the physical universe, do not have unlimited resources. Yet, to what limits do these resources extend? Apparently, they pervade far enough to compartmentalize our education system. You have seen how we have offered such varied, both in nature and in complexity, courses to the Logomoon; you’ve seen how we are able to support that which we truly want to, by offering a huge sphere for which the moon is able to grow into and develop from. Dig the whole, and they can jump right in! But when the Ethomoon reaches high school, he finds a network and dogma of education that is harrowingly dissimilar from that which the Logomoon has passed through. What does our system offer this new moon besides 4 English/Literature classes which, while of varying level of difficulty, are nowhere near as varied as the selection of mathematics-based classes; and, even moreso to my point, these English/Literature classes are not something that he can take pride in excelling at because, much to his dismay, they are required classes! They are expected of all moons!

Yet still, the Ethomoon tries. He tries really hard in these classes, and some semblance of his intelligence and ability is recognized; the people know he can write, they know he is very well read. But hell, is he taking advanced courses in three different types of mathematics-based sciences? No! So the other moons, the misshapen little pebbles of existence, assign more intelligence to the Logomoon’s accomplishments than to the Ethomoons accomplishments, simply because our system has enabled the Logomoon to display his talents to a greater extent than we have allowed the Ethomoon. Yet, my readers, it is so much more than this little discrepancy!
As previously mentioned,the Ethomoon has less and less brilliance within him, as recognized by his peers. Thus, his esteem suffers. This would not be so bad if we were to attribute to him the mental fortitude of an Athenian, yet this moon is only an adolescent whose genius gets the short end of the stick when compared to the Logomoon. As such, he begins to wonder why he is not deemed as “smart” as the Logomoon… he questions within himself whether he really does have this spark of intelligence that he seems to notice within himself, or whether he is actually a deluded madman, a cocky and overconfident individual with no real forté.

In this great run of education, the Ethomoon has no choice but to develop inwards, and surely we can understand that a lack of outwards development is detrimental to the status of being. Over time, sadly, we no longer have a moon, but simply an Ethosphere; a presence of genius that is still the same shape and size as our Logomoon, but it has no outwards appearance; we cannot see the nature of its brilliance, like a moon eclipsed by the overwhelming power of the sun.

So when the dust has cleared, what do we have thus far? A total success of our system, and one failure. Surely a system that produces two such disparities should not be employed, especially not one as important as our education system? Let us continue in our investigation in order to see if we can find more faults that must be righted…

Oh it is such a shame that one of our delicate little proto-moons of human brilliance has, as a result of the slightest of restrictions imposed by the nature of a system, developed not into the moon that we have shaped the Logo into, but an invisible mass of brilliance, unable to be noticed by the majority of our universe.

So, thus, we see the ultimate final perfection and ultimate final failure of our system of education. The discrepancy has been shown; how we are biased, for one reason or another, to a certain kind of education which, while surely and strongly promoting one realm of intelligence, has the ability to totally destroy the potential of another type of genius.

If we leave everything the way it is, however, we are still able to create even more mutations of perfection, more byproducts of imperfection.

Because it happens in reality, it must also happen in literature; therefore, I am entirely within reason by assigning the instrument of classical guitar to our student musician, the Pathomoon. Never mind the popularity of the violin, or the flute, or the clarinet, this young moon has a passion for the classical guitar, and nothing else!

The explanation and story of his development is much more short, and much more easier to tell and extrapolate upon.

Because most schools, and by most one can assume about a 90th percentile, have notoriously weak support for the music’s, at least when compared to other schools of education (such as mathematics and science), our Pathomoon finds himself stuck between a rock and a hard place; he has very little, if any room to develop his abilities within the school system, and must do so entirely on his own and of his own fortitude.

What has happened now is a downright crime… we have alienated someone from the confines of our public school system! Because the institutions of higher education that he is aspiring to attend pay no heed to grades or standardized test scores, our petty little system can offer him nothing that will help him in his quest, except for maybe the experience of having completed menial work.

We can’t accept this alien as a moon of our system anymore! Somehow, he’s now become some likeness of a boulder, and he has sadly been eroded by varying winds of education to exist in an entirely different environment than the Logomoon.

In order to cover all grounds of that which we cannot presently achieve within our education system, let us assign the fourth moon in our room, the student unknown, as simply the Pseudomoon. He fits into none of the previous categories that have been described, because he represents the final unpredictability of the human genome; the final and great enigma of brilliance that we must, if we want to be a competent world society, be able to force ourselves to deal with in an appropriate manner.

We must realize that while our system is able to support and create something as perfect as the Logomoon, it is unable to develop the other geniuses and moons into the same high-level creature, a creature that not only has the benefit of being fully supported by the institution which has carried him thus far, but has a reputation which precedes him.

A duty has been relegated upon us by all those that we have failed, all those that we have washed through and rejected with our system of education; their very discrepancy in nature, as a result of our system, should force and scare us into action, into bringing forth a new system which is so elite and watertight, that we can turn out fully supported geniuses with the touch of a button.

Now, surely, it is not so hard to imagine a room of 12 moons. We need these heavenly bodies, we need not the collection of stones and bits of broken mountain that we currently create.

lol, you guys are cold.