Crank School Quotes

Alone, there is only the person inside. I've grown to like her better than the stuck-up husk of me. Alone, there is no perfect daughter, no gifted high school junior, no Kristina Georgia Snow. There is only Bree." (Ellen Hopkins)

The Brodie set did not for a moment doubt that she would prevail. As soon expect Julius Caesar to apply for a job at a crank school as Miss Brodie. She would never resign. If the authorities wanted to get rid of her she would have to be assassinated.

The drone in my ear, it’s like the tornado drill in elementary school, the hand-cranked siren that rang mercilessly, all of us hunched over on ourselves, facing the basement walls, heads tucked into our chests. Beth and me wedged tight, jeaned legs pressed against each other. The sounds of our own breathing. Before we all stopped believing a tornado, or anything, could touch us, ever

Qhuinn’s head cranked around, leaving its cage of the hand that had remained, his blue and green eyes red rimmed and watery. “I have loved you for years. I have been in love with you for years and years and years… throughout school and training… before transitions and afterward… when you approached me and yes, even now that you’re with Saxton and you hate me. And that… shit… in my fucking head locked me down, locked everything down… and it cost me you.

Late nights, bloodshot eyes at school, walking around like a Flare-infested Crank,

Late nights, bloodshot eyes at school, walking around like a Flare-infested Crank, falling

Are we labouring at some Work too vast for us to perceive? Are our passions and desires mere whips and traces by the help of which we are driven? Any theory seems more hopeful than the thought that all our eager, fretful lives are but the turning of a useless prison crank. Looking back the little distance that our dim eyes can penetrate the past, what do we find? Civilizations, built up with infinite care, swept aside and lost. Beliefs for which men lived and died, proved to be mockeries. Greek Art crushed to the dust by Gothic bludgeons. Dreams of fraternity, drowned in blood by a Napoleon. What is left to us, but the hope that the work itself, not the result, is the real monument? Maybe, we are as children, asking, "Of what use are these lessons? What good will they ever be to us?" But there comes a day when the lad understands why he learnt grammar and geography, when even dates have a meaning for him. But this is not until he has left school, and gone out into the wider world. So, perhaps, when we are a little more grown up, we too may begin to understand the reason for our living

For some of the kids on my bus, the deviation is so small: an imperfection in the DNA strand so tiny that an electron microscope cranked to 100,000X magnification shows but a shadow. A knot of rogue atoms. Weightless. A body forms itself around that anomaly, and next comes a life, and the lives of that person's family.

I do like Manny, crank up the inside volume, listen to my dreams as I walk through the school halls, I choose what words to let in.

There are two moments in the course of education where a lot of kids fall off the math train. The first comes in the elementary grades, when fractions are introduced. Until that moment, a number is a natural number, one of the figures 0, 1, 2, 3 . . . It is the answer to a question of the form “how many.”* To go from this notion, so primitive that many animals are said to understand it, to the radically broader idea that a number can mean “what portion of,” is a drastic philosophical shift. (“God made the natural numbers,” the nineteenth-century algebraist Leopold Kronecker famously said, “and all the rest is the work of man.”) The second dangerous twist in the track is algebra. Why is it so hard? Because, until algebra shows up, you’re doing numerical computations in a straightforwardly algorithmic way. You dump some numbers into the addition box, or the multiplication box, or even, in traditionally minded schools, the long-division box, you turn the crank, and you report what comes out the other side. Algebra is different. It’s computation backward. When you’re asked to solve

Or maybe. Maybe. Maybe I'm just a lost, confused kid, scared of what's happening to me, to my family, to the world, and I hate school and I have no friends, and I spend my days sleeping with my iPod cranked up as loud as it'll go, trying not to go completely crazy, and with all that time alone I'm looking shit up on the Internet, looking up the same stuff over and over, and I memorize it all because I'm wicked smart, because I have to fill my head with something other than the ghosts.

My father was, I suppose, a crank. He had a fine, precise mind which ignored what it was not interested in. Without being a misanthrope he was unsociable and non-conforming. He had his own unorthodox theories of education, one of which was that I should not be sent to school.

There are two moments in the course of education where a lot of kids fall off the math train. The first comes in the elementary grades, when fractions are introduced. Until that moment, a number is a natural number, one of the figures 0, 1, 2, 3 . . . It is the answer to a question of the form “how many.”* To go from this notion, so primitive that many animals are said to understand it, to the radically broader idea that a number can mean “what portion of,” is a drastic philosophical shift. (“God made the natural numbers,” the nineteenth-century algebraist Leopold Kronecker famously said, “and all the rest is the work of man.”) The second dangerous twist in the track is algebra. Why is it so hard? Because, until algebra shows up, you’re doing numerical computations in a straightforwardly algorithmic way. You dump some numbers into the addition box, or the multiplication box, or even, in traditionally minded schools, the long-division box, you turn the crank, and you report what comes out the other side. Algebra is different. It’s computation backward.

Davy, ever the daring one, bought a jumbo peppermint milk shake and got fifty cents back. He talked me out of getting plain vanilla. “You can get plain vanilla anytime!” he said. “Try…” He scanned the chalkboard that listed all the flavors. “Try peanut butter!” I did. I have never been sorry, because it was the best milk shake I ever tasted, like a melted and frozen Reese’s cup. And then it happened. We were walking across the parking lot, under the burning sun, with our shakes freezing our hands in the big white paper cups that had Spinnin’ Wheel in red across the sides. A sound began: music, first from a few car radios and then others as teenaged fingers turned the dial to that station. The volume dials were cranked up, and the music flooded out from the tinny speakers into the bright summer air. In a few seconds the same song was being played from every radio on the lot, and as it played, some of the car engines started and revved up and young laughter flew like sparks. I stopped. Just couldn’t walk anymore. That music was unlike anything I’d ever heard: guys’ voices, intertwining, breaking apart, merging again in fantastic, otherworldly harmony. The voices soared up and up like happy birds, and underneath the harmony was a driving drumbeat and a twanging, gritty guitar that made cold chills skitter up and down my sunburned back. “What’s that, Davy?” I said. “What’s that song?” …Round…round…get around…wha wha wha-oooooo… “What’s that song?” I asked him, close to panic that I might never know. “Haven’t you heard that yet? All the high-school guys are singin’ it.” …Gettin’ bugged drivin’ up and down the same ol’ strip…I gotta find a new place where the kids are hip… “What’s the name of it?” I demanded, standing at the center of ecstasy. “It’s on the radio all the time. It’s called—” Right then the high-school kids in the lot started singing along with the music, some of them rocking their cars back and forth, and I stood with a peanut butter milk shake in my hand and the sun on my face and the clean chlorine smell of the swimming pool coming to me from across the street. “—by the Beach Boys,” Davy Ray finished. “What?” “The Beach Boys. That’s who’s singin’ it.” “Man!” I said. “That sounds…that sounds…” What would describe it? What word in the English language would speak of youth and hope and freedom and desire, of sweet wanderlust and burning blood? What word describes the brotherhood of buddies, and the feeling that as long as the music plays, you are part of that tough, rambling breed who will inherit the earth? “Cool,” Davy Ray supplied. It would have to do. …Yeah the bad guys know us and they leave us alone…I get arounnnnddddd… I was amazed. I was transported. Those soaring voices lifted me off the hot pavement, and I flew with them to a land unknown. I had never been to the beach before. I’d never seen the ocean, except for pictures in magazines and on TV and movies. The Beach Boys. Those harmonies thrilled my soul, and for a moment I wore a letter jacket and owned a red hotrod and had beautiful blondes begging for my attention and I got around.

WHEN I GRADUATED from my New Jersey high school in 1979, I was an honor student and a junkie. I don’t mean I smoked a lot of weed or popped too many pills—I shot speed daily. Methamphetamine to the chemist, crank in my hometown, crystal in modern terminology.

The doggy demolition began slowly. Clothes, hairbrushes, dishes, pens, wristwatch, toothbrush (yes, he’d reached it somehow)—anything I came in contact with became an object to chew, maul, consume. Toys, dog chews, or rawhides were scoffed at while he was alone; it had to be something of mine. He ate two remote controls, binoculars, a cherished baseball from high school, two belts, a computer mouse and keyboard, Ray-Ban sunglasses, and too many shoes to count. Even the shifter knob and window cranks in my Civic fell victim to Lou’s teeth. Anything I handled eventually became dog food.

Look at your wife. You're brow beating her, trying to make her confess that she fooled around with somebody. Well, what if she did? Whose fault is that? You want to feel bad? Ask yourself that. Laurel's a good woman, a beautiful woman, and if she's looking somewhere else for love, then you haven't been taking care of business at home." Warren's eyes ticked up from the computer, but Kyle pressed on. "If she confessed right now and gave you what you think you want all the dirty details-where would you be then? Fucked, that's where. Nine ways from Sunday. The two of you would have nowhere to go, because you're never going to get over it. I know you, man." Warren's eyes smoldered. "I didn't know you'd spe cialized in psychiatry." Kyle actually laughed. "I wouldn't waste my time. I already know more about human weakness than most of those cranks ever will. I went to school on myself.

Kids can change in seniors school. It's like someone flicks a switch, their hormones crank up to eleven and all bets are off.

Trying to get some sleep so I’d be rested for school the next day while people were having sex on the couch and shooting cocaine and cranking the stereo was definitely not a mundane reality.

Under the state’s simple blue flag are gathered today some of the most flamboyant cranks, conspiracists, and calamity howlers the Republic has ever seen. The Kansas school board draws the guffaws of the world for purging state science standards of references to evolution. Cities large and small across the state still hold out against water fluoridation, while one tiny hamlet takes the additional step of requiring firearms in every home. A prominent female politician expresses public doubts about the wisdom of women’s suffrage, while another pol proposes that the state sell off the Kansas Turnpike in order to solve its budget crisis.

One year, a group of students, including Dahmer, traveled to Washington, DC, to see the sites and visit important landmarks. While on this trip, someone dared Dahmer to make a crank call. He contacted the offices of then Vice President Walter Mondale and managed to charm his way into an invitation for Dahmer and his fellow high school classmates from Ohio to meet the VP.

As he approaches third, Art Devlin of the Giants—an honors graduate of the McGraw school of baseball—slows him down with an artful elbow. Tinker shrugs him off and keeps going. The next barrier is his own coach, infielder Heinie Zimmerman, who grabs him and tries to drag him back toward third. Tinker breaks the tackle and beats the peg to the plate86 as the crowd “wailed, roared, guffawed, and squalied.”87 In the excitement, fourteen-year-old William Hudson, leaning over to get a better view, falls fifty feet from the roof of a nearby apartment building. So engrossed are his fellow spectators in watching the race around the bases that no one even notices for several minutes. The boy dies of a fractured skull.88 The players are unaware of the first (but not last) death by baseball in 1908, and Brown gives up a single hit the rest of the way. The Cubs win 1–0.

In Los Angeles, it was easier to breathe. It always was. My hometown made me feel at ease in a way no other landscape ever would: the strip malls and cloverleaf freeway exits, the rush of salt wind on the Pacific Coast Highway, the dark silhouettes of palm trees against those startling, smog-brightened sunsets. This was where I’d gotten high with my high school boyfriend, sixteen and not a virgin anymore, driving the dark back roads thinking, not a virgin not a virgin not a virgin. These streets were the first streets I ever drove with my friends, late at night, with the radio cranked up, imagining our futures.