My daughter is here with me a bit longer than usual this week, as her mom has left for Portland, Oregon, to visit her sister.
So, I have more time to take in the life of my teenager, a Junior in High School. The school experience so thoroughly takes over her life that everything else becomes peripheral activity. She struggles with Economics. I never took that subject and thank the gods for that.
My Junior year is a blur but my ninth-grade year was an anomaly because the Middletown School system had created an experiment that year - a “Ninth-Grade School” - and I was one of the guinea pigs. Every ninth grader from the surrounding district went to this one school. They chose the old high-school building, in all its classical splendor, to be the site of this grand adventure.
From the start it became obvious to many of us that those in charge did not have a handle on things, that this new endeavor was fraught with problems, namely major holes in the security and disciplinary systems. As fifteen-year olds are want to do, we naturally exploited this at every opportunity. We snuck out, hid out, wandered about, fibbed, slid around and generally became unruly.
Our gym teacher was a genial, skinny fellow who happened to have a stutter and who had been my gym teach at elementary school. He was nearly ineffectual as a disciplinarian and so paid the price for his meekness.
During one lecture on “Health” issues, certain students silently and intermittently tossed pennies to the front of the room. Reaching a climax of irritation and anger, he raised his voice (such as it was), stutteringly telling us to cease or else and at the exact nano-second after he stopped...a penny landed with a clink at his feet.
Other guys found out during the year that I had especially good handwriting and could write in many styles. Of course I gave in to their requests for parental notes excusing them for running amok somewhere other than school. During the last week of classes, I had to go into the gym teacher's office for something. I stood next to his desk as he opened a large drawer and there, at the bottom, was a pile of parent notes......most of them mine.
