My grade school education was one of considerable peaks and valleys that I have since managed to tuck way in the back corner of my mind. In other words, I don't often reminisce my time with it. It was there, it happened, things were learned, and then I left. I'm always grateful for all the teachers, coaches, guidance counselors, and hell, even the janitors along the way who made sure I kept my mind fresh, focused, and relatively out of trouble. Like most grade school kids, I may have made a few mistakes from time to time, but I left with no regrets and quite thankfully, a diploma in my hand.
The most difficult adjustment I faced throughout my education in this town came at the hands of the district itself. I can trace it all the way back to the beginning of third grade. My father had recently been laid off from a railroad company that was rapidly losing money and other services to the opposition. Both my sister and I were enrolled in Catholic school at the time, oblivious to our parent's haste financial state. Within the first few days of the new school year, my mother was knocking on my classroom door. Once opened, she's motioning with her index finger to grab my belongings and to come with her. My sister is already in the car. It is here where my mother explains how we could no longer afford the school we were attending. Whatever sad feelings I had that I couldn't see my school friends anymore were immediately squashed with the notion that my sister and I had an entire week off from school thanks to dad's pink slip.
Within that free week, my sister and I had to partake in a series of small tests to see just how capable we were at handling the rigors of an almighty public school education. I somehow proved to be a more adept reader than my soon-to-be third grade peers. So much so that it became awkward once we started back up at our new school. I would be sitting there, doing my thing, when some gawky sixth-grader would just be hanging in front of the doorway to come and get me for reading class. I'd grab my book and trudge upstairs with him, sitting in a circle reading crap I really didn't care about. It was, however, a great relief from the mopey dredge happening downstairs in my own classroom.
That mopey dredge would keep happening for the rest of my time in grade school.
At some point during my youth, city educators and administrative bigwigs thought it would be a great idea to start shuffling the schools around, closing some and merging some here and there - mostly likely just to placate their wallets rather than maximize student potential. The end result was the process of moving students to and from various new buildings, making both commutes and adaptations beyond challenging. Naturally, administration didn't give a shit. You either comply with the changes, or you can leave. In my particular case, I was in one building from grades three through seven. The decision was to send us across the other side of the city for just one year, eighth grade.
One school, one grade, for just one year.
After eighth grade, they split us up again. Half attended one public high school, while the rest attended the other. Most of us, anyway. Some families wised up and started sending their kids to schools out of district, or to private ones altogether. There had been two public high schools in the city for years and years, but by the time I got to one of them, they were just about finished with the idea. Naturally, it was the particular building I was attending they were going close and convert into a middle school. This meant my classmates and I all had to move back to the other side of town to attend the newly merged high school.
We commenced as one unified high school for eleventh grade, and I simply could not handle it. I went from a school of maybe three-hundred total students to one with fifteen-hundred students. I was getting D's in everything, a stark contrast from my B+ average at my first high school. I begged my parents to transfer to the private school in town, which they wonderfully granted. Unfortunately, it didn't make much of a difference as I wound back up at the very school I didn't want to go to in the first place for my senior year.
My eleventh-grade tenure notwithstanding, the camaraderie felt at the new public high school was one of great indifference. Specifically, those students from the north side of town - those who spent their first two years in this very building -were somehow better than us south side kids. Nowhere was this more prevalent than the ensuing cliques that typically form when new students come together. The thick air of contentiousness stuck around the entire academic year, right up until that final June day us seniors walked across the stage at Proctors.
I'd be lying if I said I'm surprised we couldn't even make it work and come together for our twentieth high school reunion this month. We didn't even have a five year reunion, nor a tenth, nor a fifteenth. I knew it was bound to spiral apart, right down that toilet bowl of lingering malice and general detachment. After two decades, it's glaringly obvious we were never able to get it together. We never got time to. Had we befriended one another in, say, third grade - and stayed in each other's school lives after - maybe things might be different today. The bonds would have obviously been stronger. In her attempts to organize this reunion, a friend mentioned that some emails and messages sent out were being reported as spam because some of her old classmates did not recognize her. That's the state of affairs here. And when crunch time came, a few tried in vain to make it happen and buy tickets. It wound up being roughly ninety percent of our graduating class not even buying reunion tickets at all. It is difficult enough to get twenty people on the same page for anything - much less four hundred who barely took the time to get to know one another when we hung out in the same building for some twenty months back in the day.
I'm very grateful for the efforts of those who tried to make this reunion happen, but perhaps it was just never meant to be. Even with the advent of social media such as Facebook, calling something a reunion when we were never actually a union of anything was going to be a monumental challenge. Our best bet as graduates is to just cross paths wherever in life, maybe recognize each other, and share a drink or two. That's reunion enough.
The most difficult adjustment I faced throughout my education in this town came at the hands of the district itself. I can trace it all the way back to the beginning of third grade. My father had recently been laid off from a railroad company that was rapidly losing money and other services to the opposition. Both my sister and I were enrolled in Catholic school at the time, oblivious to our parent's haste financial state. Within the first few days of the new school year, my mother was knocking on my classroom door. Once opened, she's motioning with her index finger to grab my belongings and to come with her. My sister is already in the car. It is here where my mother explains how we could no longer afford the school we were attending. Whatever sad feelings I had that I couldn't see my school friends anymore were immediately squashed with the notion that my sister and I had an entire week off from school thanks to dad's pink slip.
Within that free week, my sister and I had to partake in a series of small tests to see just how capable we were at handling the rigors of an almighty public school education. I somehow proved to be a more adept reader than my soon-to-be third grade peers. So much so that it became awkward once we started back up at our new school. I would be sitting there, doing my thing, when some gawky sixth-grader would just be hanging in front of the doorway to come and get me for reading class. I'd grab my book and trudge upstairs with him, sitting in a circle reading crap I really didn't care about. It was, however, a great relief from the mopey dredge happening downstairs in my own classroom.
That mopey dredge would keep happening for the rest of my time in grade school.
At some point during my youth, city educators and administrative bigwigs thought it would be a great idea to start shuffling the schools around, closing some and merging some here and there - mostly likely just to placate their wallets rather than maximize student potential. The end result was the process of moving students to and from various new buildings, making both commutes and adaptations beyond challenging. Naturally, administration didn't give a shit. You either comply with the changes, or you can leave. In my particular case, I was in one building from grades three through seven. The decision was to send us across the other side of the city for just one year, eighth grade.
One school, one grade, for just one year.
After eighth grade, they split us up again. Half attended one public high school, while the rest attended the other. Most of us, anyway. Some families wised up and started sending their kids to schools out of district, or to private ones altogether. There had been two public high schools in the city for years and years, but by the time I got to one of them, they were just about finished with the idea. Naturally, it was the particular building I was attending they were going close and convert into a middle school. This meant my classmates and I all had to move back to the other side of town to attend the newly merged high school.
We commenced as one unified high school for eleventh grade, and I simply could not handle it. I went from a school of maybe three-hundred total students to one with fifteen-hundred students. I was getting D's in everything, a stark contrast from my B+ average at my first high school. I begged my parents to transfer to the private school in town, which they wonderfully granted. Unfortunately, it didn't make much of a difference as I wound back up at the very school I didn't want to go to in the first place for my senior year.
My eleventh-grade tenure notwithstanding, the camaraderie felt at the new public high school was one of great indifference. Specifically, those students from the north side of town - those who spent their first two years in this very building -were somehow better than us south side kids. Nowhere was this more prevalent than the ensuing cliques that typically form when new students come together. The thick air of contentiousness stuck around the entire academic year, right up until that final June day us seniors walked across the stage at Proctors.
I'd be lying if I said I'm surprised we couldn't even make it work and come together for our twentieth high school reunion this month. We didn't even have a five year reunion, nor a tenth, nor a fifteenth. I knew it was bound to spiral apart, right down that toilet bowl of lingering malice and general detachment. After two decades, it's glaringly obvious we were never able to get it together. We never got time to. Had we befriended one another in, say, third grade - and stayed in each other's school lives after - maybe things might be different today. The bonds would have obviously been stronger. In her attempts to organize this reunion, a friend mentioned that some emails and messages sent out were being reported as spam because some of her old classmates did not recognize her. That's the state of affairs here. And when crunch time came, a few tried in vain to make it happen and buy tickets. It wound up being roughly ninety percent of our graduating class not even buying reunion tickets at all. It is difficult enough to get twenty people on the same page for anything - much less four hundred who barely took the time to get to know one another when we hung out in the same building for some twenty months back in the day.
I'm very grateful for the efforts of those who tried to make this reunion happen, but perhaps it was just never meant to be. Even with the advent of social media such as Facebook, calling something a reunion when we were never actually a union of anything was going to be a monumental challenge. Our best bet as graduates is to just cross paths wherever in life, maybe recognize each other, and share a drink or two. That's reunion enough.