My freshman year I served as a writer for our high school newspaper and yearbook. I don’t know how I got this job, except maybe that I could type faster than most boys and a lot of girls. Whatever it was I value the experience because it’s one of the earliest memories I have of participating “officially” in the writing craft. I loved to read and I loved newspapers then and now, so writing was an unplanned but logical next step. It wasn’t a lot, but it was a beginning.
This was pre-Internet and pre-everything else. We learned lay out by physical cut and paste, which was a better education in geometry than I got the next year in Geometry class.
I can’t remember my Geometry teacher’s name. Odd, isn’t it? This person who dominated my sophomore year and I can’t remember her name. I do remember that she was the kind of teacher we liked to make jokes about. She was smart and probably a fair teacher, but she was also extremely thin, talked with a squeaky voice, and had what to us were antiquated ideas about how to behave. All that is undoubtedly unfair to her but such is the mentality of sophomores.
Geometry was scheduled after P.E. class just before lunch. One day for reasons I yet don’t comprehend, at the end of P.E. class I changed clothes and I got locked in the Locker Room. Just me, locked in a stinky locker room. I spent the entire next period contemplating life in prison because either no one heard me yell or no one cared to liberate me. So I missed Geometry class.
With the coming lunch hour someone re-opened the Locker Room and I made my escape. I went straight to Geometry class and told Mrs. Thin where I’d been and why I’d missed class. She didn’t believe me and told me so. I did all the things one does in proclaiming ones innocence but to no avail. She eventually gave me a poor grade for that day and I had to like it or lump it.
If I ever needed therapy it wasn’t for being locked in a Locker Room. Maybe if it’d been all night in the dark, but it was 45 minutes in late morning. No, if I ever needed therapy it’d be because of Mrs. Thin's squeaky voiced lack of confidence in my moral compass. I got through that class but didn’t like Geometry then and don’t like it now.
High school offered different kinds of highlights. Us teens knew the best places to go to make out, which I won’t identify just in case these hideouts are still in use. Of course, back then, making out was about all anyone ever did, except obviously the one girl who got pregnant while we were in high school. She was a beautiful girl who hung out not only with the wrong guy—a loud-mouthed tough—but with the wrong crowd. She paid a sad price for her misjudgment, and sadder still, I’m not sure he ever paid any price. While she was permitted to remain in school until she "showed" this was still a scandal in those days, a far cry from the lack of concern, lack of shame, and lack of common sense that passes for teen sexuality today.
We were blessed to go through high school without hearing about our self-esteem, inner self, finding ourselves, being true to ourselves, or you owe it to yourself. We did, however, hear about selfishness and self-starter, the former bad, the latter good. Though it was the end of the 60s, Small Town high school was still insolated and thus insulated from the winds of cultural change that were blowing down establishment ideas and institutions across the nation. The Me Generation was yet to come. We still believed in individual responsibility and social consequences, and for this I am grateful.
© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2010
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