I was in grade 7. This was the first time in my life that I had multiple teachers. We were grouped into ‘teams’ of kids and this was junior high. The big time. Six elementary schools all merged into one building from all over town. New friends, rotating schedule of classes and something called Unified Arts. I had my blue Trapper Keeper and my elementary friend crew. I was ready.
I have no memory of what class took place at what time, but I remember seeing kids smoking, which was a first. They wore leather jackets. We called them ‘the heads’. Those people were no go for my nerd band crew. We were afraid of them and stayed away. One head even had scars all over his neck. Rumor was that he and his buddies were playing with a gas can near a campfire and it flared up burning his neck. I don’t know if that was true, but it was enough to scare us out of ever speaking to this kid. We didn’t even look at him. Terrifying.
Opposite of the heads, were the jocks. In the boys bathroom there was an ongoing graffiti war. “Jocks Rule!” in bubble letters, scrawled in black sharpie in a stall. “Heads SUCK!”
“Jocks can suck my Head! Heads for life!!!!” A colorful way to light the path of my budding adolescence.
Gym class meant we had to change. In a locker room. In front of other boys. There were showers for people’s shorts to get thrown into and our teacher used to sit in a corner on a student desk and take attendance while we put on our sweats and ratty T-shirts that we all kept in bags in our gym lockers. I can still hear him screaming at us…..BOYS! LET’S GO. NOW BOYS….CHANGE AND GET UPSTAIRS. BOOOOOOYYYYYYYYYYS!!!!!
Going outside in the morning sucked because the grass was wet, which meant wet socks and wet shoes. Those items went back in the gym locker and, well, you can guess how it stank in there. I can still smell it.
So anyway, I had science, social studies, math and language arts for about 55 minutes every day and I thought it was great to go from classroom to classroom and experience the personalities and vibe of each teacher and class. Here is what my memory reports:
Math: Chab. This woman was crazy. In a good way. High energy, poor Chab weighed 90lbs if she had rocks in her pockets. To teach us about right angles, she stood on her desk and popped out ceiling tiles. She also had a squirt gun and would move around the class shooting us if we missed an answer. Can’t do any of that now. I loved it.
Social Studies: Cultrera. Always wore a tie, always put together. Boring lecture notes on an overhead along with an occasional film strip. Blessed be the day when you were chosen to advance the filmstrip machine when hearing a pitched beeping tone on the cassette that played a spoken word soundtrack to educate us on how the Indians used buckets of corn to trade with the Pilgrims. Can’t call them that today. Mr. Cult, as we called him, was also easy to sidetrack, so many a class was spent discussing baseball, how unmotivated we were as humans, and how to put all of our handouts in order in a folder to turn in and receive ‘extra credit’ at the end of each quarter. See kids, we used that have these things called GRADES. If we jumped through extra hoops, we received EXTRA CREDIT in the written rank book. It meant nothing. Kind of like today’s version of middle school. Spoiler alert: No one cared, cares, or will care.
Science: Grube. She may be reading this as she became a colleague of mine many years later…..along with Cult and Chab! Science was fun, but we ran all over her as she had a bit of trouble controlling our talking out of turn. I remember my first time using a lab bench to look at the letter ‘e’ under a microscope from a newspaper clipping. I also remember a lot of blackboard notes on protein synthesis. Even in 1986 I wondered why the hell we needed to understand how or why our bodies synthesized protein. I would soon learn that my muscular system struggled mightily with this concept. Also, the mitochondria is the power house of the cell. Grube was in charge of a closet full of boxes of chocolate bars that we sold to raise money for our week long trip to environmental school in Biddeford, Maine (shout out Brian Denger! If I had known you I would have stopped in, but you were living in Florida at the time I think…..or Mass….). Where was I? Oh yeah, $1 per bar, DO NOT SELL AT LUNCH. 20 bars in a box, sell ’em all and you get $10 toward your trip…..I think the trip was $100 per kid and I had all of that money in less than a week by selling bars under the table at lunch. Nobody cared, cares, or will care. I sold the bars to meet cute girls that were not on my team at school. Even back then, I was ALWAYS working the angle.
Language Arts: Eddie Eichorn. The acorn. This class is what gave me the seed for this blog. Acorn. Seed. Get it? Of course you do, because you also took L.A. in grade 7. Of the 4 main classes, this is the one I remember least. I guess we wrote. We read? We did both? This was also my homeroom, where I reported every morning for attendance, the Pledge of Allegiance (we said GOD and nothing happened to us….no indoctrination, no sex changes….hmm) and announcements of what was for lunch, middle school sports scores and God knows what else. (God again….hmmm). But, as I said, the entire blog idea came to me driving recently from Ikes class here. Mr. Ike. Mr. Eich.
He had a framed paragraph above his blackboard behind his desk. He mentioned it on the very first day of school. He told us that the frame held his classroom management and discipline as well as his form of punishment. I think I’m paraphrasing, but it went something like this:
PERSISTENT PROVOCATIONS
PERSISTENT PROVOCATIONS PROVOKE THE PRUDENTLY PATIENT PRUDENT PEDAGOGUE TO PROVIDE PARTICULARLY PAINFUL PUNISHMENTS PERIODICALLY.
After typing and reading this, I kind of remember it being longer. Hmm.
See, Mr. Eichorn would make kids write that sentence out if/when they are acting goofy in class. Since I remember it, you can take what you want from that last sentence. Thankfully, I do not remember writing more than once or twice. For the heavy hitters, Ike used to drop the gauntlet.
We had this kid in our class named Matt. Matt couldn’t sit in his chair, stop moving or keep his mouth shut. Nowadays, Matt would likely have a diagnosis of A.D.D. (like the poem….”I’m A.D.D….My teachers do my work for me!”….the kids made that up not me…..). Matt would have been given tools and support to find success in school. Not in 1986. Instead he had Persistent Provocations assigned to him like this:
I remember him having to write it 10 times using crayon. Harder to write with crayon clearly. When he blew that off, Ike allowed him to use colored pencils. He blew that off too. So Ike gave him graph paper, reduced it to writing it 5 times but each letter had to be in a different square. Ouch. He struggled recess to get it done, but failed. Ike tacked his progress up above the board, next to the framed work of the original. Wind swept into the room through an open window, knocking the graph paper down. Ike pretended not to see it as the class was erupting in laughter. He stepped on it and, pretending it was trash, tore it in half and threw it away. We laughed. Matt cried. Well, not literally because now the whole thing was a bit of a joke.
The compromise went on for weeks as teacher and student bargained for the painful punishment of persistent provocations to be procured post haste. The tension during the periods gone by was palpable. Even on the periphery, I was perplexed. Poor Matt was pulverized upon learning the final assignment:
Please write the paragraph only one time, using at least 5 colored pencils, one letter per square, and each letter must be a different color. No patterns, please proceed with random colors. Also, this must be written using your non dominant hand.
To this day, I have no idea if Matt ever completed this assignment. Somewhere, Matt is out there…..Matt….Demers I think it is. If anyone knows him, please find out if he remembers the spring of 1986 as he provided us all with perfect penmanship in L.A. class.
If he did complete this, the work would be nothing short of prodigious.
Stay safe, stay awesome, and stay tuned.
Moeschen! 