I think most of us grow up in a relatively small circle of acquaintances. In my elementary school, there were two or three classes of 30 kids each in my grade. I might've known some kids from the grade above me, and maybe the kids in my sister's year, but mostly we just hung out with the kids in our own class. I think this is normal for most people.
We didn't go from grade to grade with the exact same class, so I probably shared at least one year with every person in my grade, but I wouldn't say I knew them all well. If I try to list one person from each year off the top of my head, I get:
K- Sarah Chamberlain
1- Bobby Malone
2- Diana Lee
3- Regina Nieu
4- Akemi Okamura
5- Derek Koning
6- Bowen Li
As an aside, in that list of people, I'm still friends with 3. I was only friends for a few years with 2. And I barely knew 2.
Anyway, that was life for 7 years.
In middle school, there were several feeder elementaries, and I met a few new people, but most of us stuck with our old friends. And in high school that was even more true since there were less feeder middle schools that went to our high school.
Although, surprisingly, I think in high school I knew more of the people in the other grades. Then again, maybe that shouldn't be as surprising since we're older and some classes (electives) mix grades (ie. art, choir, intro. to business, etc.). Or maybe it should be, since it's more cliquey. Or maybe it shouldn't be since cliques are usually formed around things other than class years (ie. cheerleaders, band dorks, LSD, etc.).
I've lost my train of thought.
Oh right.
In such a small community, you start thinking (and rightly so), that everyone grows up with the same basic experiences as you. Especially in the suburbs, there really isn't that much different between different families. Maybe someone's Chinese and someone else is Jewish. Maybe someone has divorced parents, or one parent has died. But pretty much we're all neighbors, and the neighborhood I grew up in was pretty bland. Not that it's a bad thing. Necessarily.
I remember freshman year I was in Spanish 2 in la Srta. Templer's class. She had this system where she paired up the kids with the best grades and the kids with the worst grades. I met these two people, Wilson and Joey. (Later I found out Joey was Katrina-ayi's son.) They were friends and seniors, I think. Anyway, afterward Joey joined the army or something, and served in Iraq. And I remember thinking how strange it was that I would know someone who joined the army. In my life, that only happened on TV. Everyone I knew went on to be EECS geeks at Berkeley or some such.
I remember my senior year I found out some Korean boys would hang out behind the school smoking cigarettes. And I thought, how stupid, who would willingly choose to smoke cigarettes given the DARE unit we had every year since we were able to sit still long enough for the teachers to give us a presentation about how bad smoking was for your health? But I didn't know those Korean boys, so I shrugged it off.
What really shocked me was when I found out Jims had been smoking. I still can't wrap my head around that, but whatever.
I've always had an irrational belief that everyone else is like me, thinks like me, had the same learning experiences as me, knows what I know. And I know that it can't possibly be true, but it actually worked out surprisingly well when I was a kid. All my friends were like me in the Most Important Ways. Maybe I was not as talented in some ways, and more talented in others. But I think we had the same core values. We listened to our parents, we didn't torment our siblings too much, we didn't smoke or drink, we didn't have sex. We did our homework, we tried our best in our classes, we were honest and respectful most of the time. We tried to support each other, we discouraged each other from doing stupid things, we talked things out, we gave and sought advice. I don't know. We had boring lives. Safe lives.
When I was at Michigan, explaining for the fifth time how to solve 5x=3x+2 to college sophomores, it really made me feel...confused. I've been around people who didn't do as well in math as I did. But I always believed it was because they didn't care, or didn't bother to do their homework. (And in high school that was probably mostly true.) In college, I was the one who struggled, but I slogged through it and I came out of it okay, if not at the top (or anywhere near, lol) of my class. But that was (and I'm not trying to brag) higher math.
When someone tells me that the first step to solve 5x=3x+2 is to subtract 5, and by doing that you get x=3x-3, I really have no idea where to start. Didn't everyone get the same math background that I did? Did they learn addition and subtraction in first grade? Did they learn multiplication in second grade? Did they learn how to do long division? Did they take algebra in middle school? In high school? At all??
I was reading a book by Obama recently, The Audacity of Hope. He says a lot of things that have been said before, and one of those things was that no matter how much the government stepped in to try to improve education in America, a lot still depended on the parents. You have to try to instill in your children the importance of education, if not a love for learning itself.
When I look back at my childhood, I can't remember a time when I didn't think it was important to try hard in school. I also can't remember a time when my parents told me, "You need to try hard in school because education is important." I'm sure they did, but I don't remember them having to explicitly say it because I think I always knew it.
Now how did that happen?
I was thinking, community probably has a huge effect as well. I can't think of anyone who failed any year in my elementary school. Even Stanley Ames was promoted every year (until both he and his brother, Michael, disappeared one year... moved away, I think). And I can't think of anyone who should have failed any year.
Mr. Haas told me that he used to teach at another high school where students would come into high school and take algebra as a freshman, fail it, and retake it again sophomore and junior years, failing it each time. Then senior year, they'd be in the class for the fourth year, and still be struggling.
In our school district, a huge chunk of kids took algebra in middle school. By the time they were seniors they were either in calculus, or they had already finished calculus and were taking AP Stats. Even the kids who struggled with math were able to get through algebra 2, geometry, and trigonometry before they graduated.
And I know that my school district is a bit out of the ordinary. Or even more than a bit.
But I think my point is that my parents always cared how I was doing. And that's true for all of the kids I was friends with, and most of the kids I knew.
I remember in elementary school, as early as third grade and possibly earlier, we used to have "Wednesday Envelopes." Every week, all of our graded work from the previous week was put into these manila envelopes, along with school and class announcements, permission slips, PTA newsletters, whatever. On the front of the envelope was pasted a sheet with your name and a lot of lines with the date of each Wednesday. Every Wednesday you had to take this envelope home and give it to your parents, and your parents had to sign it so that you could return the envelope on Thursday. And you got points for doing this.
I never thought about this before, because we did it every Wednesday for as long as I can remember all the way through 6th grade. In fifth and sixth grade we even got extra points or something for helping the teacher to file papers into the correct envelopes. There was a classroom job for filing and one for stuffing envelopes. (I loved those. ^^; Way better than cleaning the whiteboards or taking out the trash anyway.)
Tangent: You know, I'm really starting to see a pattern in the jobs I enjoy. Rote, mindless tasks with definite short-term goals. And organizational or streamlining tasks.
Pretty much everyone in my class brought back their signed envelopes on Thursday. Every Thursday. Every year. Maybe once or twice someone forgot. But then they probably forgot the entire envelope and brought it back signed on Friday. And I've never heard of anyone forging their parent's signature on their Wednesday Envelope. (Who would? We were elementary school kids, for crying out loud. Then again, I wouldn't put it past the kids these days either. =X)
I think, I always assumed that everyone in every school did this. It was such a normal thing that we did, that nobody thought twice about. It just was. And it, in a way, forced parents to care. If they didn't go through their kids' work, at least they had to do something every week that was related to their kid's school. And maybe at least once a year they would have time, or be so bored as to go through one of the envelopes and see what their kid was up to.
But now that I think about it. It's entirely possible that John Muir was the only school to have Wednesday Envelopes.
I wonder...
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