Homeroom - part 1

English was my first class of the morning at John Tyler High in the spring of 1970. It was also my "homeroom" - although I was never quite sure what that meant :-)

I spent most of my formative years attending private schools, so when I was thrust into the public school system in southern California in 1968 it seemed like a big "step down" academically... But by comparison John Tyler High was like falling off a cliff...
I guess that kind of makes sense: Tyler was a very conservative, fundamentalist town and the north side was decidedly blue collar... Still - when I first heard my fellow students complaining about how hard the classes were I thought they were kidding. It turns out they weren't... My next impression was that they were freaking idiots - but I don't really think that's true either... I think the schools just did a stellar job of reflecting the community's "values" - which apparently didn't include critical thinking :-)

So when the English teacher wrote "revue" on the board instead of "review", or "heros" instead of "heroes" nobody else seemed to notice and I didn't speak up... I just enjoyed being secretly amused...

Aside: Those last 2 years of high school were a very puzzling time... I'd always believed I was pretty smart, but if that were true why couldn't I function? Everywhere I looked I saw nothing but boundless ambiguity. I couldn't figure out how to get a grip on anything... Yet all my classmates moved effortlessly through the day - always knowing what was going on and what needed to be done... How was it that they could figure out what I couldn't??? It began to seem that everyone else was a lot smarter than I in the ways that really mattered (like doing well in school - or tying shoelaces)...
So by the second semester of my senior year the thought of going to college seemed downright laughable... But that was OK because I didn't want to become part of the corporate "greed machine" anyway... Yes - I was going to become one of the "workers of the world" - that is if I could ever figure out how to do anything useful. :-)
I aspired to just making it through each day without anything particularly unpleasant happening :-) But I digress... Back to homeroom:

Marsha Chaney sat to my left. She was unfailingly nice - genuinely so. (I can usually tell the difference between "fake" and "real" nice...) Here's her yearbook pic:

And behind Marsha was a cheerleader named Pam Stanley. A lot of guys considered her to be the prettiest girl in school but I didn't really see it. You be the judge:

I unintentionally embarrassed Pam one day:
The teacher had given us a quiz and rather than grading the papers herself she had us swap with another student and grade each other's... Pam ended up with mine and after the teacher went over the answers she told us to pass the papers to the front of the room. For some reason Pam tried to hand mine back me and I said "Aren't you supposed to pass it forward?" and she said "I just wanted you to see what grade you got". If I'd had a lick of sense at all I would have smiled and thanked her - but instead I said "I know what grade I got" (Duh - I aced it...) Yeah - I guess I've always had a knack for (unintentionally) making people feel stupid... Just ask anyone who knows me :-)

OK - I've already devoted far too much time to this post... There's more to tell but I'll just label this "part 1" (there - I did it), publish it and continue the story another day :-)