And the Rest

At this point I've talked about most of my classes at John Tyler High in the spring of 1970. The only two that remain are Debate and Sociology and I'll get to them shortly...

During my last 2 years of high school hardly a day went by that I didn't wake up and think "I should drop out of school today". That changed at the beginning of April my senior year when it dawned on me that I might actually graduate. After all those years (and 11 different schools) the journey might actually end without me throwing in the towel first :-)
Then I would be free to become one of the "workers of the world". Get a blue collar job, collect a paycheck and play my guitar... There was no way I was going to become a cog in the corporate wheel (like my dad) and spend the rest of my life busting my hump just to enrich some fat cats... Of course - I had to figure out how to keep my butt out of Vietnam first - after all, I was no "Fortunate Son"... Yeah - Canada was always on my mind... But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Back to the regularly scheduled subject matter:

There's not much to say about Debate class... I was still very good at public speaking because I knew I was good at it. Speech is one of those things where self-doubt becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy...
I have to admit that I was never all that good at thinking on my feet though - I'm more of a deep thought kind of guy. But I was lucky to get paired with the sharpest guy in the class. He was the son of a lawyer and nowadays is a judge and member of the Texas Judicial Council. During debates he was always jotting down little notes for me... Sometimes I had no clue what they meant but I'd argue the point anyway :-) I think I got a "B" in the class...

Next topic:

The sociology teacher was a very nice, very old lady. I seem to recall that she was supposed to have already retired but wanted to keep teaching so they let her stay on...
I don't remember much from the class other than she graded really easy...
Oh - and this one time were talking about drugs and one of the students admitted to being a Coke (tm) addict... Yes - he was referring to the soft drink. Everyone laughed, but he had a 30 can per day habit - not only is that expensive but that's a serious buttload of caffeine... No wonder he rode bulls for fun :-)

OK - and there was this one story the teacher told us... I've repeated it to a lot of people but nobody has ever thought it was funny so I'll tell it anyway:
Back in the late 60's a lot of people were sniffing model airplane glue to get high (and brain-damaged) so Texas outlawed selling model glue unless you bought a model at the same time.
As fate would have it one day the Sociology teacher accidentally broke one of her knicknacks and decided she might be able to fix it with model glue so she headed off to the store to buy some. Of course, she had no idea about the whole "huffing" thing so when she got up to the checkout this transpired:
Clerk: I see that you're buying some model glue but not a model...
Teacher: That's right...
Clerk: Well... Would you like to buy a model?
Teacher: No thank you... I think I'm a bit old for that...
Clerk: But then - what are you going to do with the glue???
At this point the teacher is getting irritated because she has no idea what the clerk is trying to get at and says:
Well, I'm certainly not going to use it to build a model!!!

Yeah - I thought it was funny...

I think I'm going to try and close out the high school stuff before moving on to other Tylerific topics. It should only take a couple of more posts to get around to why I didn't go to my graduation ceremony :-)