2020.12.30
I couldn't think of anything as great for this milestone, so I decided to finally get to a different look back - a few months ago I assembled a list of high points and lowpoints of all my school years. I was surprised at how easy it was to assemble, though I guess it makes sense that these things really stick out in my memory landscape, and all I had to do was think chronologically to survey them all.
Elementary School
- My dad thought I had stolen a dollar from the local Thrift Store, loosely affiliated with the church, after I had been playing with the register and later it came up short. My emotional memory was that I was innocent - I just liked the crash bang of the old fashion register - and I was grudgingly believed but as we walked away my dad said "the finger of suspicion is pointing at you" and I admit, it seems really sketchy! So I'm not 100% certain.
- First grade I had a teacher who was a nun of the "everyone goes at their own pace" variety, but my second grade nun was having none of that. After some physical contention the dicocese ran me through some tests and had me skip second (my parents declined a scholarship for me at like a specialty boarding school, that's always a minor what-if for me but I'm pretty sure I had a better life!)
- The grade skipping was undone a few years later when I switched to a public school district
- "Student of the Week" w my first week at the new school
- Got yelled at my teacher after getting "Student of the Week" and doing a celebratory slide on the ground, being told "we don't do that here"...
- At one point for a Sunday School skit/presentation, I was set up as "Mr. Good Jr. Sunior", the exemplar of good behavior and good dress (albeit supplementing the usual uniform with a light blue sweater vest) and toting a bible. I was proud enough at the time, but it was absolute cringe in retrospect.
- "Project Kindle" - a "gifted and talented" program at my school. In 4th or 5th grade I did a course of study on "robots" (wrote that book) with a lot of 1:1 mentoring. In 6th grade I did an "underwater base" in Lego, but I started getting into avoidance strategies because I knew I was so half-assing it.
- Bad 4th Grade relationship with Miss Norton (as my dad called her, "Snortin' Norton") and another teacher who did math, Mr. Harrigan I think was the name
- Because of the previous grade skipping, I got put in the lowest 5th grade reading instead of highest 4th grade reading class. (I remember the teacher having to say "commercials" because the students were unfamiliar with "advertisements")
- going through great lengths to avoid doing math homework, probably greater than just doing it (calc cheating?)
- A great 5th grade relationship with a teacher Mrs Dorvee
- I was consistently in the "D+F club" in sixth grade - halfway through the semester I would be having terrible grades, though I'd usually pull them up by the end. Later I remember my mom trying to get me to commit to certain grades, and I HATED that... I would only say "let me promise to put in a good effort and see what happens" because the idea of making a goal and missing it seemed horrible to me.
- terrible, terrible in the shop classes, both wood and metal. In metal shop, making a bent metal dust pan, asking the teacher what I should use to stir the pain, he sarcastically said "your hand" and I believed him, and had fun with a black paint stained hand, threatening to touch people etc w/ it. The next day the guidance counselor asked me to look at some hella suspicious black fingerprints above a doorframe. I denied it was me - to this day I don't think it was! Like I was tearfully pleading my innocence, and I think it was sincere... but even I wonder about the coincidence (I thought I was being framed, to be honest)
- getting goaded into a fight with a kid (trying to establish I wasn't the bottom of the social order, I guess?) when he didn't show up we other kids had the idea of going to his house, and we did so, even entering it. This is one of the biggest shames I carry - a situation that was a hairs breadth from police involvement, and so I have some empathy for "good kids" who end up doing something really, really stupid.
- I swapped best friends, Dylan for Todd. I am glad to have been close to Dylan for these decades but am unclear why I felt there had to be a swap
- carrying a brief case instead of a backpack in 6th grade (one teacher called me "The IBM Dough Boy")
- possibly after friend of the family taking us to "Troy Music Hall" determined to be someone who liked jazz and classical, because that was what smart people liked - this stunted my musical appreciation for years and years.
- really resented having to move, yet again, to Cleveland. Because I associated Ohio with my dad's rural family, I thought I was going to the back woods (when really going from upstate NY to the near suburbs of Cleveland is rather the opposite)
- The year of that move, as a form of protest I was determined to detest sumercamp. To show my disdain I would walking around pretending to watch an imaginary portable TV... "I hate everything about this place" became a mantra... so much so that I startled myself when a thought starting "I hate..." got autocompleted with "everything about this place" by an autonomous part of my brain (to be fair the showers and lack of privacy were kind of awful, but if I had tried I could have had a great time, as I did later seasons at band camps.)
- bombing math tests in 7th and 8th grade, to the point of tears
- writing computer trivia program in BASIC on history instead of a research paper for a History Fair, the judges hated it... really feeling the frustration/disappointment from my dad as we went for consoling brownies after.
- mom doing most of the work 8th grade science fair project on climate change / plant growth
- winner in 8th and 9th grade of "Dobama Theater Kids Playwriting Festival"
- taking SAT early, like in middle school, and winning some recognition
- winner National Council of Teachers of English (strawberries) and had a special relationship with my English teacher Judith McLaughlin - one of the few teachers I'd end up going to visit years after graduation.
- rewriting this short story "Strawberries and the Paths Taken" and McLaughlin telling me I sorta destroyed what was good about it
- My dad getting a debilitating attack of spinal meningitis eventually leading to his death
- I made a morning tradition of making my dad fried bologna sandwiches, and then I just stopped. I think just pulling back from the frailty and helplessness of his debilitating illness
- struggling in several math classes, especially Calculus - basically once math shifted from "think quickly" to "remember a lot of things" remember faking sick one day to avoid a test. Geometry went great tho.
- My geometry class had a kite building activity, and we were allowed to use store-bought frames as long as we made the material? and I had my Grandma sew that for me. But the resulting kite ("Simba") did look pretty awesome - I painted "Flying Tigers" like shark mouth on it.
- Biology went well despite the memorization involved... Chemistry went badly as expected, and Physics went REALLY well, also as expected. Languages went terribly and I switched from French in middle school and one year in high school to Spanish (I think I had picked French because it seemed more intellectual) I also did weirdly well in History, given that it would seem to be a lot of memorization
- Wooing Veronika, the exchange student from Germany... the relationship had many awesome + authentic qualities but also this weird thing where I know it was the ego boost of being selected by someone so exotic.
- I went to Senior Winterfest with Nicole, a Black bandmate and bus-stop buddy. But I pursued Marnie for prom; not sure if it was a lack of spark with Nicole or more loaded reasons, and I feel bad about that, but stuff with Marnie blossomed into a great high school/early college romance and I don't regret pursuing her.
- Cribbed from a set of "dueling essays" in the Atlantic Magazine about the authorship of Shakespeare (i.e. the one magazine was my only real reference in what was supposed to be a research paper) and made a "Senior Essay" in the form of a dialog/play, a single essay that got me an A+ in both English and History class. But a bit of a negative in being a big dodge.
- getting 1490 on SAT
- Did OK on some AP tests, mixed in other tests (AP and others). Challenged my notion that I was just a genius/test genius (now that I think about it, my advantages are being fast, and maybe having taken the SAT before!)
- summers I worked for the Cleveland Catholic Dioceses' "Camp Happiness" - geared at special needs population. The kids were generally so full of love that it softened the edges of their plight. There are two scenes from that and my van monitor/cellphone keeper time there that I won't get into here, because of camper privacy
- At some point in high school I sort of "dumped" my best frind Mike Witczak, betrayal as a weird bow to social hierarchy, but later we were reconciled best friends again.
- didn't get a NASA highschool internship
- Applied to Harvard (I think my SAT score triggered their auto-recruitment) but didn't get it.
- Got a high school recognition from the phi beta kappa society
- Spanish class in college was just terrible
- I had an on again mostly off again romance that recurred throughout the 4 years of school and cast a shadow over the other romances I had.
- I took the intro to computer science class because it meant I didn't have to repeat my nemesis Calculus. I got an A, but barely. Later a TA encouraged me to take the "weedout" class, where the As started coming rather easily (thanks to the brilliant style of Professor Couch, who had a deliberate strategy of collaborating w/ the early self-starters on the 3 or 4 difficult projects, then propagating the techniques to the rest of the class, thus goading the self-starters into pushing harder and getting better results than the coattail riders). So that became the other part of my double major along with English (and I dropped the Child Studies track I dabbled with thinking I might want to be an English teacher)
- took a lot of African American literature in college, the only overlap of "foreign culture" and my English major (After a Latina Authors class I found out I couldn't get English major credit for stuff I read in translation) It was generally great stuff but the choice was more pragmatic than enlightened.
- I was so fortunate with college money.. between the deaths of my dad and my grandfather Papa Sam there was some money for school (my mom also went for her Masters) and between that and scholarship cash I ended up with very little debt, and I think my mom wiped that out at the end.
- The deal with money was that I'd get room and board paid for but any spending money I had to earn, so freshman year I worked the mailroom for my dorm, and then I moved to being a "UC" at the computer lab
- I had some kind of ambition in the computer lab, and ended up getting the role of student manager, mostly by interview well for it and sounding like I wanted it
- but, when it came time to do the hard work - namely redoing the printer networking in the lab - I foisted it off on my 2nd in command Todd
- pleading for A- rather than B+ - but at the beginning of the semester... those were the two grades I almost always got in classes for my English major and the math said that was going to be the difference between magna cum laude and summa. I didn't plead for grades much, and it was at the begining of the semester, still, kind of shameless... but it worked!
- getting a proper Phi Beta Kappa key, along with the summa cum laude
- avoided writing any undergraduate thesis papers.... maybe as a double English and Computer Science major I fell through the cracks
- I had a great summer job programming for the "Curricular Software Studio", an interesting project (started in part by Daniel Dennett) where professors with grant money could get software projects made... though some of the results of having an endless series of inexperienced undergrads work on your program were about what you would expect.
- coming out of college, I did a lot of interviews, and got 8 out of 9 places I applied for
How on earth does the word "plus" only have one s.