The formative years shape a person I guess, they shaped me. One year in particular was the foundation for my general world view. That was 8th grade.
A couple of things happened. First puberty. Fourteen seems a little late in retrospect, maybe that's why, also in retrospect, puberty hit me very hard.
A second thing happened, in that I got involved in a knock down, slobber-knocking fight with the rebo room teacher. We're talking trench warfare, here. I mean Verdun and the Somme all rolled into one. We clashed heads over my notebooks, over math, over the living history program in which I was not allowed to participate because of said clashes.
Every day in the rebo room it was a fight about something. Who could take it more, that was the question. I had lunch detention every day.I got in school suspension, I got out of school suspension. You see ISS was supposed to be really tough. Just like in The Breakfast Club you just sat there all day. Hah! They didn't count on this brain. I sat there for hours, the battle I imagined, the girls I fantasized about...It was easy.
But it was a war of attrition. My grades went from a solid B or B+ to a D, I kid you not. By the end of the year I couldn't have cared less about school. I did nothing in class. I didn't do any homework. I just sat there. Just look at the report card:
Good question.
That year sticks with me, 30 years later its still there. And it set the stage for a lackluster HS career.
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