It was a really fun place to be so everyone… EVERYONE! wanted to be there ALL THE TIME.

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Everyone also wanted to eat lunch with all of their friends everyday. Why wouldn’t we? We were Teenagers. We wanted to socialize with our friends as much as possible. The school was letting us do this quite a lot anyway but if we could find ways to socialize with our friends more, we were going to do just that.

Students at the brand new and modern John Adams Jr. High School were not only free to schedule themselves to be in the commons as much as we wanted, we could also schedule ourselves to eat lunch during any open MODs that the cafeteria was serving food. So we did. This lead to a rebellion that I imagine the brand new and modern teachers and administrators had not planned on at all.

It was a rebellion of the cafeteria staff.

Before I publish this memoir in book form, I’m now thinking I’m going to have to interview any of my old teachers from JA I can find when I visit home next summer. When I do, I’ll be sure and ask them about how it went down when the cafeteria staff demanded that students not be allowed to choose which MOD we ate lunch. To simply have the computer program add that to the schedule we would get every week along with our “required courses”.

This was the real start of the clampdown. I can’t remember if we were told during an assembly, by announcement over the school PA or if we simply got our schedules one day and found a lunch MOD printed there. I also don’t remember if there was really much said about it at all by any of us students.

At that point, well still had so much freedom I imagine it hardly mattered to most of us. Again I don’t remember how it went down, but sometime after that, when we were told of much bigger and far-reaching schedule changes, I’m sure the lunch thing was hardly remembered by anyone.

Those big changes were noticed and remembered by everyone. And how could they not be. And by the end of this stage of the clampdown, our fun factory was pretty much taken away. Still… we were now fully engaged rebels and we would do what rebels do.

Rebel.

To be continued…