I always listened to my Mother
I was afraid of my Dad
I respected all my teachers
I sat in front of the class
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No… my parents were far from perfect, and despite my “above average intelligence” I was far from a top student. But I have no doubt, the reasons I did reasonably well in the chaos that was John Adams Jr. High School in my home town of Rochester, Minnesota back in 1971… were the same as why the fake war and real violence of our little cul-de-sac world did not have the affect on me, it might otherwise have had.
Thinking back on that time (before and during my first year at JA) my adult self can’t help but give my parents major kudos for their approach to parenting with the intention of doing better than what their parents had done. They were busy, but Dad was quite involved in my every day life. Beside boy scouts, sports and music and other community activities, our family regularly went camping. We eventually even had a little lake front property were we camped every summer for several years. We also drove down to Iowa for regular gatherings of my Dad’s huge family and spent three whole summers in Greeley, Colorado where (along with the families of three of his colleagues) Dad went back to school and got his Masters Degree in Education.
In 1972 we moved to a place in the countryside about fifteen miles north of Rochester, but before that happened, I have very fond memories of all these things mentioned above. Many of them (along with many others) of course continued after the move. I walked to school every day after breakfast and home again after school, or after whatever of the many school activities of which I was a part. John Adams was just across the field at the end of our cul-de-sac where (apart from the war and “our” fort) I remember countless hours with my friends, running through the field of tall alfalfa, trampling the plants to make paths and little pockets where we could sit and talk privately and simply be children.
What a lucky boy I was.
So when the constant chaos that was the status quo at JA got to me, I had plenty of support. I also had plenty of checks keeping me from using my intelligence to work the system and completely goof off. After all, my Dad had lunch with every one of my teachers every day. If I did anything really bad, I’d catch hell at dinner that evening.
What a lucky boy I was.
Very lucky actually. Because being a teacher’s kid in that brand new and modern rebel experiment in education that was JA, gave me a front row seat to a new kind of violence. New to me anyway. The every day chaos that was my homeroom was just the tip of the iceberg. What started there continued all day, the story of which is of course…
To be continued…
