For three years, me and my classmates were beta testers for the brand new and modern ideas of a bunch of academics fresh out of school themselves. They were excited young adults with stable educational experiences behind them and exciting new careers ahead. We were scared and confused teenagers with whatever our childhood was behind us and no idea if there was any future ahead at all.

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I’m sure nearly everyone was confused. For a teenager at the brand new and modern rebel factory that was John Adams Jr. High School of Rochester, Minnesota… confused may very well have been the default setting. But not everyone was scared.

I certainly was though, scared and confused… I think. When I could actually think.

It’s a bit hard to think in the midst of all that chaos. What I remember most was simply one reaction after another. Every day I’d go through that door and be hit with the sounds… the vibrations of chaos. Even when it was quiet, the building seemed to radiate a perpetual instability. Sure there were lots of kids at JA that did very well. But most of the time, what it was that they did well, only added to the chaos. It was the chaos that scared me. The confusion everyone felt, was over the schedule.

Everyone I knew was constantly obsessed with the schedule. Trying to figure out where they were supposed to be, or wanted to be, or processing the changes that were constantly being made as to how things were to be done and what was going to be expected of them. I’d navigate my way to morning homeroom… if there wasn’t an assembly first. Quite often (especially during the first few months of that first year) there were regular assemblies of the entire student body in the auditorium before homeroom. Usually to announce and explain another change regarding our schedules.

The schedules. The damned schedules! Even the really smart kids who understood it easily, were obsessed. Only they obsessed on how they could manipulate it to their benefit. I knew kids who, because of how the computer placed their required classes on certain days, could slip out of the building after homeroom and be gone all day. As long as they returned in time for afternoon homeroom, no one would be the wiser.

Homeroom was a mess. Everyday there was some drama to distract us from the essential task of our individual schedules. I’d often barely get enough of mine done and checked, to be able to accurately show where I was going to be up until lunch, before it was time for the first “mod” and we all had to rush off. “Mods” was the term for the individual time periods of our brand new and modern system of modular scheduling. There were sixteen, twenty-six minute mods in a day, and a six day week. A through F day. We were supposed to complete our entire schedule for the week on A day so the time during homeroom on all the other days, could be spent talking about which resource centers and other non-core class activities available, would be the best ways to spend those “free mods”.

Yea right.

I don’t remember a single week… EVER! when everyone in our homeroom had their schedules done the way we were supposed to at all, never mind by the end of morning homeroom on A day. Every day of the entire week, there was at least one student who need major help from our homeroom teacher. Usually more than one. And while he was helping them, the rest of us would of course do… what teenagers do when bored and unsupervised.

That did not confuse me. It did however, often leave me feel something that was a bit more nuanced than simply scared. But again this will have to be…

To be continued…