… what teenagers do when bored and unsupervised.
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My adult mind just can’t help itself. I can’t help but think about how logical it all seems now. That the chaos, the perpetual instability of our brand new and modern John Adams Jr. High School. It was inevitable. It makes perfect sense.
It even makes sense to me how the brand new and modern teachers and administrators were so completely in love with their revolutionary ideas to give us all that freedom. They were so taken with their own ideas, that they truly believed we would appreciate them as liberators, from tyranny in the guise of education. The tyranny that they had had to endure in school. That they had rebelled against. They thought we would so appreciated them, that we would just go along with it all. That we would help them make the experiment successful. It makes perfect sense.
My adult self agrees. That’s what should have happened. But it didn’t. It was a good idea and we should have helped… but we didn’t. We rebelled. We rebelled just as they had rebelled. Only now, they were the ones being rebelled against. It makes perfect sense.
So the smart kids got away with murder, the dumb ones floundered and ate up all the teacher’s and administrators’s time, and the rest of us… ? Well we did what teenagers do, when bored and unsupervised. We explored our options. We looked for, tested and pushed our boundaries. There were very few boundaries at first. We pushed them anyway.
Then came the clampdown.
It started slowly. Our freedom to do basically whatever we wanted, was gradually taken from us. I didn’t see it go completely. By the time our brand new and modern Jr. High School was back to the kind of system that was being used by all the other Jr. High Schools at the time, I was nearly a senior at Rochester’s, John Marshal High School. But before I’d left the ninth grade at John Adams, we all knew that the brand new and modern experiment was over. The rebels had lost. They had become their own enemy.
But for that brief time I was there. In the midst of all that chaos and confusion, a lot happened that I will have to share. But again that will have to be…
To be continued…
