An imagined “memoir” in progress, with fictional details that I believe are consistent with what really happened, during my junior high school years and my first year of high school, from ages 11 to 15, in the second half of the 1960s in the progressive college town of Ann Arbor Michigan in the U.S. Midwest.
Our now divorced mom, my brother and I returned from three long full developmental weeks of our vacation on Cape Cod in August, beginning to find some equilibrium as three still emerging human beings, without a male parent in the household, now in a mostly positive relationship with each other.
But stressful challenges were ahead for all of us. Our mom was still figuring out her persona now as a single adult woman, “divorcee”, and part of the progressive community that existed around the university. And me, matriculating into junior high. The start of school each fall had become the yearly low point for me, and now doubly so because of a big new school full of loads of kids that I would not know and may or may not be comfortable with.
Other than my parents’ divorce the prior year, I had survived my last couple years of elementary school without too much psychic damage, though I got through it by being more of a trained seal than a fully engaged person. My emerging approach to my academic school work was exemplified by my zeal for working my way through the color-coded SRA reading program, reading their generic, homogenized, level-rated prose pieces and taking the comprehension test after each, before moving on the next piece and eventually up to the next color level. What I was reading was not particularly interesting to me, the whole point was to try to “level up” relative to my classmates, which had some self-esteem boost for me.
I have no recollection now of the first time I set foot in the institutional halls of Tappan Junior high for my first day of homeroom and six different classes each day, probably one of the youngest kids there given I was a year ahead of myself in school, having skipped kindergarten many years back. The building was a big square block surrounded by parking lots on two sides, athletic fields on the third with no significant landscaping to make it look like anything but a venue for some sort of incarceration or some bureaucratic government work.
Each class seemed a claustrophobic and intimidating new venue for me packed with my “peers”, kids generally one year older than I, and at this preteen age, that one year was particularly significant developmentally. Intellectually I could hold my own with anyone there, and intended to demonstrate so academically. But physically and hormonally I was definitely on the young side, despite my previously expressed precocious sexuality which I had spent the last three years mostly repressing.
Tappan had about a thousand kids grades seven to nine, which means that there were over three hundred other seventh-graders where I had previously had maybe thirty peers at both of my elementary schools. I could do the math. With only maybe twenty kids from my sixth-grade class at Burns Park also starting at this big new school, here were nearly a thousand strangers that I would be intimidated by until I had the opportunity to develop a relationship with each. And of the three hundred plus seventh-graders, how many of them was I likely to share a class with? Maybe half? And the older kids, the eighth-graders and ninth-graders, what opportunity would I have to share a class with them? So I was doomed to spend the year walking the halls between classes with some eight hundred and fifty older strangers staring at me. Every day in class the weight of that intimidating anonymity bore down on me and took its toll.
My mom and dad, now divorced, had been pretty good example of an egalitarian approach to parenting during my elementary school years. I say egalitarian, because they treated me as a fellow human traveler like them, with my own mind, my own will, and my own responsibility for directing my life. They saw their role as facilitators, to the best of their ability and resources providing me with a stimulating environment to live in and the developmentally appropriate “tools”, like imagination toys and a bicycle. Beyond that they mostly did not involve themselves in my activities, other than observing from afar and only participating if I asked them too and they were available to do so. Occasionally they would suggest an activity that they wanted to do with me, like throw a ball together or accompany them on an errand, just to talk and enjoy my company or maybe discuss a particular matter with me. It was all more like how good friends engage with each other than the more conventional parenting practice of raising and training a semi-functional being who is “just a child”.
Outside of my wonderful mostly unstructured summers, I was continuing to be transformed by the many hours I was required to spend in my school classrooms, with its adult locus of control. I was ever compliant when in the presence of those adults, particularly those responsible for directing and passing judgement on my actions. My survival mechanism was to slowly learn to seek my self-esteem by being the most well-behaved and praiseworthy “trained seal” I could be. More and more drinking the kool aid of compliance with each successive year in this institution.
I would try my best to continue to put on an exemplary presentation of myself to my parents in their presence. That I was thoughtful, capable, could fend for myself and would always come home when the street lights came on. These were in fact all true, but any negative feelings I had from time to time I was more comfortable sharing with my peers than my parents or other custodial adults.
In response my mom and dad continued to parent without any resort to the conventional behavior modification techniques of rewards or punishments. My mom would always provocatively announce to her peers that she didn’t believe in spanking, because it was essentially “hitting children”. But what she did not announce was that she and my dad did not employ any of the non-physical alternatives to corporal punishment. I wonder if they would have been able to maintain those rules of engagement if I had been one to push more boundaries (that they were aware of) or act out more in their presence. What my mom in particular did do, was to call out my bad behavior on the few occasions she would witness it, indicating, sometimes with an angry tone, that it was inappropriate and even that she was disappointed to see it. Given my continuing discomfort around adults plus my sense of pride in my good and capable kid persona, I was always quick to correct any misbehavior once brought to my attention, though the wound to my pride would often remain.
As my parents, not divorced, became more integrated into the predominantly white adult university community that lived in the neighborhood, I was meeting their kids at school and in the park, the latter always an informal gathering place for the neighborhood youth without their parents or other adults present. These were families with a sense of intellectual privilege, seeing themselves as members, even key players, in the progressive academic elite at this major public university, and therefore the intelligentsia of the country. Their sons and daughters were growing up in an enriched environment of progressive humanist ideas with most of my young peers also being given a lot of latitude to develop their unique talents and personas, and not being required to conform to traditional religious or other conventional strictures.
I finished elementary school in June of 1966, and in the fall of that year started seventh grade at a very different sort of school that was way more, in all the difficult ways, than I had bargained for.
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PART 1: T-DAY (SEPTEMBER1966) – Two weeks into my attendance at Tappan Junior High I’m still trying to get my bearings packed into this big school with a thousand other kids, the overwhelming majority of them I don’t know, all older than me, and my few existing friends from elementary school mostly scattered in other classes in other periods. A particular incident in my Homeroom class typifies the strange new world I now inhabit at school.
