{"id":4325,"date":"2013-09-08T14:22:09","date_gmt":"2013-09-08T21:22:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/?p=4325"},"modified":"2013-09-15T12:54:06","modified_gmt":"2013-09-15T19:54:06","slug":"coop-goes-to-high-school-part-1-good-riddance-to-junior-high","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/2013\/09\/08\/coop-goes-to-high-school-part-1-good-riddance-to-junior-high\/","title":{"rendered":"Coop Goes to High School Part 1 – Good Riddance to Junior High"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"A<\/a>
A junior high yearbook picture<\/figcaption><\/figure>In the summer of 1969, at age 14, it was a still recovering soul that did his best to psych up for yet another year of going to school after barely surviving the last three very difficult years at Tappan Junior High. Zager and Evans\u2019 dystopian classic \u201cIn the Year 2525\u201d, about a doomed world, was the big summer hit on CKLW AM radio. \u00a0Perhaps more hopeful were all the songs on the radio from the provocative rock musical Hair<\/a> about hippies and human liberation, as expressed by the reality and underlying metaphor of \u201cletting your hair down\u201d.<\/p>\n

Oh say can you see
\nMy eyes if you can
\nThen my hair’s too short<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The iconic Woodstock music festival, which I knew nothing about at the time, was happening in upstate New York that August, the climactic event in what some would later call the \u201csummer of love\u201d. \u00a0But the musical Hair at least made me familiar with that counterculture that was emerging with its \u201cflower children\u201d driven by a mantra of \u201cpeace, love, joy\u201d facilitated by \u201csex, drugs and rock-n-roll\u201d which allowed you to \u201ctune in, turn on and drop out\u201d.<\/p>\n

I was secretly a wannabe hippie\/revolutionary myself, inspired mostly at this point in my life by the compelling popular culture of the time. \u00a0Listening to the transcending the ghetto songs of Motown<\/a> artists like The Supremes<\/a>, Stevie Wonder<\/a>, Marvin Gaye<\/a>, Smokey Robinson<\/a> and many others. \u00a0Or the activist counterculture fervor of many of the white folk-rock artists of the late 1960s including The Beatles<\/a>, Simon & Garfunkel<\/a>, Stephen Stills<\/a>, and Bob Dylan<\/a>. Reading comic books about super-powered anti-heros fighting for the soul of society like Batman<\/a>, The Flash<\/a>, Spiderman<\/a>, and Dr. Strange<\/a>. \u00a0Reading sci-fi classics like Jules Verne\u2019s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea<\/a> and Isaac Asimov\u2019s Foundation<\/a> series each about a different sort of passionate, transformational, outside-the-box, bigger than life character, from the nihilistic anti-war submariner Captain Nemo<\/a> to the visionary psycho-historian Hari Seldon<\/a>.<\/p>\n

You would never know it to encounter me – a shy kid with short hair and conventional clothing – but I harbored a megalomaniacal streak and delusions of grandeur, fantasizing that I would somehow someday help lead the revolution that would transform society. At this point that was all mostly repressed and I didn\u2019t even dare \u201clet my freak flag fly\u201d, speak a contrary word to anyone, let my hair grow or wear flared pants (now coming into popular fashion), let alone the iconic bell-bottomed hippie gear.<\/p>\n

From this wannabe so much more than a meaningless kid orientation, junior high had taken its toll. \u00a0I had entered the institution three years earlier thinking myself somehow special – smart, an advanced student, shy but capable, and a leader able to navigate the social milieu of my classmates and other peers. \u00a0But for me at least it had not been so much about exploring your potential as just somehow surviving going through puberty jammed in with so many other kids that same awkward age. \u00a0A child of divorce lacking self-esteem, each day felt like an unrelenting pressure cooker of comparing myself (mostly unfavorably) to my peers and not having a thick enough skin to suffer their own negative feelings projected on me. \u00a0Witnessing the teasing and bullying daily around me, I developed a great fear of being singled out in any way and thus subject to teasing and ridicule, so I had learned to play it safe by being as unremarkable and average as possible.<\/p>\n

The extreme stress of trying to implement this strategy day after day had led me to both a weakened immune system leading to regular illnesses, plus the willingness to feign additional illnesses when I simply did not want to face school on a given day (sometimes extending to a week or more). \u00a0Add to this an injury I sustained in May of 1968 getting my ankle chewed up by the flywheel of a \u201cminibike\u201d (a tiny motorcycle popular at the time that one of my neighborhood friends had) that left me in a cast and crutches for the last six weeks of school. \u00a0It was a perfect excuse to stay home for that entire period. \u00a0All told I probably stayed home a full quarter of the days I should have been in Junior High.<\/p>\n

Though we seldom talked about my school avoidance as such, my mom seemed to implicitly accept or at least not challenge my coping strategy, given that one of her parenting mantras had always been that \u201cbright kids will tell you what they need\u201d. \u00a0But also at the time she was going thru a very stressful period of her own, having divorced four years earlier and continuing to go thru an extended depression, while as a now single parent trying to maintain a household and raise two boys, myself and my three-year-younger brother Peter, himself wrestling with obesity since his early childhood.<\/p>\n

But earlier in this current year, my mom had finally tried to at least confront the problem, arranging a meeting of her and I with my school counselor to negotiate my return to school after several weeks missed due to illnesses, real and concocted. \u00a0I recall in the meeting being uncomfortable sharing how I felt with either my mom or the school counselor, seeing them both as iconic authority figures whose thoughts on the matter were way more significant than my own. \u00a0The end result of course was I did go back and finished my time in junior high with okay grades, mostly \u201cB\u201ds. \u00a0When I finally finished school in June, like every year when the last bell of the last day of class came, I felt a great sense of relief and profound liberation, more so this time round because I knew I would not be going back.<\/p>\n

That past spring I had also been exposed to the world of politics, when my mom, who had previously taken on the role of precinct chair for the local Democratic Party, played a part in the successful mayoral campaign of our neighbor, Robert Harris<\/a>, elected in April of 1969. \u00a0I remember my mom hosting cocktail parties to raise money and garner support for Harris from her large circle of friends in the community. \u00a0She also recruited me to do canvassing calls to people in our precinct to identify voters likely to vote Democrat so she could make sure to get them to the polls on election day. \u00a0And on that day, had sent me out on my bicycle with a list of people whose doors I needed to knock on and remind to vote. \u00a0It was perhaps the first opportunity I had had in my life to make at least a small contribution to something in the \u201creal\u201d adult world, something I noted and salted away for later.<\/p>\n

The summer had been full of self-initiated activities as summers always had been for me. \u00a0I played my last year of Little League baseball and enjoyed following the major leagues as well, particularly the Detroit Tigers, their ballpark just some 40 miles east of Ann Arbor. \u00a0I even had several opportunities to go to games with my Little League team or with my friends\u2019 parents. \u00a0Some of the time I would hang out in Burns Park just across the street from my house with my neighborhood friends or I would spend time at their houses. \u00a0But I was mostly a kid into what would be considered \u201cnerdier\u201d hobbies.<\/p>\n

Baseball being of great interest to me at the time, for my birthday in April my mom had gotten me the \u201cBLM\u201d (Big League Manager) baseball game, where you could play the real major league teams against each other based on each player\u2019s batting and pitching statistics from the previous season. \u00a0The previous season had been 1968 when the Tigers had won 100 games and had gone on to beat the St. Louis Cardinals in a seven game World Series. \u00a0I taught my brother Peter how to play BLM and together we played the entire month of April schedule for all ten American League teams, a total of some 130 games, each one taking about an hour to play. \u00a0We both knew the ins and outs of the game and provided the \u201ccolor commentary\u201d for each game and became intimately familiar with all of the league\u2019s players and their particular abilities. \u00a0We of course kept box scores for each game played and batting and pitching statistics for all the players.<\/p>\n

I also had a couple neighborhood friends that were into the Avalon Hill historical military simulation games that I liked to play. \u00a0My favorites that summer were Battle of the Bulge, the last-ditch offensive by the Germans through the mountains of the Ardennes in 1944, and Midway, simulating the climatic 1942 naval battle of World War II in the Pacific. \u00a0When my friends weren\u2019t available to play I would set Battle of the Bulge up in my room and play it solitaire, or not actually play through the game but just endlessly obsess over the best possible initial setup for the American army units to stop the German onslaught.<\/p>\n

These games, whether baseball or warfare, were all about systems and strategy and simulations based on statistical probabilities with the introduction of some realistic randomness based on the role of dice (or in the case of BLM baseball, spinning a spinner with 1 to 100). \u00a0With my active imagination I could fantasize I was right there in the dugout managing my team or in headquarters staring at the maps of the theater of operations, ordering my military units to move, attack or hold fast. \u00a0It was the part of my life where I felt the most fully engaged, where it did not matter I was just some random kid in the real world.<\/p>\n

But now it was Labor Day with school about to start again. \u00a0I was filled with the usual anticipatory dread and sense of resignation at returning to the routine of school, though this time at least I knew I would not be returning to the Tappan pressure cooker. \u00a0My parents were both adventurers of sorts, and I had learned from them that life at its best was an adventure, and now finally going to high school would be one for me. \u00a0I felt this optimism because I had encountered some high school kids on various occasions and had noticed and noted how they seemed to be so much more grown up than I was. \u00a0Guys with facial hair and young women with ample breasts and figures, more daring hippie-ish clothing being worn by both genders. \u00a0I longed to be more like that, more like a real \u201cI am what I am\u201d fully realized person, than an intimidated undifferentiated kid.<\/p>\n

Click here <\/strong><\/a>to see the next installment, “Part 2 – My First Year”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the summer of 1969, at age 14, it was a still recovering soul that did his best to psych up for yet another year of going to school after barely surviving the last three very difficult years at Tappan Junior High. Zager and Evans\u2019 dystopian classic \u201cIn the Year 2525\u201d, about a doomed world, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[13,1792,515,1761],"class_list":["post-4325","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adventure","tag-ann-arbor","tag-our-ongoing-strategy-for-learning","tag-human-development","tag-tappan-junior-high"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4325","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4325"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4325\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4350,"href":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4325\/revisions\/4350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}