Freshmen

The local school board made a major decision recently: They're adding "freshmen only" schools to each of the local high schools. Like most decisions of this ilk, there are upsides and downsides. Loudest on the upside list would include easing overcrowding and the benefits of smaller class sizes and that it is working really well at the one school they've tried it in our community. Downsides would range along building costs and the loss of other opportunities (like maybe a fine arts high school) and the reality that it hasn't worked large-scale in other communities near us. Really, I can see both sides so at that point I just mentally let it go.

I mean, they've already purchased land for a couple so I'm pretty late to the dance as is.

But one quote from board president Fred Placke (a former teacher) in the local paper today read, "Ninth-graders mingling with 12th-graders I just never thought was a good thing. Too much of an age gap." I think I know what he means. Something along the lines of the experiences an 18 year-old is going through and the socialization of a 14 year-old are different things, and the younger ones can be influenced in a number of ways, many of them negative for a young teen. If I'm wrong on that, let me know, Fred.

Anyway, I got to thinking about my experience as a ninth-grader.

The first semester, I had a general P.E. class where, for some reason, they actually spent a few weeks on square dancing. My good friend Smitty's older sister was in the class and invited me and some of my buddies to be in their group. They were really nice to us and made that awful stretch of P.E. fun. These senior girls just laughed and had a good time with it instead of making it drudgery like the other guys and girls our own age were doing. The principle I learned was that you just grin and bear some things in this life...and that there are worse ways to spend an hour than dancing, even square dancing, with fun girls. Me and my friends returned the favor by getting them on our court during basketball and not taking it competitively during P.E. We laughed a lot during that, too.

I learned from Mr. McBay that if you step out of bounds on a rule or two, that corporal punishment can be quite a deterrent to any future thoughts of stepping out of bounds on a rule or two.

Then I started hanging out in an athletics period during the last hour of the day once baseball season rolled around. Yes, the guys were bigger. Yes there was the day they got all the freshman guys in the gym for a "players-only" meeting, rolled in with the grocery carts they'd pilfered from the tennis team's storage, turned on some loud Twisted Sister music and pelted us with the contents of the grocery carts for the duration of "We're Not Gonna Take It" and then left us to clean up all the tennis balls and return the carts. But that was the first and last day of what someone might call "hazing" today--but it was more or less a rite of passage. After we returned the carts the older guys were laughing with us and high-fiving us for good escape moves or whatever. The principle I learned was that these guys could pound you if they wanted, but as long as you give them a little respect and know your place in the pecking order, they'd also be pretty cool to you, too. I think that's called learning humility.

The older guys would help you out sometimes with how to handle girls and dating and stuff like that. Sure, in retrospect there was a great deal of pooling of ignorance...but at the time these guys had three years of their own trial and error stuff and they'd share it with you. Like the time I had a crush on Kim Markovich, cheerleader in my homeroom class and she was very Go-Go's and outgoing and fun. One of the senior guys overheard me telling whatever plan I was hatching to impress her, stopped and said something like, "Don't try to impress her, just talk to her. Ask her a lot of questions about what she likes and doesn't like. Get to know her, man. That'll impress her." Good advice. Which I didn't follow. And I tried to impress her by spending a little too much on a birthday present for her...on a night when she got about 30 presents and it got lost in the shuffle. I spent more time asking Kim Markovich questions, but then she moved. But I got to know Kim Markovich...and she showed up at my senior trip and told my girlfriend what a great guy I was and how lucky she was. Maybe she was just being nice, but either way, it was good advice.

I used to stay after practice and catch the pitchers who wanted some extra work...two of whom would go on to impressive colleges to play ball and one even pitched in a World Series. He now analyzes baseball on ESPN. I learned a LOT just from standing around after the sessions (I always needed a ride home because I'd stay late and one of them would usually help out) on everything from cars to girls to music to teachers to avoid/get to scholarship talk to college decisions to football to hearing about sex to which churches were good/bad to cool places to eat to what jobs were good ones to military service options and well...

...all of life at that time.

Yes, there were practical jokes.
Yes, there were times when you'd get embarrassed in the hallway because one of them would be a big shot when you were with your freshman buddies.
Yes, they hit on all the girls in our grade who were a bit more naive than they thought they were.
Yes, they inadvertantly encouraged us to do some things our parents wouldn't wanted us to do (like sneaking in to see Halloween at 14--of which I slept with the light on for three nights afterwards. I mean, c'mon...the horror movie genre was just getting going and when Mike Myers wasn't laying on the ground when Jamie Leigh Curtis looked over that railing and that creepy piano music started playing, well, he had to be OUT THERE somewhere.)
Yes, I had some R-rated moments brought into my PG-13 world.
It wasn't all roses and ice cream in my high school experiences that first year.

Yes, there is a large age-gap.
Yes, there's a large experience gap, too.
Yes, it's possible that the experiential life of a teenager is markedly more overtly permissive than my Alabama public high school life nearly a quarter-century ago.
Yes, it's possible that the 3,000 teen high school is overwhelming compared to my high school (one of the largest in the state at that time) literally half that size.

But there are some healthy lessons to learn...and maybe keeping 9th graders isolated only continues to make icons of our children and they lose another year of the chance to observe older teens and learn from them. Maybe it helps them understand what they believe instead of just parroting. Maybe it helps them to make their various faiths their very own instead of the one their parents told them. Maybe it makes them think and analyze socially. And maybe they don't learn some of those valuable life-lessons that might actually help them grow in wisdom instead of one more year of telling them how magical and wonderful they are. At some point, they have to deal with that.

So, I'm not sure that being a freshman is a bad thing.

And I'd still rather have a fine arts high school than 9th grade campuses...but having a painter and a ballerina might just have something to do with that--so my opinion might be irrelevant.