This was resonating. Reading your recall of those years enabled me to recall that time better.
A while back I wrote…
“I was with the same set of classmates since grade 7. When I enrolled as a brand new seven grader at E.O. Smith Junior high school I was assigned to section E. When I showed up for class there were 26 other girls and boys. We were called the accelerated class. There were 12 other sections for grade 7, A - M. Due to our higher test scores my classmates in section E were grouped together. I scored a 13 grade reading level and an 8th grade math level on the basic skills test I took when I was in the sixth grade. Mrs. Johnson, my sixth grade teacher glared at me angrily about why I didn’t get better scores than what I did. I felt crestfallen about her assessment until I compared my scores with my classmates. Nobody scored higher than I did. Yet, Mrs. Johnson upbraided me for my paltry performance. Go figure! Later, much later, I learned to understand Mrs. Johnson’s response as Tough Love.
We remained Section E from grade 7 through grade 12 and attended all our classes together except for the electives. We had the same homeroom teacher, starting with Mrs. Lillian Bastine as our junior high school homeroom teacher and Mrs. Gloria Woods as our senior high school homeroom teacher. Everyone knew we were the smart kids. We knew we were the smart kids but we never lorded it over the others. We innately understood the value of the privilege in our status. Harold Moore Jr., or as we knew him, Harold Vann, later to be known as Khalid Abdul Muhammad was one of my classmates.
Nobody ever sat us down and explained the reason for our section E status. As we began to get to know each other, we compared notes and quickly reasoned why we were grouped together.
Names of section E classmates:Jacqueline Hill, Adrienne Bennett, Theodore Jones, Charles Carruthers, Kenneth Jones, Rosalind Curry, Diane Boone, Gwendolyn Johnson, Kenneth Carter, Lionel Pointer, Anthony Cebrun, Jacqueline Smith, Barbara Howard, Linda Brown, Harold Vann…
It felt good to be in section E. I didn’t think much about it at the time. It simply was where I was and where I was supposed to be. The specialness of it did not hit me until much, much later when I begin to look back and assess my development. “You never know where you are until much later.“
Being in section E shaped me and influenced me more than I understood at that time. Who understands anything at the time, anyway? Besides the shot of esteem it imparted me: being recognized for being smart and being relegated with other smart students, the greatest benefit to me was shaping how I viewed the opposite sex.
The girls were the smartest students in the class. Jacqueline Hill, who became a doctor, was the smartest. Jackie graduated valedictorian six years later. Carolyn Boone was the next smartest. Rosalind Curry, Barbara Howard, Linda Brown, they all stood head and shoulders above us smart guys. Their being smart was unquestioned. It was simply how it was. We, the guys, were attracted to them but their intelligence totally negated, at least for me, my ability to view them at sex objects. And ultimately, women in general. The paradigm was set for me there and then. Imbued with a value of academic intelligence and knowing that the girls I grew up with were as intelligent as or more intelligent than me, shaped my non-sex object view of women. As a Cisgender male, I am strongly attracted to women of the opposite sex but I was loathe to ever assert myself sexually with the opposite sex without their genuine consent. My sexual attraction to women was always in deference to their choices. Always. I get very uncomfortable when men treat women as sexual objects. Unfortunately, many do. I learned all this from being in Section E.”
We're of an age that watches replays in the rearview mirror of life. (But no matter how often we tune in, we can't change the past.) A young A-A man taught me a poem while I visited them every Saturday in a prison Bible study (actually, a stealth ethics class): THE GIFT.
Yesterday is history,
tomorrow is a mystery,
today is a gift,
which is why we call it
The Present. <end>
For me, Rabbi Jesus was a teacher of ethics. (He was declared God in the flesh by Emperor Constantine (who wasn't even a Christian until years later on his deathbed) at the Council of Nicea in 325AD. (I've translated and consolidated many of the ethics taught by Jesus from across the gospels, at my blog MeridaGOround : search for a post titled "Beautiful Attitudes".
Good reading here: THE ONE, by Henrich Päs, a theoretical physicist who has put together a superb history of the inter-relations between quantum mechanics and monism — the idea that the universe is a singular organism: All is One. (The chapter on decoherence was a challenge for this humanities guy, but it can be glossed.)
This was resonating. Reading your recall of those years enabled me to recall that time better.
A while back I wrote…
“I was with the same set of classmates since grade 7. When I enrolled as a brand new seven grader at E.O. Smith Junior high school I was assigned to section E. When I showed up for class there were 26 other girls and boys. We were called the accelerated class. There were 12 other sections for grade 7, A - M. Due to our higher test scores my classmates in section E were grouped together. I scored a 13 grade reading level and an 8th grade math level on the basic skills test I took when I was in the sixth grade. Mrs. Johnson, my sixth grade teacher glared at me angrily about why I didn’t get better scores than what I did. I felt crestfallen about her assessment until I compared my scores with my classmates. Nobody scored higher than I did. Yet, Mrs. Johnson upbraided me for my paltry performance. Go figure! Later, much later, I learned to understand Mrs. Johnson’s response as Tough Love.
We remained Section E from grade 7 through grade 12 and attended all our classes together except for the electives. We had the same homeroom teacher, starting with Mrs. Lillian Bastine as our junior high school homeroom teacher and Mrs. Gloria Woods as our senior high school homeroom teacher. Everyone knew we were the smart kids. We knew we were the smart kids but we never lorded it over the others. We innately understood the value of the privilege in our status. Harold Moore Jr., or as we knew him, Harold Vann, later to be known as Khalid Abdul Muhammad was one of my classmates.
Nobody ever sat us down and explained the reason for our section E status. As we began to get to know each other, we compared notes and quickly reasoned why we were grouped together.
Names of section E classmates:Jacqueline Hill, Adrienne Bennett, Theodore Jones, Charles Carruthers, Kenneth Jones, Rosalind Curry, Diane Boone, Gwendolyn Johnson, Kenneth Carter, Lionel Pointer, Anthony Cebrun, Jacqueline Smith, Barbara Howard, Linda Brown, Harold Vann…
It felt good to be in section E. I didn’t think much about it at the time. It simply was where I was and where I was supposed to be. The specialness of it did not hit me until much, much later when I begin to look back and assess my development. “You never know where you are until much later.“
Being in section E shaped me and influenced me more than I understood at that time. Who understands anything at the time, anyway? Besides the shot of esteem it imparted me: being recognized for being smart and being relegated with other smart students, the greatest benefit to me was shaping how I viewed the opposite sex.
The girls were the smartest students in the class. Jacqueline Hill, who became a doctor, was the smartest. Jackie graduated valedictorian six years later. Carolyn Boone was the next smartest. Rosalind Curry, Barbara Howard, Linda Brown, they all stood head and shoulders above us smart guys. Their being smart was unquestioned. It was simply how it was. We, the guys, were attracted to them but their intelligence totally negated, at least for me, my ability to view them at sex objects. And ultimately, women in general. The paradigm was set for me there and then. Imbued with a value of academic intelligence and knowing that the girls I grew up with were as intelligent as or more intelligent than me, shaped my non-sex object view of women. As a Cisgender male, I am strongly attracted to women of the opposite sex but I was loathe to ever assert myself sexually with the opposite sex without their genuine consent. My sexual attraction to women was always in deference to their choices. Always. I get very uncomfortable when men treat women as sexual objects. Unfortunately, many do. I learned all this from being in Section E.”
Enjoyed this quite a bit.
There's a great coming of age movie to be made from this if it were to kept true to tone.
We're practically the same age: I was in 6th grade when you were in the 7th!
We're of an age that watches replays in the rearview mirror of life. (But no matter how often we tune in, we can't change the past.) A young A-A man taught me a poem while I visited them every Saturday in a prison Bible study (actually, a stealth ethics class): THE GIFT.
Yesterday is history,
tomorrow is a mystery,
today is a gift,
which is why we call it
The Present. <end>
For me, Rabbi Jesus was a teacher of ethics. (He was declared God in the flesh by Emperor Constantine (who wasn't even a Christian until years later on his deathbed) at the Council of Nicea in 325AD. (I've translated and consolidated many of the ethics taught by Jesus from across the gospels, at my blog MeridaGOround : search for a post titled "Beautiful Attitudes".
Good reading here: THE ONE, by Henrich Päs, a theoretical physicist who has put together a superb history of the inter-relations between quantum mechanics and monism — the idea that the universe is a singular organism: All is One. (The chapter on decoherence was a challenge for this humanities guy, but it can be glossed.)