Bored of Education

 

Bored of Education

The spring of 1959 in Northport was the gateway to expanded education facilities. The exploding population of school children had placed a huge burden on the system and the infrastructure was inadequate. At the Laurel Avenue School, we had been eating our lunches in the auditorium because there was no place large enough to accommodate all of us and recent years had seen their share of struggles with double sessions. The baby boomer group, a byproduct of optimism connected with the end of World War II was just coming into it's own.

 While attending the Laurel Avenue School, the East Northport Jr. High School on 5^th Avenue was under construction, a project that seemed roughly the size of Texas. The plan was that once it was finished, the students would vacate the Laurel Avenue School so it could be renovated and expanded to modern standards. In hindsight, those modern standards likely included adding more asbestos and lead-based paint. The new facility on 5^th Avenue would eventually encompass the 7^th, 8^th and 9^th grades, relieving the 9^th grade burden from the Middleville High School. In the meantime, the two-year renovation plan to the Laurel Avenue School would allow access by even more students still in the pipeline of the future. Money was in short supply and the taxpayers were squawking like stuck pigs. My Dad sat on the school board, and I heard many a dinner table diatribe concerning the lack of money and the need for infrastructure. I suppose it seemed like a unique situation to Dad at the time, but over the years I've come to recognize the recurring scenario. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

The 5^th Avenue School was complete and ready for occupancy around Easter, 1959 and all the Northport schools were bursting at the seams, so the call was made to move into the new school at the end of Easter recess. This would be a monumental moving effort and would have to be executed with the precision of the June Taylor Dancers. It would require the involvement of all hands-on-deck, packing those books into cartons, labeling things, preparing items for transport carrying heavy loads to staging areas, etc. I guess there were about 700 kids in that school and that was one large work crew. We were directed by our teachers to abandon our lesson plan for a day or two and pitch in, a real-time lesson in life.

Our attractive CORE teacher, Miss Mear was conducting the proceedings with the skilled precision a Maestro. She was supervising the details of one guy in our group who had just taken down a dusty picture from the wall, when in one swift motion, he turned around to ask where to put it and ran into her. She was wearing a black felt-textured dress and the picture left two distinct dust imprints, each about the size of a silver dollar on her breasts.  Oooops! Our buddy just created an Instamatic moment. He was a little surprised and flustered, but the teacher just brushed herself off with a tee-hee or two. I guess she told him to put it in a carton or something, but that little incident became pretty hot conversation for us thirteen-year-olds. Funny, it doesn't take much to amuse the male of the species of that age, and this sort of thing still remains pretty interesting. I guess there is just no hope for us guys.

So, we went on to the 5^th Avenue School and served out the remainder of our hitch as “seniors” in a two-grade school, but the following year they added the 9^th grade to the program, making us “seniors” again! The school we had just left was built in 1925 and we were now in a brand new 1959 School with all the amenities of uptown living. I hoped my grades would follow the luster of the new bricks, aluminum and glass, but they didn't. It was the beginning of a long siege of failing notices, some of which I was able to intercept, others not. My mind was on girls, boats and summer vacation. If I had simply put the same effort into learning, as into daydreaming, avoiding and beating the system, things might be different today. Dad continued to lower the boom with each near-failing grade and my prospects for scholarly improvement seemed more distant as each year passed in my educational quest. I was an inadvertent slacker.

With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, I now observe that each generation of kids seem to think they invented slacking, but in reality, we all have a history of avoiding and trying to beat the system at one time or another. I also note that given enough time, we all have been beaten by the system in some way. Such is the cycle of life. Using our past experience, we try to teach our children to avoid repeating our mistakes in the hope of enriching them somehow, but somehow it falls on deaf ears.

A manager I worked for many years ago often used an expression “you’re just pissing up a rain pipe”. When I look at many of the young people of today, I can’t help but be reminded of that expression.