Unfiltered Story #344512

Back just before 1972 in Michigan, a federal judge had ordered desegregation using busing. My little suburban school fell into chaos as we got an influx of considerably more rowdy inner-city kids. Several of us brighter kids were put in the back of my 6th grade classroom and instructed to take turns reading aloud. If you can’t guess, the classroom volume was excessive. There were even occasional fights in the classroom.

Mid-year, my family moved to Florida and my parents made the extra effort to get me in a private school. My class was in a section of a former church. The rooms were divided by those heavy pleated “walls” that did little to keep out noise. The lunchroom for our grades was the common space in he center of all these barely isolated classrooms. Unfortunately, it was so small, we had to do lunch in shifts, so there were classes going on at the same time as some students had lunch. (Hopefully everyone can see where this is going.) This meant that groups of 8-12 year olds having to eat lunch in total silence for the sake of the classes still in session. Yes, seriously. It was as agonizing as it sounds. Us kids about wanted to explode at the end of the day. Later in life, I would have a friend who was at Annapolis and his experiences there as a plebe were only slightly more strict. And I hopped from one extreme of no discipline to excessive discipline overnight.