A Classmate's View of High School

I just got around to reading some of the stories in Wheels, Pranks, and Memories of School:  Third Book of Stories of Growing Up in Partridge, compiled by Chris Terrill.  It was printed this fall.  One of the most interesting to me was a story written by Bob Fair, who was a high school classmate of mine.  He was also the classmate of David Y., Oren Y., Nevin N., Ellis M., and Leon M. and a dozen or so others. He wrote it after having visited with his cousin, Joyce, who also attended Partridge High School.  Bob entered high school the second year after state law changed to require all students to attend school until age 16.

I'm re-typing a portion of his story here:

"She told me that our dear friend Ellis Miller had said she wasn't very nice to the Elreka crowd, and it started me thinking about school bus dynamics.  Joyce was on the route that picked up most of the new students from Elreka.  She and I agreed that it wasn't the student's fault, but the situation that they had unwillingly been thrust into by the State of Kansas.

In her defense, imagine daily encountering a huge, well established group of new Dutch-speaking conscientious objector students piling on to the bus, with no interest in pop culture, rock and roll music or future military service.  Group dynamics changed on her bus in a major way, where our bus route didn't change at all.

Of course these students wanted to  eagerly complete their high school diploma in 2 years and were avidly discussing school problems on the morning and afternoon bus rides in a language we didn't understand, but they could understand ours.

Their non-participation in our school sports program seemed lame, as these guys were beating our socks off in basketball and baseball on a daily basis, and we were asking for their help to no avail.  Those guys were well established teammates that could easily dominate any sports match.  The general community was very supportive in just getting every student out by their junior year.

After you import all of these straight A students, the bell curve starts to manifest itself in our report cards.  While B's or D's were all the same to me, it mattered to some other people.  This group was superior to ours in 3 ways--Academically, Athletically, and Religious Devotion, even with some of their homes lacking running water, electricity, or internal combustion engines!  You can imagine how frustrating it might have been to be on that bus.  They seemed to always side-step foolish situations unlike us, and it made us see ourselves very differently by comparison."

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This sounds like Bob.  He was a fun-loving guy, and I'll vouch for his attitude toward grades.  But not so fast, Bob.  Some of these details need a little work.  I'll chalk it up to the memories being more than 45 years old.  Obviously, no malicious intent is present.

I wasn't on Bob's or Joyce's bus, so I'm not sure what all happened on the bus, but I would like to offer some amendments to other parts of the story.

1.  On Dutch speaking:  True, we were capable of that, but I seriously doubt that it happened to any degree on the bus or anywhere in school.  We were not allowed to talk Dutch in school during all the years of grade school, and we were not in the habit of talking Dutch at such times.  I suspect discussing school in Dutch would have felt extremely awkward.

2.  Completing high school in two or three years:  I never heard of any parents pushing their students to do that, or students pushing each other to do that.  I finished high school in three years, but it was a sudden notion I got on enrollment day, when I learned that Oren, Ellis, and Nevin were all doing that.  I'm not sure that I even knew it was possible before then.  This decision actually moved us out of Bob's class and into Joyce's class.  After that year, I can remember only one other person who finished high school in three years.

3.  Sports superiority:  Elreka's grade school team had never played Partridge's grade school team because we were in different leagues.  The year we were in eighth grade, however, we had an extraordinary team, and most of the boys went to Partridge High the next year.  Some of the best players, however, (Gary and Phillip N.) were not attending Partridge, so his description of an intact established team is not quite accurate.  Also, I remember only one actual match-up between the "Amish" and the Partridge teams.  I think it was arranged a bit surreptitiously by the P. E. teachers, and happened during the school day.  Non-participation in sports had nothing to do with wanting to finish high school early.

4.  Primitive Living Conditions:  Here I believe Bob conflated what he knows of Old Order Amish life with what he assumed of all of us.  For the record,  every student from the "Amish" community (that was us) came from a home with electricity, a telephone, and running water.  All but a few of us owned and drove cars with internal combustion engines.  The Old Order Amish had also been using tractors for farming here for 20 years by then.

5.  The size of the "Amish" group on the bus:    For starters, I can think right off of at least nine Amish students who were on my bus, and not Joyce or Bob's bus--at least not the first year after the attendance laws changed.  I can't come  up with that many who could possibly have been on either of their buses that first year.  Again, probably a case of conflation with later years.

6.  Student grades:  We were not all straight-A students, and as far as I know, no teacher graded anyone on the curve.  I still remember the grading scale:  94-100=A,  86-93=B, 76-86=C,  70-76=D, 0-69=F.    

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I never heard anyone say what Bob said in this story--that they viewed us as superior in three ways.   I do remember the first school newspaper I saw with a published honor roll.  It was heavily freighted with names of Elreka graduates.  I'm sure I wasn't the only one who noticed that.

In my view, what happened was that the separation between the cultural/religious groups in the community was thorough enough that we didn't really know each other.  Leftover sentiment from adults who remembered with some rancor our people's non-participation in World War II probably fueled some suspicion.  "Dumb Dutchmen" was also probably a fairly concise appraisal coming our way.  When they really learned to know us, the initial perceptions needed adjustment.  Bob's concluding sentence tells me that the new perceptions stuck:  ". . . it made us see ourselves very differently by comparison."  That's a credit to youthful flexibility.

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The last I heard, Bob was working as a diver in Hawaii.   That sounds like a job he'd go for.