Glossing It Over

60

You know, as we go over things in our lives, we sometimes gloss over those little bits that didn't fit the pattern? Such as by the close of my Junior year of High School I was experiencing these sudden 'fevers' toward the end of the school day. The first time this happened, I went to the school nurse and she checked my forehead and found it hot and moist and concluded I had a fever. But since the school day was nearly over anyhow, she didn't see any point in calling my father in to pick me up and take me to the doctor. I agreed, especially since I knew I shouldn't see a doctor in my mother's eyes, and decided to worry about it once I got home on the bus. Yet only about fifteen minutes later the feeling of heat was gone as if nothing had happened, so I ignored it... Until the next day when it happened again. Checking with the school nurse she again felt my hot forehead and again recommended I wait until I got home then talk to my father about seeing a doctor. But strangely enough, the feeling of heat went away again about fifteen minutes later and so I didn't do anything about it. When it happened again the following day, I didn't bother see the nurse about it as I expected it would go away on its own, and it did. So for my last month of Junior year and through the Summer, I just got used to ignoring it...

Another example of 'Glossing It Over' was what happened with 'Spanish II'. After having a great time with 'Spanish I' during my Sophomore year, given its mixed approach to learning the language, I readily signed-up for 'Spanish II' during my Junior year. But with the start of 'Spanish II', the original teacher was gone and a new teacher had taken her place. Probably just out of College herself as she seemed like she could have been a senior at our school given her apparent age, she had a totally different approach to teaching Spanish. Rather than a mix of reading and writing Spanish, listening to tapes & translating, and the occasional task of engaging in low level conversations, the new teacher believed that the only reason to learn a language was to speak it. Gone was the book, gone were the tapes, our grades would be solely based on our verbal fluency. Had I mentioned before that I stuttered?

Without any book of the language to at least use as a reference, class was given over to the teacher talking to us in Spanish and wanting us to answer in turn. As the days went on, she would introduce a new word here and there, but unlike 'Spanish I', there was no discussion of how the words would fit into the gender classifications or how the verbs should be conjugated, we were just to pick that up as we spoke. Toward the end of the first quarter, given my stuttering and the teacher's frustration with it, I knew I was in trouble. The Spanish teacher pulled me aside and pointed out that if I dropped the class before first quarter grades were due, then I wouldn't have the 'F' show up on my report card. I got the hint and dropped 'Spanish II' which gave me the free time to select other classes for my Junior year such as my highly successful 'Public Speaking' class.

So for my Senior year, I signed-up for 'Spanish II' again, hoping that there would be a different teacher and thus a new chance. Great news! There was a new teacher. Bad news! He had the exact same 'verbal fluency is your grade' philosophy, no book. I dropped the class right there and then and looked for what other class I could take in its place. There was a slot open in 'Basic Photography' and I picked it. Though, as I had missed the first day, they had to get approval from the teacher first. The wood shop teacher taught photography on the side, while he wasn't the same wood shop teacher I had during my Freshman year of High School, we hit it off well and he accepted me in his class. Also taking this class was another classmate of mine which I had known over the years so it added to the comfort level of parachuting into a class at the last minute.

One hole in my Senior year schedule patched, I then had to face the other hole. My mentor of the previous three years of High School, Zack Hatch, was missing. I was to have had 'Advanced Math' with him this year while simultaneously taking 'Calculus' with the second most senior math teacher. Instead, with Zack gone, the third math teacher was taking his place for the class. Just as I had gone up through the high school grades with Zack, my friend Van had gone up with this teacher and we both now had 'Advanced Math' together. He vouched for this teacher and I got over my initial concern with Zack being gone. Still, I asked his son, Pete, where his father was a few times, each time he wouldn't say anything. I finally found out from the office that he was on sabbatical due to personal reasons.

Anyhow, I went ahead with both 'Advanced Math' and 'Calculus'. While the second most senior math teacher tended to mumble during his class lectures and lacked the flare of Zack, I caught on what was being taught and scored well with the homework and tests in 'Calculus'. But with the third math teacher in 'Advanced Math', while he was very engaging during class, and I got all the homework questions correct when we'd go over them in class, I was somehow getting every test question wrong. Stunned at first, I looked over my answers again and again and couldn't for the life of me understand what I was missing. By the second test of all wrong answers I asked the teacher after class if he could walk me through where I was going wrong because I couldn't understand it. He pointed out that, with Zack gone, he was very busy with the additional class load and that I'd have to figure it out for myself. And that's just what I tried to do. I could have asked one of my classmates for their insight, but as I had been the hot kid at math during the preceding three years, the last thing I wanted to do was admit to anyone that I was clueless about my tests. And so I obsessed over my failing tests, now three in a row, and repeatedly went over the work again and again and would always come up with the same result, that my answers should have been right, and yet were marked wrong. I toyed with talking to the 'Calculus' teacher about it, but realized he would be slammed with teaching additional classes with Zack gone, as well.

As the end of the quarter neared, I did the same trick as the 'Spanish II' teacher taught me and pulled out of 'Advanced Math' before the 'F' grade was turned into the office. This broke my heart but I didn't have a clue what else I could do. Worse, 'Advanced Math' was a required course in order to take 'Calculus', and while I was sure I was going to have an 'A' or a 'B' in it for the quarter, I was forced to withdraw from that class as well. When I got my report card for the first quarter, there were two holes amongst the otherwise acceptable scores. Ultimately it didn't matter as I lived on my own and no one else would be seeing it.

By the middle of October, after the incident with my guidance counselor, it occurred to me to make an appointment with the 'other' guidance counselor. A woman, she was stunned to see me as there had been the implicit understanding that the male guidance counselor was for the boys and she for the girls. When I explained to her that I was seeking a second opinion and wanted to know what my college options were, she just told me to go to the office where they had volumes of books listing careers and courses of study for them. Once I'd selected what course(s) of study I was interested in, then I could make a second appointment with her and we could go from there. I told her I didn't need to see those as I wanted to go into computers. While she appreciated my enthusiasm, I'd have to go through those books and dig out exactly what courses of study pertained to computers.

And so for the next few days during my free period I plowed through those books, one by one, and could find nothing to do with computers. Was working with computers and computer programming not a career field? Then it occurred to me that Zack had once mentioned that, to program computers, you had to understand math so I looked through the books again for math related fields, but soon realized that without 'Calculus' or even 'Advanced Math' in High School, a math career and college course of study wasn't an option either.

My life had come to a dead end.

I drowned myself in caffeine and carbohydrates.

(my guess, now, is that the volume of books I had been looking through were from when the High School had first opened in the late nineteen sixties, and that was why they didn't show any computer related career fields... but that's just a guess now decades later and I have no way of looking back at those books to check their printing dates.)