My classroom experience in my second year of Spanish class at Broad Ripple, during the last month of my first fall term and second spring term as a high school sophomore in Indianapolis in 1963, was different than what my experience in Spanish class as a 9th grader at a junior high school and, later, as a sophomore in Bayside High School in the fall of 1962, in New York City had been.
During my first year taking Spanish at Junior High School 67 in Little Neck, Queens, most of the other students in the class were grade-oriented students who, like myself at that time, were seeking to get the best final grades from Mrs. Lipton, the fairly skillful, experienced, half-friendly, half-authoritarian foreign language teacher (who, in her late 40's, was probably not considered as physically attractive by most of the teenage guys in her classes as was Mrs. Garfinkel, the other foreign language teacher in the junior high school who taught Spanish). Consequently, Mrs. Lipton was pretty much able to present her daily Spanish lessons to the class I attended in a business-like way, without having to interrupt her daily language lessons to respond to any student disruptions during the classroom period or having to deal with any "classroom management"issues.
The mostly grade-oriented 9th-graders in the class were not going to risk being penalized by Mrs. Lipton for fooling around in class; and they would also tend to immediately pressure any of their peers who looked like they might be trying to disrupt the Spanish language class to "shut up" and not block them from learning what they needed to know, in order to score high enough on Mrs. Lipton's multiple choice tests to maintain their 85-plus or 90-plus term grade averages.
And although during my first term as a sophomore at Bayside High School I was assigned to a second year, non-honor Spanish class, that met during the 10th period late afternoon last class of the day and which seemed to include only a few grade-oriented classmates or a student like me (who, by that time, was becoming less grades-oriented/less mark-happy and more intellectually/knowledge-accumulation-oriented, as well as less intellectually competitive), the low-keyed Spanish class teacher who seemed to be in his 50's, a white man named Mr. Durkin, was able to present his second year Spanish class lesson without being interrupted by any disruptive students. For at Bayside H.S. in the fall of 1962, even the sophomore, junior and senior students who were not grade-oriented, not in honors classes and not interested in studying a foreign language like Spanish would tend to just sit passively in class and daydream without paying much attention to what the teacher said.
These same students would generally not ask any questions, even if they still didn't understand the lesson the teacher was attempting to teach them, and would generally spend only a minimal amount of time doing homework or studying for tests. But they were generally not into disrupting the class in a way that might provoke the teacher to send them to the high school dean's office, from where their parents might then be telephoned, etc.
Bcause Mr. Durkin's second year Spanish language class lessons, however, were usually just a repeat version of the same Spanish language lesson concepts Mrs. Lipton had presented to my first year Spanish class the year before, and based on the same Spanish language El Camino Real textbook chapters that I had already studied in the 9th grade, even if the other students had been into disrupting his class lessons, it probably would not have affected the limited degree to which I was learning to read Spanish at that point, though.
I can't remember much more about the first semester of second-year Spanish class at Bayside H.S., except that (because I had previously learned what was being taught in this class in 9th grade), I scored 90 or 95 percent on the class mid-term exam and thus received either a 90 or 95 percent mark for the class on my mid-term report card at Bayside H.S.; and also a little bit about two of my classmates in this Spanish class, who sat nearest to me in the classroom.
Neither of the two sophomore classmates in this class that I remember seemed either very grade-oriented or very interested in the second-year Spanish language class that they were apparently being required to take in order to eventually obtain their high school diplomas from Bayside High School. One was a tall African-American working-class guy who, having apparently been the star of his junior high school's basketball team and, as a sophomore, already a starting member of Bayside's basketball team, seemed eager to see the class period end; so that he could join his basketball teammates in its daily after-school practice session on Bayside's gymnasium floor.
And because he apparently hadn't already had a first-year Spanish class in which the teacher covered the same lessons that Mr. Durkin was again presenting in class (like I had had), he seemed to find it more difficult to get a high mark on the Spanish class mid-term than did I. But because, as a sophomore, excelling on the basketball court on Bayside's basketball team seemed much more relevant to him at that time than getting a high mark in a Spanish language course (which he would never have probably taken if it hadn't been a class he was required to take), as long as Mr. Durkin gave him some kind of passing grade of over 65 at the end of the term for attending each class, so that he could earn the required academic credits he needed for a high school diploma, whether he actually learned much or not in the Spanish class probably didn't interest him too much.
The other classmate sitting nearest me in my Spanish class that I remember was a long brown-haired, white Italian-American working-class sophomore woman, about 5 feet 2 inches tall, who came to school each day wearing lipstick and make-up, as well as, tight, short skirts and dresses, and blouses, that showed off her figure in a flattering way. And most of the white Italian-American guys who attended Bayside H.S. at that time probably regarded her as physically attractive.
She didn't seem like someone who was planning to attend college or very interested in trying to get high marks in any of her academic classes--unlike nearly all the 9th-grade women in all my junior high school classes had been or nearly all the sophomore women classmates in the "honors" biology and "honors" geometry classes I was in during my time at Bayside in the fall of 1962. And I suspect that she didn't spend much time bothering to do the homework that the teachers of the classes she was required to take assigned.
One afternoon, after school was dismissed for a few minutes, I noticed her and another white woman student at Bayside High School, who was about her size, pulling each other's hair and fighting in the park across the street from the front of Bayside H.S., before a crowd of student onlookers. Apparently she or the other woman student felt that the other female student had "stolen her boyfriend." Fortunately a teacher or a dean rushed past the crowd of students to break up the fight before either of the women students had seriously hurt each other.
My impression was that the Spanish language class classmate who was involved in this after-school fight was mainly interested, as a sophomore, in dating (and eventually going steady and marrying soon after high school) whichever Italian-American working-class guy she found most sexually attractive and had fallen in love with at that time. So although we sat next to each other in second year Spanish class each day, neither she nor I seemed to feel there was any kind of basis for ever exchanging words with each other, either before or after each class period.
And, since in the social circles I had attended classes and sometimes gone to boring weekend parties with, when in junior high school, did not include the type of women classmates who would ever get into any kind of physical fight with another female classmate over some kind of "stealing my boyfriend" dispute, I think I became even more wary of exchanging any words with this particular Spanish language classmate at Bayside, before moving to Indianapolis for the last month of my first semester as a high school sophomore.
At Broad Ripple H.S., the second-year of Spanish class, that I was placed in for the remainder of my sophomore year between January and early June of 1963, was taught by an elderly white woman teacher, who seemed to be in her late 50's or early 60's, named Miss Dipple. The main difference between being in Mrs. Lipton's first-year Spanish class in 9th grade in Jr. H.S. 67 and being in Mr. Durkin's second year Spanish class during most of my first term as a sophomore in Fall 1962 at Bayside H.S. and being in Miss Dipple's second year Spanish class at Broad Ripple, was that in Miss Dipple's class a significant proportion of the students didn't let Miss Dipple present her class lessons without constantly interrupting her and openly ridiculing her. And the students who disrupted Miss Dipple's class were led by some of the sophomore, junior and senior Broad Ripple H.S. jocks and the sophomore, junior and senior women in the class whom they dated or who were eager to be asked out on dates by the jocks.
By disrupting Miss Dipple's class, the non-intellectual and non-academic-oriented jocks like Rick (who was on the high school golf team) and Tony (who was on the football team) were able to encourage most of the other students in Miss Dipple's class to act like the more academically-oriented students in my junior high school class in NYC used to act, if a substitute teacher was filling-in for our regular subject teacher on a particular day. And, as a result, most of the students in Miss Dipple's Spanish class didn't bother to spend much time either doing any of the homework she assigned or paying much attention to what she was trying to teach them, in-between all the times she was forced to spend responding to the students in the class who were into spending the Spanish class period immaturely fooling around.
Despite the fooling around that the other students in the class did, I was still able to learn enough of the additional second-year Spanish grammar Miss Dipple was attempting to teach us, by doing the assigned homework and reading from the Spanish language textbook chapters that she assigned each week, to be able to apparently answer more of the multiple-test Spanish class quiz, mid-term or final tests that she gave us between January and early June 1963, than did most of her other second year Spanish class students. And, in addition, I was one of the students in her class who sat quietly and took notes when she attempted to present her Spanish lessons each day; and was not one of the stueents in the class who either laughed with or encouraged the non-intellectual jocks and the jock women friends who were ridiculing her each period.
So, not surprisingly, Miss Dipple realized by the end of my second semester in her second-year Spanish language class that it made more sense for me to be, in the following academic year as a junior, in a third-year Spanish language "G" class, with Spanish language-class students who were more academically-oriented than were the ones I had been placed with, during my sophomore year, in Miss Dipple's second-year Spanish class between January and early June 1963.
I now remember very little else about the time I spent in Miss Dipple's 2nd-year Spanish class other than that my assigned seat in class was near two high school women, Mary Jo and Kay, who both seemed to be popular with the white male jock athletes in the class. Mary Jo was a buxom high school cheerleader, whom I actually only first saw leading cheers for a Broad Ripple team on the football field the following fall, when I no longer was in any same class with her.
Mary Jo had a pleasant, friendly personality and seemed to be regularly dating a steady boyfriend who was on one of the Broad Ripple sports teams. Most of the guys at Broad Ripple in the early 1960's likely felt that Mary Jo was very pretty and physically attractive, as also I did at that time.
So even if I wasn't then more into making money, from my newspaper delivery route, and still watching a lot of TV at home, than into dating somebody outside of school, during the second semester of my sophomore year in high school, I realized then that there was no possibility that Mary Jo would ever regard me as some classmate she might ever be interested in dating; if, by chance, she ever broke up with her steady boyfriend. If that happened, the guys on the school's various sports teams (who already knew how to drive, had their own cars and were the guys with the highest status in the out-of-school socializing scene at Broad Ripple) would all be asking Mary Jo for dates and they would be the kind of guys that Mary Jo would still be most interested in going out with in early 1963; not some classmate like me who hadn't yet taken drivers' ed, had no car and wasn't on any of the high school sports teams. And because Mary Jo apparently wasn't devoting as much time to her academic work as she did to her cheerleading activities in high school in the early 1960's, when I was mostly placed in "G"/honors classes, with students who were apparently more into spending time doing homework than was Mary Jo, I only saw her at a school-related activity, from a distance, as she helped lead cheers from the football field.
The other seemingly popular high school woman student near my assigned seat in Miss Dipple's Spanish class, Kay, was either a junior or senior, who apparently was more intoo her science courses than into studying Spanish; and who seemed to be planning to enroll at Purdue University in Lafayette, Indiana, after graduating from Broad Ripple with her academic diploma. Like Mary Jo, Kay was likely considered to be physically attractive by most of the jocks at Broad Ripple who seemed to be asking her out for dates each weekend; although I thought her to be less physically attractive than either Mary Jo or Ginny.
Kay had apparently been either one of the football game "homecoming queen" finalist candidates or "homecoming queen" before the time I became a student Broad Ripple. But her personality seemed less good-natured, less easy-going and less friendly than Mary Jo's personality; and, unlike Mary Jo, Kay tended to join in with the male athletes in Miss Dipple's class, whose notion of what being "cool" in 1963 seemed to be to show that you could ridicule the elderly Miss Dipple and disrupt a required class you had no interest in studying for, with impunity. And I can't recall ever noticing Kay either inside the school or outside of school in Indianapolis, after June 1963.
The jocks seemed able to get away with disrupting Miss Dipple's class with impunity because the coaches of the high school teams they were members of were apparently able to get the high school dean's office to not hold the jocks accountable for disrupting her class; and because the number of students in the class who were actually interested in studying Spanish was too small for any non-jock students in the class to bother to question how "cool" it actually was to disrupt Miss Dipple's Spanish class in 1963.
