With respect to what happened in my academic classes at Broad Ripple High School during my fall 1963 to spring 1964 junior year there, after so many decades I now have relatively few memories.My most vivid memory is what I experienced in a U.S. History I class that was taught by a right-wing white woman teacher, who appeared to be then in her 50's, named Mrs. Woods.
In elementary school and in my first term as a sophomore at Bayside H.S., I had usually scored the highest mark on my class social studies or history multiple choice tests; and I was usually the student who most often responded inside the classroom most quickly with the answer to any of the oral social studies or history-based questions a teacher would ask. Yet Mrs. Woods's U.S. History I class at Broad Ripple turned out to be the only social studies or history class in junior high school or in high school in which I didn't receive either a 95 or an "A" final grade.
There seemed to be two reasons why the right-wing Mrs. Woods ended up only giving me either a B-minus, a C or a C-minus in the U.S. History I class I took with her in the fall of 1963. Because the class was not a "G" class in history of more academically high-achieving students (similar to an "honors" class in history in a NYC public high school), all the other students in this history class pretty much sat silently in the class, looking bored and never raising their hands to ask a question, in response to whatever 1950's-type right-wing conservative view of pre-U.S. Civil War history Mrs. Woods happened to be presenting to us in her classroom. And so I seemed to be the only student in Mrs. Woods's class who was interested enough in U.S. history to raise my hand and sometimes ask her a question, in this class.
Yet because my questions reflected the early 1960's anti-communist liberal corporate media's late 1950's "You Are There"-type historical television show's view of U.S. history more than the anti-communist, Joe McCarthy-type right-wing Freedom Foundation-1950's conservative-type perspective, that Mrs. Woods was into, Mrs. Woods apparently felt I was challenging her intellectual authority and her qualification to teach the class, if I asked a question that she was unable to provide a convincing answer to.
The second reason Mrs. Woods seemed to want to punish me with a low final grade was because I also raised a question in class one day about the method she was using to "teach" us U.S. History I. In all of my previous social studies or history elementary, junior high school and high school classes (and in all my subsequent high school history or social studies classes), all the social studies or history teachers would spend at least 90 percent of all the classroom periods in a school term presenting a summary of the topics we had read in our history or social studies textbooks, and answered homework questions about, and leading discussions in class about these topics.
In Mrs. Woods's U.S. History I class, however, around 90 percent of all the classroom periods in the school term were periods in which Mrs. Woods had us spending nearly the whole period just watching a 16mm movie, often produced by a right-wing anti-communist organization like the Freedom Foundation, about the particular U.S. history topic we had been previously assigned to read about in our textbook. And she would spend no time in the classroom discussing the topic of the film or the historical topic we had read about in our history textbook.
So after it appeared to me that (unlike all the other social studies or history teachers I had previously had or would subsequently have) Mrs. Woods was having us watch movies in our U.S. History I class in practically every period during this term, in order to be able to avoid having to do any teaching of history during each period when she was supposed to be teaching, I asked her in class why she was haing us watch a movie nearly every period in class, instead of leading a discussion of what we had read in our history textbook?
And, again, Mrs. Woods seemed to apparently feel that I was questioning her right to collect a history teacher salary in the fall of 1963, when all she was mostly doing in the classroom was turning on the 16 mm projector each period and sitting in the back of the classroom, in the darkness, while her students spent the 40-minute period watching a movie nearly every day in class.
Luckily for me, however, I was not stuck with Mrs. Woods as my U.S. History class teacher again in the spring term of my junior year at Broad Ripple High School. And because, as usual, I always answered over 90 percent of the multiple-choice questions correctly on the social studies-related test forms the teacher periodically gave us, and was also the student in this non-"G" class who most frequently and quickly answered whatever in-class history book textbook-related question this second history teacher asked, not surprisingly, I ended up receiving an "A" in this U.S. History II spring term class.
