In both the fall term of 1963 and the spring term of 1964, I took no science course at Broad Ripple High School. But during the same two terms, I did take two terms of English, two terms of Spanish, and two terms of Intermediate Algebra in "G"/"honors"-type classes, with the more higher-academic achieving students at Broad Ripple.
Despite getting a low grade in my Geometry II class during my sophomore year, apparently because I had received either a 90 or 95 final grade for each term of my 9th grade Elementary Algebra class in New York City, I was still assigned to Mr. Mahin's "G" Intermediate Algebra I class in the fall of 1963.
But aside from vaguely being able to picture how Mr. Mahin's classroom looked, vaguely recalling that I must have received either a B-plus, A-minus of A as my final grade that semester (because I pretty much spent time at home doing the assigned homework on a daily basis-- and didn't just wait until the night before a scheduled test in class to try to cram into my brain all the intermediate algebra lessons' content we were supposed to be tested on), and also vaguely recalling that a white high school woman student with short hair, who always wore glasses, named Sandy, seemed to be the smartest mathematics student and most grade-oriented student in the class, I now remember nothing else about what I experienced in this class during the fall of 1963.
I also cannot now recall very much what kind of literature, in my English "G" class, I was assigned to read, during the fall term of my junior year, by the white woman teacher who taught this class, Mrs. Deering, who then seemed to be in either in late 30's or early 40's.
Most men likely then considered Mrs. Deering to be prematurely overweight for a woman of her relatively young age; and she didn't seem as intellectually, politically, or philosophically liberal as the older English "G" class teacher I had during the second term of my sophomore year, Mrs. Griggs--whose latter of recommendation likely led the Columbia College's admissions office to admit me into Columbia University in the fall of 1965.
But Mrs. Deering was a fair marker and good teacher, and she seemed to like the short story I handed to her to fulfill one of her homework assignments that fall, in which I satirically described the parasitic business activity of a funeral director; which was written after I watched a television documentary on the "CBS Reports" show that was based on Jessica Mitford's early 1960's best-selling The American Way of Death book.
Besides recalling that I wrote and handed in this short story, the only particular thing I remember about this class was that it was in this class that I noticed that one of the high school white woman, Mary, who sat in the individual desk-chair stool seat next to mine in the classroom and put on lipstick each morning before attending school, was someone I felt attracted to physically.
But Mary, whose mother apparently was either seeking election or re-election to the Indianapolis School Board that fall, never showed any particular indication that she might have welcomed it if I asked her for a date during either the fall or spring term when we shared the same English class high school teacher; and I can't recall ever even conversing with her at all even once, either before or after class during my junior year at Broad Ripple.
By the fall of my sophomore year at Columbia, three falls later, I was then tending to be more physically attracted to women who didn't wear lipstick than to those who did. But, like I've indicated before, in high school, like most of the other high school guys in the school, I tended to still feel the high school women who put on lipstick and make-up each morning, before coming to school each day, were prettier and more sexually desirable than the high school women who did not use lipstick and make-up.
