In 1964, after the first semester of my junior year of high school in Indianapolis inside Broad Ripple H.S. between February and June, I continued to be in the "G" class for the more academically-oriented high school junior students in English, that Mrs. Deering still taught and in the third-year Spanish class that Mrs. Diaz still taught. But in a "G" class for the more academically-oriented students in Intermediate Algebra II that I continued to be in, my teacher was now a tall guy named Mr. Morgan, who seemed about 15 to 20 years younger than my Intermediate Algebra I "G" class teacher in the previous semester, Mr. Mahin, had been.
As in the fall term, the high school woman student named Sandy still seemed to be the highest-achieving student in this "G" Intermediate Algebra II class that Mr. Morgan taught. But, so many years later, I can't recall anything about what happened inside Mr. Morgan's class during that term. Since there was never any classroom disruption of Mr. Morgan's classroom lessons by any students during the whole term, and because I pretty much did the assigned Intermediate Algebra II homework every day and studied a bit before each scheduled classroom text or quiz, my recollection is that, as in Intermediate Algebra I, I received a final grade of either A or A- from Mr. Morgan in this Intermediate Algebra II course.
In my memory, my second term of 3rd-year Spanish in Mrs. Diaz's "G" class pretty much blends in with the first term. In both terms, I think Mrs. Diaz gave me a final grade of either A- or B-plus, becuase I usually scored around 90 percent on the written Spanish tests and handed in all the homework assignments; although I don't think I was that good at learning to speak the language well enough to have much of a conversation with a native Spanish-speaker.
I now have only two particular memories related to my spring 1964 term in this Spanish language class. One memory is that Mrs. Diaz tried to interest me and my "G" Spanish classmates in joining her during the summer of 1964 in some kind of Spanish language immersion course for U.S. high school students in Mexico City; which would include visiting some Mexican tourist sites, as well as Spanish language study in a country where everyone spoke Spanish.
In later decades, I think it became more common for public high school students to spend their summers studying in a foreign country or at a talent, arts or music-oriented summer camp. But in 1964, most of the high school students I had known who ever spent their summers taking a course (unless the course they were taking was drivers' education) were only doing so because they needed to retake a course they had flunked, in order to eventually qualify for their high school diploma.
So there was no way in 1964 that someone like me--who, as early as first grade, had always disliked the authoritarian aspects of being compelled to attend school during the fall, winter and spring--would consider giving up a portion of a summer vacation from school in order to study and do school work in Mexico City. Especially since none of the other nearly all high school women classmates in this Spanish class had shown any particular interest in getting to know me better either before or after each Spanish class session (in which a lot of time was spent reading excerpts from a Spanish language edition of Don Quijote by Cerventes), during either the Fall 1963 or Spring 1964 semester.
The second particular memory related to Mrs. Diaz's Spanish "G" class I have from the spring semester of 1964 is of bumping into by chance, unexpectedly, one of my classmates in this class, Suzi, at the Glendale Shopping Center one weekday evening, near the end of the school term.
Suzi was then a senior who would be graduating from Broad Ripple High School in less than a month; and she was someone who was likely to have been considered very pretty and physically attractive by most of the high school guys in the school. And my assumption in the spring of 1964 was that Suzi, who had been one of the school's "homecoming Queen" candidates in either the fall of 1963 or fall of 1964, had no difficulty attracting guys at Broad Ripple in her senior class, like the athletes or the various school activity club student leaders, who most of the high school women in the school would feel were the guys most then worth dating in 1964.
Suzi was about 5 foot-2 and seemed to always put on make-up and lipstick and dressup in a fashionable way for each school day. And-- because, as I've indicated previously, in high school I hadn't yet come to regard women who wore make-up and lipstick, and were into dressing-up, as less attractive and more plastic than women who didn't use make-up or lipstick--I also then considered Suzi to be a physically beautiful woman.
Suzi did say "hello" to me and smiled in a friendly way when we bumped into each other, outside of school, at the Glendale Shopping Center. But I realized that, since inside school during the 1963-1964 school year she had never indicated any particular interest in getting to know me and probably already had a lot of senior class guys asking her for dates, her friendliness towards me at the shopping center did not mean that whe was inviting me to ask her for her telephone number or for a date.
In addition, like most high school guys who were juniors in 1964, I automatically assumed that a high school woman who was a high school senior would not be interested in ever dating a guy who was only a high school junior; and, if you were a guy who was a high school junior, the only high school women you should be asking out for dates would be other high school juniors or high school sophomore or freshman class women.
Ironically, in doing some background research for these recollections of my experiences in Indianapolis in 1963 and 1964, I noticed that, like me, Suzi was apparently of assimilated Jewish religious background. But because her family had a last name that was not as easily identified as being a "Jewish" last name as mine, in 1964 I did not realize that Suzi was also of "Jewish" religious background.
Still, because Suzi was a popular senior class student, as well as much less of an alienated, "isolato," outsider and internally non-conformist student at Broad Ripple than I was in 1964, I don't think there would have ever been any likelihood that Suzi would have ever been interested in dating me in 1963 or 1964--despite our common assimilated family religious backgrounds.
No comments:
Post a Comment